Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation. Examining the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, the book shows how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close readings of understudied fugitive slave narratives published in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, Ross analyzes the different ways white and black authors take up these issues in their writing--from calming white fears of enslaved rebellion to abolishing slavery--and demonstrates how literary representations ultimately destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below. In so doing, the book demonstrates the importance of race to surveillance studies and claims a greater role for the impact of surveillance on literary expression in the US during the era of slavery.

About the Author
Kelly Ross is Associate Professor of English at Rider University where she teaches courses in American literature, African American literature, and crime fiction and film. Her essays have appeared in PMLA, The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics, The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition, and Leviathan.

Reviews
In her engaging and beautifully written study, Ross demonstrates the centrality of racial surveillance to pre-Civil War U.S. literature. She's particularly illuminating on 'sousveillance,' or counter-surveillance, by African American and other writers seeking to challenge racial hierarchies. Examining texts ranging from Charles Ball's Slavery in the United States to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents, Ross shows how racial surveillance contributed to the fluidity of genre during the period. Among the many highlights of the book is her analysis of the productive tensions between surveillance and sousveillance in Poe's fiction. This is an essential work for anyone interested in antebellum literature. * Robert S. Levine, author of Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies *
An example of interdisciplinary scholarship at its very best. The connections between surveillance, race, and genre that Ross uncovers change our understanding of antebellum U.S. literature. This is a superb book. * Cody Marrs, author of Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War *
At last, the field of American literary studies has a thorough account of the emergence of the genre of detective fiction in the antebellum period. Through stunning readings of writers not often included in studies of detective fiction, including Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Hannah Crafts, Kelly Ross's Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature convincingly demonstrates the role of slavery-both its system of surveillance and the capacity of those surveilled to watch back-as the most important crucible for the genre in the United States. This is an indispensable study. * Justine S. Murison, author of Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States *
Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature offers theoretically astute, historicist literary criticism that is both compulsively readable and admirably economical in presentation. * Jeannine Delombard, The New Rambler *
Kelly Ross's comprehensive and dynamic account in Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature shows how a focus on the technologies and cultures of surveillance and sousveillance (watching from below) illuminates deep and previously unacknowledged connections between genre and race. * Genre *
In her book, Kelly Ross revisits well-known literary texts alongside lesser-studied writings to cover a wide range of American antebellum literature...She thereby adds to surveillance studies while encouraging us to re-read widely known texts and genres with fresh eyes. * Pauline Pilote, Revue francaise d'etudes americaines *
Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature is well researched and is in conversation with scholarship and literary criticism on both surveillance and sousveillance, as well as the literary authors and texts she reads closely. Most important, however, is that Ross analyzes a vast range of literary genres and is able to convincingly argue her thesis and offer a comprehensive understanding of the ways observation shaped and influenced writing before the Civil War. * Rodney Taylor, The Journal of Southern History *
Ross's book presents an intriguing narrative of the role of surveillance and the negotiation of it as a way of claiming power in highly racialized antebellum America. * Adam Bradford, Poe Studies *
Ever since Michel Foucault's seminal work on surveillance, Discipline and Punish, literary studies have adopted his theoretical and historical understanding of the mechanisms by which societies exert control through acts of conspicuous and inconspicuous observation. In Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature, Kelly Ross seeks to redirect the conventional trajectory of this model. * Andrew Taylor, Irish Journal of American Studies *
Attending to sousveillance, its risks and rewards, punctures the illusion of white scopic invulnerability; Ross shows how watching is, or can be, mutual, shared, disruptive-and potentially revolutionary. * Andrew Taylor, Irish Journal of American Studies *
Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre is not primarily a cultural history, however, but a study of how several literary genres-the slave narrative, the early detective tale, historical fiction, and the sentimental novel-reimagined both the liberatory and the oppressive aspects of visuality. * Ian Finseth, University of North Texas *
Carefully researched, succinct, and written with admirable clarity, Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature is assiduous scholarship and exemplary literary history. Its careful footnotes reveal Ross's deep reading and broad knowledge of both Nineteenth-Century literary scholarship and history. It is sure to be necessary reading for scholars of African American literature, detective fiction, visual culture, and Nineteenth-Century literary studies more broadly. * Jeffrey Insko, Nineteenth-Century Contexts *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192856272
Author Kelly Ross
Format Hardback
Page Count 208
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 470g
Dimensions(mm) 242mm * 163mm * 17mm