Abstract
A provocative rejoinder to social movement theorists who draw a stark distinction between the madness of crowds and the rational progress of social movements, Benjamin Lamb-Books’s Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery: Moral Emotions in Social Movements troubles the waters of social movement theory, bringing the volatile contentions of American antebellum abolitionists to bear on frames of collective action and movement success. Anger is a gift for many antislavery abolitionists, displacing the moral ambiguity of the sentimental and salvific tendencies of social movement actors of the antebellum era. As Lamb-Books writes, “Though often labeled a ‘negative emotion,’ anger actually has a prosocial character similar to other group-oriented moral emotions” (p. 40).
Placing abolitionists at the center of his sociology of social movements, Lamb-Books shifts attention from the unity of movements and coherence of collective action toward the embodied intersecting and competing effects of race, gender, class, religion, and ideological investments that account for the vast variation in both the form and the function of abolitionist movement. Though ambitious in its scope, both in respect to its empirical archive and methodological approach, Angry Abolitionists elevates critical historiographical obstacles often left unexplored, gaps in research that have kept abolition on the margins of cultural theories of social movements. This omission is no accident. As the author repeatedly notes, anti-black racism has shaped not only the structural contentions of antebellum struggles to end slavery in the United States—it has contributed to, and continues to color, contemporary scholarship on the significance of abolition and its role in shaping other movements that followed in its wake.
Angry Abolitionists opens with a theory of emotionality that brings a Weberian functionalist theory of collective behavior to bear on the work of emotion in social movements, placing emphasis on the import of status and power in considering the cohesion and collective force of political actors who aim to move novel ideas from beyond the reach of political power into the mainstream. Part One covers the historiographical issues that pertain to the study of abolition, detailing the gaps in social science research that mark its virtual erasure from a cultural history of social movements. Lamb-Books points out that while the social movement literature from the 1990s serves as a corrective to the implicit racism of that from the 1960s, the gross absence of convincing scholarship in this area of history is worthy of further analysis.
Chapter Three, “Moving Contexts of Abolition,” could stand alone as a great introduction to either abolition or social movements. It dispels monolithic accounts of abolition, defining abolition as a social movement in the broadest sense—an entity not only organized by the work of anti-slavery societies, Quaker congregations, and various other institutionalized forms of public political protest mobilized by mostly white, middle-class people in the northern states, but also made up of more informal instances of movement participation. Here Lamb-Books lays out a comprehensive historiography of abolition that is shockingly unsentimental with regard to the effects of its emotionality on both macro and micro levels of organization. Not all abolitionists were activists. Not all antislavery activists were antiracist. The gender politics of abolitionist movement culture alone contained the unconventional and contested participation of working-class women, black, white, free-born and fugitive alike. The political challenges abolition as a sociological phenomenon posed to the country in the tense decades leading up to the civil war are made flesh in his account of the psychological challenges abolition posed to its participants, as not only a political agenda, but a very taboo sociological phenomenon to boot!
Lamb-Books takes seriously the social relationships constitutive of the rhetoric of slavery as well as the moral ethos from which the movement to abolish it emerged. By attending to the “performative, symbolic, and emotional pathways of core abolitionist frames,” tracing the legacies of Lucretia Mott and William Lloyd Garrison (p. 93), Lamb-Books offers a rich social and historical analysis of three main framing processes at work within the rhetorical symbolism of abolition: the sentimental, the republican, and the evangelical protestant. With an eye on the emotional effects, gender biases, and racist undertones of their power-tripping tendencies, these frames work to lay bare the intersections of religious, secular, cultural, and political movement formation that culminate in the contentious politics of angry abolitionists.
More than answers to questions of movement success, what this approach to the study of social movements yields is much-needed insight into the various ways movements work, from the irrational, antisocial mob to late capitalism’s rational and highly bureaucratized NGOs. What remains most curious about this social formation is not simply how it coheres, or how it succeeds, but, speaking plainly, how it persisted. Social movement literature is genuinely interested in mapping out a single narrative of assent from uprising to the realization of social change. However, as Lamb-Books argues through his work, conventional narratives of choice, agency, political recognition, and success limit our understanding of what makes social movements work. What defines a movement’s political trajectory depends as much on the shortcomings of movement actors as on their best intentions, as much on the structural constraints of their actions as on the opportunity structures they leverage.
An invaluable addition to the Cultural Sociology Series, Angry Abolitionists draws on vast bodies of literature on abolition as well as studies in affect and cultural theory of the last twenty years to expand the methodological scope of social movement theory. However much attention has been paid to the history and literature of abolition, the contribution of Angry Abolitionists stands apart due to its focus on the efforts, challenges, triumphs, and testimony of black abolitionists in advancing the conditions of possibility for the emancipation of their own people. In centering figures such as Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and James McCune Smith alongside well-known antislavery legends such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, Lamb-Books opens the door to an entirely new area of research—one in which social movement theory might reimagine itself from the ground up, through an increasingly interdisciplinary set of methodological tools and citational practices, making way for radical interdisciplinary approaches to theorizing social movement frames, ideas, psychology, and aims that highlight how race and racism, gender and gender deviance, and the politics of representation and recognition both contribute to and complicate movements of social change foundational to the study of social movements in civil society.
Given how far the United States still must go to undo the harm caused by centuries of reliance on enslaved labor to build its economic power, social order, and global standing, the impulse to romanticize the work of abolitionism, to redeem the national transgression of slavery, is understandable. The work of sociologists, however, is not to soothe our social anxieties but to craft, as Lamb-Books has so earnestly offered, an honest, thoughtful, and well-informed understanding of the productive misdirections of moral progress and the contrary-but-generative movements of social change. Angry Abolitionists traces the personal, interpersonal, and intramural struggles of antislavery abolitionists to make their message move from the margins of antebellum society to the mainstream, extending understandings of social movement participation to include “both the self-described ‘abolitionists’ and people who disliked that label or perhaps had never even heard of it altogether” (p.70). Confronting head on the methodological and socio-historical challenges of unearthing the emotional lives of long-archived subjects for the purposes of empirical study, at its best Angry Abolitionists bridges the divide between the sociology of emotion and collective action theory with a capacious approach to “contentious politics” that makes room for more nuanced self-critical analysis of the structural constraints that have historically limited which movements we study as well as the ways we are taught to study them.