TY - JOUR
AU - Molineux,, Catherine
AB - Sarah Parker Remond was a remarkable woman. Her father was a hero of the American Revolution; her mother helped found one of the nation's earliest abolitionist societies in Salem, Massachusetts. Despite facing repeated challenges to her free status as a mixed-race woman in the nineteenth-century United States, Remond nevertheless achieved an international profile. She went to college in London, medical school in Florence, and attained status as a physician of obstetrics there. All the while she lectured to impressive crowds that were receptive to learning about slavery and the promise of racial equality. Her life is worthy of many biographies, yet I am of two minds about An Abolitionist Abroad. Full-length biographies of nineteenth-century black American women are rare. The chapters are divided into the familial upbringing that trained Remond to contest racism and gender inequality, her political and social activities in postabolitionist Britain, and her integration into the Italian upper middle class. The attention brought to Remond is welcome. Even so, this study lies somewhere between a scholarly monograph and a popular biography; it does not achieve either. Sirpa Salenius knows that the study falls short—the book is presented as a case study following the framework of Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic (1993) and openly relies on scholarship to contextualize Remond's life. The coda explicitly states that a book exploring the same aspects of her life would require further research. Salenius does not provide enough detail from Remond's activities for this study to be preferred to her autobiography. This book would have been more effective had the author outlined in the introduction the extent of primary-source material available, as gaps in the archival record can be fruitful if they are acknowledged. As a historian of the Atlantic, I was also disappointed with the author's exploration of the difficulties and failures of racial equality in nineteenth-century Europe. Salenius's introduction paints a picture of Remond's freedom from racial prejudice in Europe. Subsequent chapters acknowledge that this utopian vision was a representation created by black American authors who wrote about their trips and tours in Europe—an important analytic point that should have been fully explored and placed earlier in the narrative. The final chapters on Italy might be useful to nineteenth-century historians of the grand tour, but they read like a series of minibiographies of people who may have met Remond. I am saddened that the University of Massachusetts Press did not properly edit An Abolitionist Abroad. The story of Remond's life would have been highly desired for undergraduate classes if it had been shaped and developed—even as a footnote to Gilroy's framework. But in this form, I would recommend it only for scholars seeking an entry into black American lives in Europe or for scholars who want to understand that modern Italy and England were, as the United States was, the product of cross-cultural and interracial exchange. © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe
JF - The Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaz048
DA - 2019-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/an-abolitionist-abroad-sarah-parker-remond-in-cosmopolitan-europe-pvHijj0f3u
SP - 1007
VL - 105
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -