Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition by Kathleen M. Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition by Kathleen M. Brown Sarah Gold McBride (bio) Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition. By Kathleen M. Brown. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. 456. Cloth, 39. 95. ) In Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition, Kathleen M. Brown takes a familiar story—the antebellum abolitionist movement—and gives it an exciting new backdrop that yields significant new insights: the shifting scientific, medical, and popular understandings of the body that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century. White and Black abolitionists both saw the body as a key site in their fight against slavery. Black bodies contained visceral evidence of slavery's horrors, but they also provided the foundation for a radical alternative future: Black Americans as free, sovereign, rights-bearing citizens. Because white supremacist justifications for Black enslavement drew so heavily on bodily evidence and biological theories of race, Brown argues that scholars of slavery have been hesitant to center Black bodies in their analysis, fearful that doing so merely recapitulates racist logics. Brown faces such hesitations head on, taking abolitionists' focus on the body seriously and on its own terms. In doing so, she reframes how abolitionists understood the significance of Black bodies to their movement. Fundamental to this reframing is a concept Brown deems "embodied self-sovereignty" (10) —a claim of natural law that asserted every human's right to bodily care, safety, autonomy, and the ability to create and care for their own families. Brown argues that abolitionists saw embodied self-sovereignty as the necessary precondition for successfully claiming the rights of a political subject—not a pleasant side-effect of achieving those rights. This argument, the book's central thesis, elegantly turns existing historiographies of human rights and humanitarianism on their head. Just as Brown seeks to define the historical body in terms her nineteenth-century actors would have recognized—as inclusive of flesh and blood, but also "functions like movement, thought, and emotions" (6) —so too does taking abolitionists' bodily logics on their own terms avoid teleologies about what human rights once meant in the past. Undoing Slavery's eight chapters move chronothematically from the seventeenth century to the eve of abolition, and geographically from Philadelphia, to Virginia, to the transatlantic networks of Anglo-American abolitionism. Several themes and motifs reoccur throughout: blood, motherhood, the production of scientific and medical knowledge, and labor in all its forms, especially the unpaid labor of women (reproductive, activist, domestic) that was rarely understood by male contemporaries to be political. As Brown reminds the reader repeatedly, the legal framework End Page 262 and scientific logic of maternal inheritance meant that Black women's reproductive, nursing, and childcare labor "created enslaver wealth"; Black mothers' bodies became even more significant after the transatlantic slave trade closed in 1807, when "enslavers in the US became wholly dependent on births as a source of new enslaved labor" (119–21). Brown's archival research is expansive, drawing on sources like correspondence, legal documents, scientific and medical publications, poetry, periodicals, and family papers. This meticulous work—as well as the analytical insights gained from Brown's methodology—is best showcased in chapter 3, which focuses on a single Virginia Supreme Court case: Pleasants v. Pleasants (1799). In this unusual case, a white Quaker abolitionist named Robert Pleasants and an enslaved man named Ned joined together to sue members of the Pleasants family. Their goal: to force the other Pleasantses to honor the emancipation directives in Robert's father's nearly thirty-year-old will—in short, to free Ned and his family. Pleasants is a well-known case, the subject of historians' analyses for at least five decades. In Brown's hands, however, the case gains fresh significance: contextualized against the body, Pleasants becomes an opportunity to investigate what happened when two competing meanings of blood—a metaphor for familial connection, or, to many abolitionists, the basis for "universal humanity" (88) —clashed. Brown does something else important with this case: she centers Ned and his family. From the chapter's opening lines, Robert and Ned are presented as two Virginian. . .