Bracing and essential, a radical reframing of British Romanticism through the lens of Black experience - for fans of David Olusoga, Gretchen Gerzina, Saidiya Hartman and Emma Dabiri
Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats - the Romantic poets are titans of English literature, taught and celebrated around the world. Their work is associated with sublime passions, violent stormscapes and a questing search for the inner self. It is rarely associated with the racial politics of the transatlantic slave economy.
But these literary icons lived through a period when individual and collective resistance by Black people in Britain and her overseas colonies was making it increasingly difficult - and increasingly costly - to ignore their demands for freedom. A time when popular support for the abolition movement exploded across the country - and was met by a vehement, reactionary campaign from the establishment. A time when white supremacist ideologies were fomented to justify
