Photo by Norah Tafuri '25. Carrie Shanafelt presents at 'Quobna Ottobah Cugoano on Slavery's Moral and Financial Debt.'
By Norah Tafuri ’25
Staff Writer
Content warning: This article discusses slavery.
The study of English offers a lens to critically explore the expression of past writers and thinkers as they share their wisdom through time. On two warm November nights, the Department of English at Mount Holyoke College hosted a two-part lecture series on abolitionist authors. The series began with “‘The World is a Severe Schoolmaster’: Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Domination and Submission” an analysis of author Phillis Wheatley’s work concentrating on the libidinal economy of slavery by Britt Rusert, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the W.E.B. Du Bois department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As noted in her biography by the Poetry Foundation, Wheatley was abducted from West Africa when she was seven and held in enslavement in a household in Boston. The Poetry Foundation writes, “By the time she was 18, Wheatley had gathered a collection of 28 poems.” Close readings by scholars have illuminated powerful resistance to the slave trade embedded in her work, elements that were given increasing clarity and depth with Rusert’s analysis.
The analysis was followed by a lecture titled “Quobna Ottobah Cugoano on Slavery’s Moral and Financial Debt” given by Carrie Shanafelt, an associate literature and philosophy professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Formerly enslaved, Cugoano was an active abolitionist who in his 1787 book “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery” wrote intensely on the role of the economy in the trafficking of human beings.
In her article “‘A World of Debt’: Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’: The Wealth of Nations, and the End of Finance,” Shanafelt writes, “Cugoano makes a startling observation that the emerging system of global trade is driven not by the logic of free-market commerce, but by the interests of wealthy financiers who purchase political security by sinking entire nations under unpayable moral and financial debts.” In her lecture, Shanafelt described her research regarding these relationships and critically applies them to the dynamics of our world today, speaking also of the role of sentimentality in commerce and the demoralizing effect of debt.
Shana Hansell, English department academic coordinator, organized the lecture series and similar events in cooperation with both students and faculty. “It can come from anyone in the department, the idea for it, and then it’s a process of collaboration to make it happen,” Hansell said.
In the case of these lectures, the material for the evenings was compiled from various disciplines to bring the most critical assessment of the coursework under analysis. “The great thing about the English department is our topics can be seen through the lens of three or four other departments,” Hansell said.
Alex Moskowitz, a visiting lecturer in English at Mount Holyoke, invited Rusert to speak in the hopes that students in his “Race and Sensory Perception in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” course, which engages in Wheatley’s work, would appreciate the lecture. Moskowitz said that within the small community of academics focusing on this particular field “people know each other’s work … and are very, very generous with their time.” He also noted that Rusert was eager to have the opportunity to bring her research to her community in the Pioneer Valley.
Rusert has been teaching about Wheatley for 10 years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Through her instruction and the contributions of her students, she strives to honor Wheatley’s work by using her experience to better understand the present. “I think a lot of this work is also related to me trying to understand what it means to live in a place like Massachusetts,” Rusert said. “While writing the essay from which this lecture was drawn I was struck by how certain forms of white liberalism today parallel what Wheatley experienced in colonial Boston, surrounded by people who imagined themselves to be enlightened and progressive but who also actively upheld the ideologies of white supremacy and racial subjection.”
Moskowitz testified to this aspect of the study of English. “One of the things that … makes the study of literature generally so important is that it can respond to what people are interested in now. … [The] study of literature becomes a powerful tool for understanding our world and thinking about what we care about,” Moskowitz said. “It’s not the study of the dead past, …but I think [it’s] something that’s still very much alive and you replicate that in what you teach, how you read.”
Prompting the second part of this lecture, Kate Singer, an English professor at Mount Holyoke College, was inspired to reach out to Shanafelt in order to expand on the course material provided in her class, “Resistance and Revolution in the Age of Necropolitics.” She explained that the invitation was extended as a way to help her students “think more specifically and precisely about the intersections of capital, resistance and systems of necropolitics [and] slavery in the late 18th and early 19th century.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Singer found that her students were acutely interested in the role of racial capital in mitigating and controlling acts of resistance and revolt. It was something she sought to explore more deeply. “In this way, the system of slavery is part of a system of capitalist finance that persists today, and one that constantly intervenes into communities' abilities to resist or revolt against such systems,” Singer said. While she had been teaching about Cugoano’s literature for some time, the financial aspect of his analysis is something she felt that Shanafelt would be helpful in discussing this intersection.
In “A World of Debt,” Shanafelt writes, “Quobna Ottobah Cugoano described a causal relationship between corporate financing of national debt and the perpetuation of slavery that anticipates more recent analyses of cyclic economic crisis as a legacy of labor abuse since the 18th century.”
In relation to the debt held by the United States, Shanafelt stresses the significance of recognizing the applications of Cugoano’s assessment to present financial systems. “The entire political system is being controlled by the people who own our debt. I think there should be more visibility about who exactly owns our [national] debt,” Shanafelt said. “When we think about somebody who … owns government debt, that person has a vested interest in making us go to war, right? They have a vested interest in letting us suffer ecological disaster, right? Because every time there’s a crisis, then they get to rush in and invest more money to bail us out.”
As Shanafelt relayed the reality of this dire element to the United States’ current financial circumstance, she noted that she felt a heaviness in the room. “The sense of the room was very intense. It felt like everyone was kind of thinking about the same thing,” Shanafelt said. “We might not all agree about every single aspect of it or we might not come to it from the same place, but here we all are thinking about the same problem. That felt really generative.”
Both lectures acted as a guide towards deeper reflection of an active past. “Hearing the voices of Cugoano alongside Mary Prince, Juan Manzano, or Olaudah Equiano reminds us [that] there are voices that spoke, and continue to speak — that survived and come to us to remember their acts of survival,” Singer said.
Utilizing these lessons, as Rusert mentioned, becomes a careful and continuous practice of evaluation of then and now. As Shanafelt noted, literature becomes a tool to recognize that history surrounds us and is within us, acting not as a warning in the repetition of history, but as a reminder that we still have yet to break the cycle.