Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic

Spectacular Suffering focuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves.

The book’s first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emoti...