Romantic Hope and "Black Despair": A Brief History.

The article focuses on the historical emergence of political hope and its connection to the French Revolution, Romanticism, and the secularization of theological ideas. Topics include the conceptual development of political hope as a technology of racialization, the association of despair with racial slavery in the British political imagination, and the transformation of despair into a metaphysical condition linked to slavery, reinforcing racial hierarchies in the Romantic era.