"Almost a Savage": The Rhetoric of Comic Violence in Ignatius Sancho's Letters.

This article suggests that the comic means by which Ignatius Sancho represents the quotidian violence of slavery in The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African avoids the traditional problems of the sentimental "spectacle" of slavery, including the objectification of the black body and the fetishization of black suffering. Sancho is not simply a comic writer—he is a self-referential analyst of comic traditions—and the Letters showcase complex instances of comic violence as black performance in eighteenth-century England that critique both the slaveholding society and the sentimental abolitionist for their shared reliance on rhetorical strategies that objectify slavery as they spectacularize it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]