Mastering Emotions

"Within this study, Dwyer argues persuasively that for both slaveholders and the enslaved, emotion was used as a crucial tool of power and thus mastering one’s emotions, as the title suggests, was integral to navigating daily life under slavery...By emphasizing the central role that emotion played in the maintenance of and resistance to slavery, Dwyer is doing the vital work of urging us to recognize the pervasive role emotion--an often overlooked social and political force--continues to play in upholding racist power structures in today’s society."—American Nineteenth Century History

"In Mastering Emotions, Erin Austin Dwyer insightfully demonstrates how emotions shaped, maintained, and challenged the institution of slavery by examining the power dynamics of real and performative feelings between people who were enslaved and slave owners...Mastering Emotions covers considerable ground, examining a number of emotions from multiple angles and perspectives...Importantly, Dwyer's conclusion makes a strong case for further academic and cultural work to better understand the power dynamics of emotions within race relations since the abolition of slavery more than 150 years ago."—The Journal of Southern History

"

Dwyer’s intriguing new book brings together the histories of slavery and emotions to illuminate how Black and white southerners alike deployed emotions as 'a currency of power.' Dwyer reads slave narratives alongside and against documents of enslavers to reconstruct people’s emotional lives. While it is never possible to know how other people truly felt, Dwyer analyzes the rhetoric used to discuss emotions, what emotions were expected of whom, motives for feigning or hiding specific emotions, and differences between emotional norms and actual emotional practices. In doing so, she uncovers 'what people thought emotions could actually accomplish'—in short, how power operated through emotions in both
slavery and Emancipation....[A] pathbreaking and complex work.

"—The Journal of the Civil War Era

""Essential...Dwyer’s thoroughly documented study demonstrates that white southerners often dismissed the emotional capacity of Black people, especially when it came to separating enslaved families by sale...One of the many virtues of this volume is that Dwyer carries her story beyond emancipation into the Jim Crow era."—Choice