As nineteenth-century scientific theories of racism sought to justify slavery and oppression by dehumanizing black people, popular abolitionist arguments often emphasized the humanity of enslaved black people by likening them to free white people, most popularly in the figure of the mixed-race hero(ine). Other abolitionist arguments, however, employed animals as points of familiar reference, in cross-species comparisons that did not simply repeat racist ideologies but solicited interracial sympathy. This essay reads abolitionist children’s literature that deployed a strategy of “animal humanism,” using domesticated animals to mediate their readers’ sympathy for enslaved people. Focusing on the parallel rhetorics of species and race in children’s literature, the essay centers its discussion on the abolitionist revision of Maria Susanna Cummins’s novel The Lamplighter (1854) in The Lamplighter Picture Book (1855), other abolitionist literature for children, and political cartoons in which species and racial difference figure. As pets are construed as both domesticated and domestic in these texts, the possibility of cross-species kinship presents a more proximate familiar relation than cross-racial kinship. Attention to these uses of domesticated animals reveals the limitations of sympathy that is more easily mediated through species rather than race. However, readings of the animal as not only familiar but familial open new possibilities for an abolitionist sympathy that has antiracist potential in its ability to be mediated through acknowledged positions of difference rather than a dependence on sameness.

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The positioning of movements for social and political change as forms of postemancipation abolition democracy has a long history. Abolition has been the watchword under which initiatives proceed to eradicate the death penalty, human trafficking, nuclear weapons, the hegemony of Wall Street, prisons, police, the deportation of immigrants, and more. The essays in this forum examine nineteenth-century abolitionism’s complicated legacy through the prism of contemporary frameworks and agitations for justice and social transformation. The working papers reflect vital ongoing debates about abolition’s afterlives while meditating upon a series of pressing current concerns: migrant justice, the humanitarian rhetoric of some anti-racist initiatives, the activism of Erica Garner following the murder by police of her father, the racialization of madness and violence, the prison-abolition movement, and climate activism. By addressing the mobilization of rhetorics of slavery and abolition in our own vexed political moment, the contributors reveal that to think abolition now is necessarily to rethink abolition then.

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