Romantic Hope and “Black Despair”: A Brief History

Scholars coordinate the historical emergence of political hope with the French Revolution, Romanticism, and the secularization of inherited theological ideas. This essay argues that the conceptual development of political hope functioned as a technology of racialization. Drawing attention to how hope’s theological opposite, despair, had become synonymous with racial slavery in the late eighteenth-century British political imagination, it unpacks the figural logic of “black despair” and shows how this logic subtends the Romantic conception of political hope as a hereditary right of the white liberal subject.