In Subject to Others, Moira Ferguson charts the parallel developments of a female political vanguard, the antislavery movement, and colonial discourse in Britain before 1834. She examines the intersection of these phenomena through the close textual analysis of British women’s writings against slavery, including poetry, fiction, and tracts over a period of 150 years. Ferguson carefully places these texts and their authors in a historical framework that includes the general conditions affecting British women’s lives from the Restoration to the mid-nineteenth century, the economic realities of the slave trade, and the politics of abolition culminating in the emancipationist agitation of the 1820s and 1830s.
Although most of these British female authors had no firsthand experience with Africa or the Caribbean, they combined what they did know of slavery with existing literary paradigms and their own experience of oppression to create narratives that were accepted as an “authentic expression of slavery’s reality.” Ferguson chose writers of different class, political, and religious backgrounds, and her richly textured study links these variables to different interpretations of slavery and the interrelation of race and gender domination. Yet even the most radical of these women retained a certain ethnocentrism, something that Ferguson highlights by contrasting the autobiography of ex-slave Mary Prince.
Ferguson writes movingly of women’s intellectual and economic contributions to the antislavery movement and of their political empowerment within its ranks, but her most provocative contention is that their Eurocentric constructions of Africans in antislavery propaganda were damaging to future domestic race relations and central to the consolidation of British imperialist ideology. By presenting African slaves as non-sovereign, passive, alienated individuals in need of European allies, these authors helped to construct notions of the “Dark Continent” in need of enlightenment. Ferguson mentions that the vision of antislavery women contrasted with that of anti- and proslavery men, but she might have gone further at least to sketch in the most obvious differences. Given her obvious command of the literature, it would be interesting to know the relative weight Ferguson would assign to her authors’ discourse when Britons were negotiating the meaning of freedom for themselves and others. As it is, she leaves the reader with a curiosity about other discursive connections between antislavery and pro-colonialism, as well as a desire to apply some of her insights to the writings of antislavery women in other settings.
Subject to Others is thoroughly researched, and well written, and it demonstrates how literary analysis can alter or refine our understanding of history. It will appeal to historians of colonialism and slavery, particularly those interested in discourse and culture, as well as a wide range of feminist scholars.
