Writing for Justice: Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations (Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American)

Mortara, Elena

ISBN 10: 1611687896 ISBN 13: 9781611687897

Publisher: Dartmouth, 2015

Synopsis

Winner of the 2016 American Studies Network Book Prize

In Writing for Justice, Elèna Mortara presents a richly layered study of the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, through close readings of the life and work of Victor Séjour, an expat American Creole from New Orleans living in Paris. In addition to writing The Mulatto, an early story on slavery in Saint-Domingue, Séjour penned La Tireuse de cartes (The Fortune-Teller, 1859), a popular play based on the famed Mortara case. In this historical incident, Pope Pius IX kidnapped Edgardo Mortara, the child of a Jewish family living in the Papal States. The details of the play's production--and its reception on both sides of the Atlantic--are intertwined with the events of the Italian Risorgimento and of pre-Civil War America. Writing for Justice is full of surprising encounters with French and American writers and historical figures, including Hugo, Hawthorne, Twain, Napoleon III, Garibaldi, and Lincoln. As Elèna Mortara passionately argues, the enormous amount of public attention received by the case reveals an era of underappreciated transatlantic intellectual exchange, in which an African American writer used notions of emancipation in religious as well as racial terms, linking the plight of blacks in America to that of Jews in Europe, and to the larger battles for freedom and nationhood advancing across the continent.

This book will appeal both to general readers and to scholars, including historians, literary critics, and specialists in African American studies, Jewish, Catholic, or religious studies, multilingual American literature, francophone literature, theatrical life, nineteenth-century European politics, and cross-cultural encounters.

Hardcover is un-jacketed.

About this title

About the Author:

ELÈNA MORTARA is a professor of American literature at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. A well-known scholar of Jewish American writing and nineteenth-century literature, she has written, edited, and translated numerous books and articles.

Review:

“While there are studies of the Edgardo Mortara case, a biography of Victor Séjour, and histories of the anti-slavery movements and of the battle for Jewish emancipation in Europe and the Americas, this outstanding book interweaves all these strands successfully into a freshly researched single work.” (Werner Sollors, professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University)

“Elèna Mortara’s Writing for Justice is a fascinating account of the career of the 19th-century writer Victor Séjour, a New Orleans–born free black man who had brilliant success writing for the Paris stage. At the center of Séjour’s career, this study shows, was a play that eloquently addressed a contemporary scandal, the legal kidnapping by the Catholic church of a six-year-old Jewish child who had been clandestinely baptized by his nurse. Though a Catholic addressing a largely Catholic audience, Séjour, adding his voice to widespread protests, spoke out powerfully for human emancipation. Mortara explores the intersection between the celebrated black writer’s personal history and the situation of other oppressed groups in his time. Then in a stunning coda, revealing that the kidnapped child, who became a priest, was her great-great uncle, she movingly recounts her family’s personal memories of the trauma.” (Stephen Greenblatt, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern)

“A masterful examination of what must be one of the most intriguing figures of mid-nineteenth-century American literature, Writing for Justice reflects a refreshing transnational turn in literary study.” (David I. Kertzer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Pope and Mussolini and The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara)

“A brilliant book . . . Elèna Mortara has managed to enhance a haunted family history by devising a fascinating detective story as well.” (Stephen Whitfield, Brandeis University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Dartmouth
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1611687896
• ISBN 13: 9781611687897
• Binding: Library Binding
• Number of pages: 352