Inspired by recent postcolonial fictional reinventions of the history of the Black Atlantic, and employing the critical tools of colonial discourse analysis, this book examines a nineteenth century 'postcolonial' corpus - texts written between the emergence of the United States as a nation and the Civil War. The texts considered witness a growing unease about the issue of slavery and the slave trade that erupted in the Civil War in 1861. Many of the texts have the ocean as their setting and 'negotiate' the complex and ambivalent relationship of 'postcolonial' America to Atlantic commerce and...

The sea has been the site of radical changes in human lives and national histories. It has been an agent of colonial oppression but also of indigenous resistance, a site of loss, dispersal and enforced migration but also of new forms of solidarity and affective kinship.

The sea has been the site of radical changes in human lives and national histories. It has been an agent of colonial oppression but also of indigenous resistance, a site of loss, dispersal and enforced migration but also of new forms of solidarity and affective kinship. Sea Changes re-evaluates the view that history happens mainly on dry land and makes the case for a creative reinterpretation of the role of the sea: not merely as a passage from one country to the next, but a historical site deserving close study.

This book is a significant contribution to existing research on the themes of race and slavery in the founding literature of the United States. It extends the boundaries of existing research by locating race and slavery within a transnational and 'oceanic' framework.
The author applies critical concepts developed within postcolonial theory to American texts written between the national emergence of the United States and the Civil War, in order to uncover metaphors of the colonial and imperial 'unconscious' in America's foundational writing. The book analyses the writings of canonized...