The Racialization of Gratitude in Victorian Culture

Gratitude was racialized in Victorian culture. Drawing on a wide historical framework, which takes in eighteenth-century proslavery arguments as well as twenty-first-century anti-immigrant discourses, I explore how Victorian-era texts placed demands upon enslaved, formerly enslaved, and colonized peoples to feel thankful for their treatment as British imperial subjects. My article ranges over contexts and academic debates, and surveys nineteenth-century discourses, but it coheres around a case study concerning media reportage of the brief residence of a young West African, Eyo Ekpenyon Eyo II, in Colwyn Bay, Wales, in 1893. In a contextual examination of the press reaction to Eyo’s decision to abandon his British schooling, this article draws attention to the implicit, submerged inequalities, exemplified in the demand for gratitude, through which Victorian Britain articulated the affective qualities of white hegemony.