Appropriated Voices: William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” and British Antislavery Poetry

<p>British antislavery poetry in the late 1700s is well characterized by the first stanza of William Blake’s poem “The Little Black Boy” when his black speaker says “o! my soul is white; … But I am black as if bereav’d of light” (2-4). These statements that seem to exclude each other exemplify the discussions and arguments that antislavery poets had been publishing and would continue to deliberate after “The Little Black Boy” was printed in 1789. Other poets, while appropriating the voices of enslaved people or Africans, as Blake does in “The Little Black Boy,” often emphasize differences between their black speakers and their white British audiences even though they seek to create sympathetic portrayals of those speakers and promote abolition. Blake circumvents this phenomenon through his rejection of racialized hierarchies that draw attention to differences and through complicating ideas of hierarchies in general with the result being that a white English child who the little black boy mentions is not hierarchically privileged over him. Through directly comparing “The Little Black Boy” with three other antislavery poems I will explain how Blake is able to create a poem that rejects racial hierarchies more effectively and enthusiastically than many of his contemporaries.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2023

Author dc:creator

• Mattson, Brett J

Contributors dc:contributor

• Russell Prather

• Blake
• poetry
• antislavery poetry
• 18th century
• Literature in English, British Isles

Repository record dc:identifier

https://commons.nmu.edu/theses/763

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:commons.nmu.edu:theses-1811