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10 Paratextual Navigation: Positions of Witnessing in The Anti-Slavery Reporter
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Published:June 2024
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Abstract
This chapter uses Edward Soja’s concept of thirdspace, which understands lived space as real-and-imagined, to analyse how the British Anti-Slavery Society’s most influential periodical, the Anti-Slavery Reporter , used self-referential footnotes to position white British readers at the centre of the anti-slavery saga. Paratextual elements provided readers with a map for navigating the thirdspace of a page before focusing on the specific uses of self-referential footnotes in the periodical. Understood geographically, paratextual actants transported evidence from the colonies to Britain, where readers could appropriate it and transform themselves from passive recipients to witnesses whose testimony condemned slavery in the court of public opinion. In the early 1830s, British readers engaged with the Reporter as a navigational tool, one that helped them position themselves in relation to the critical political issues of the day while simultaneously shaping their beliefs about Britain’s place in the emerging world order. Although this repositioning of British supporters at the centre of the anti-slavery movement did provide momentum to efforts to abolish colonial slavery, it closed the emotional gap between Britain and the colonies by erasing the importance of colonial anti-slavery activists.
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