“Whence, Then, Is This Change of Sentiment?”: Homesteading and Restorative Nostalgia in The Woman of Colour
“Whence, Then, Is This Change of Sentiment?”: Homesteading and Restorative Nostalgia in The Woman of Colour

Summary/Abstract: Following the lead of recent inquiries into The Woman of Colour (1808) as a sensibility narrative that fleshed out the unfinished project of abolitionism at around the time when the slave trade was being outlawed in England (1807), this study explores the intermingling between what Svetlana Boym has identified as two distinctly oriented strands of nostalgia, reflective v. restorative, that innervate the title character’s sensibility of (dis)enchantment with her homesteading voyage, as she is transported from her native island into another – partly ancestral yet also foreign and emetic – insular space, from which she eventually tries to expunge herself into a yet-to-be-undertaken voyage of return.

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