Humanity without Feathers

This essay traces the way eighteenth-century abolitionists used tropes and figures borrowed from sentimental literature to delineate the parameters of the human. Sentimental texts furnished antislavery writers with the rhetorical tools needed to excite the “humanity” of metropolitan readers toward the suffering of enslaved people in distant climes—which suggests the second way the title “Humanity without Feathers” might be understood: to refer to the difficulty of making the humanitarian imagination wing across great distances to establish connections between local acts and distant suffering. [Author]