Looking Ahead

I promised myself I wouldn't start writing until August but I'm thinking about revising that since I'm feeling antsy about all the stuff I have swirling around in my head. I'm probably going to spend another week reading and taking notes and then start outlining and generating some close readings of the texts I've read. I also need to organize my notes and figure out what I have the jettison and what needs more research. I think sticking to looking at Dred as my main text is still the right way to go but I also really need to figure out a better way to incorporate Douglass and Delany into that analysis. Here is a loose sense of how I'm going to organize the chapter.

The 1850s
I'm going to need to narrate the history following the Compromise of 1850 i.e. John Brown and bleeding Kansas, the abolitionist debates over black assimilation versus emigration, and pro-slaver supporters arguments in favor of the annexation of Cuba. More than that I need to the way these debates are echoes and continuations of the earlier abolitionist debates in Great Britain. Specifically, how desire for access to the Caribbean sugar market and fear of a black Cuba reenact issues surrounding the rise of the sugar plantation, the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and eventually the Haitian revolution. In the case of abolitionist debates over emigration, I need to tease out how emigration acts as a reversal of the trauma of the Middle Passage, the desire for return not merely about being a homecoming and the establishment of a black republic, but also a desire for a founding narrative, in which equality with white Americans established through an origin story similar say to the founding of Plymouth Rock.

Stowe
The journey she takes from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Dred is an interesting one involving both the influence of Douglass, critiques from Delany and others regarding the representation of slaves, and her trip to England prior to writing Dred. This last one is a bit flimsy but I think Clarkson and the British fight is on her mind during the gestational period of this novel. The character of Dred and the setting of the swamp allow her to negotiate both the present and the past in presenting abolition as the outcome of a longer history.

Revolution, Insurrection, Mutiny and the Slave Ship
The slave ship is a fraught image in this moment. On the one hand the Transatlantic slave trade has technically been abolished. But as Blake shows us, and as the Amistad, Tryal, and Creole cases also demonstrate, the slave ship won't go away. The slave ship mutinies and the slave insurrections provide rhetorical moments for abolitionists to invoke both the Haitian and American revolutions.

The Literary Representation of the Slave
Not sure where this is leading exactly but it seems to me that some of the problems I introduced in the first chapter on Grainger and Equiano become even more fraught, especially in the wake of the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision. Douglass and Delany in particular use these texts about insurrection as a way of making opposite points in a way. Douglass ties Madison Washington to the history of the American Revolution as a way of creating an American identity for his character. Delany's Blake is more of a Moses figure leading people away from the States to some never-seen promised land. Stowe is a bit trickier. While Dred at once seem to be merely a representation of other insurrectionists from history she seems less concerned with creating an accurate black revolutionary figure than she is in using him to discuss abolitionists need to recognize themselves as fellow insurrectionists as well as highlighting the role of pro-slavery violence in creating these insurrectionist figures.

The Maritime Imaginary
Hopefully by the time I work these other things out, I'll have a clearer sense of how they play into the role of the maritime in abolitionist texts. For the moment though I'm stuck on this quote from "The Heroic Slave" (1853)

During all the storm, Madison stood firmly at the helm,— his keen eye fixed upon the binnacle. He was not indifferent to the dreadful hurricane; yet he met it with the equanimity of an old sailor. He was silent but not agitated. The first words he uttered after the storm had slightly subsided, were characteristic of the man. 'Mr. Mate, you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free.'(Douglass 237)

A vexed statement if there ever was one. On the one hand he's correct. The opportunity for mutiny while at sea demonstrates the illusion of authority aboard a ship. On the other hand it seems to me that the kind of freedom attained through mutiny epitomizes the problem of negative freedom, a freedom from tyranny but not necessarily enfranchisement.

Blake Post Mortem

Finally finished Blake which is kind of an excruciating re-read. The kind of primary texts I'm working on in this chapter make me long for my Melville chapter.

Not sure at this moment how much of my chapter is going to discuss Blake. I've set up this chapter as exploring the problem of the literary representation of free and enslaved blacks, and Douglass, Delany, and Stowe have written three texts that attack this problem head-on, and have done it in a way that invokes the Middle Passage, the history of sugar production, British abolition, and the Haitian and American Revolutions. The difference between Douglass's and Delany's visions for blacks in a post-slavery world seems to turn on the lessons learned from this history. Delany seems to yearn for full autonomy for blacks away from the United States, and in setting his revolution in Cuba tries to recreate the Haitian experience, albeit with a "full-blooded" black elite. Yet this vision keeps failing. One of the frustrating things about reading this text is how much planning goes into these slave revolts and how little payoff there is.

Of course the reason for this "failure" of vision is in part that this novel was suppose to help raise funds for an African expedition. This raises the question of why abolitionist texts were written. Delany seems to have been taking advantage of Stowe's success in publishing anti-slavery novels. He even sets up the beginning as almost a mirror of the opening of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Is the novel's failure to capture a wide audience due to the timing of publication, or is there something lacking in terms of compelling and sympathetic characters?

By the time the "complete" Blake appeared in weekly installments in The Weekly Anglo-African, it was May of 1862. While the Civil War didn't absolutely put the question of Black emigration to rest--as Bob Levine writes, in 1862 "Lincoln was exploring the possibility of colonizing blacks to the tropics of Central and South America"-- it definitely changed the focus of abolitionists (Levine, Douglass and Delany, 217). Delany in fact turned his efforts to the war upon hearing news of the secession of South Carolina while in Great Britain (220). Identity politics become wrapped up joining forces with Douglass in making a case for the Civil War as a war of emancipation.

In terms of sympathetic characters, it would seem in trying to write something so completely counter to Stowe's work, he also failed to capture that element of sentiment that made her work so successful. This may be a reaction to Stowe's feminized male slaves Tom and Tiff, and preference for a more polemical revolutionary rhetoric.

Moving on to "The Heroic Slave" and possibly Life and Times.

Race and Representation

It occurred to me today as I was alternating between Blake and Levine's book on Delany and Douglass that it's high time for a Douglass biopic. Better yet, an HBO miniseries. Douglass has always seemed to be an impossible figure to cast but for a while now I've thought Jeffery Wright might make a good match. He's still young enough that he could transition from younger Douglass to elder Douglass rather believably. The two problems with him are the voice and the height. Wright may be a trifle too short, but it Joaquin Phoenix can get away with playing Johnny Cash...

Because I still have The Wire on the brain I thought Idris Elba might make a good Martin Delany.

Not bad, you think?

Re-reading Blake is painfully slow but there's too much stuff to ignore. It's fascinating the way in which Delany's back to Africa emigration rhetoric echoes both Clarkson and Equiano in both the potential for Africa to yield riches outside of slavery and in terms of emigrated blacks as "raw material" for new nation builders. What's really strange is how he remains so pro-Christian, even to the point of denigrating native Africans, despite his contempt for the role for prayer over action in some abolitionist circles. A fascinating man, Martin Delany.

Once again it's shaming to realize how much I've pushed aside in just this one decade (1850-1860). Both Levine and Sundquist write about the desire of many in both the North and South to annex Cuba for it's sugar supply. For the South, this is also part of what fuels their push to extend slavery into the Western Territories. Turn the Gulf of Mexico into a sort of miniature version of the Atlantic Triangle (Sundquist, Empire and Slavery in American Literature 1820-1865), even to the point of wanting to reopen the Transatlantic slave trade. Delany's staging a rebellion there is both a reflection of abolitionist anxieties over what the annexation could mean for the extension of slavery in the States, and a strange sort of reenactment of the Haitian revolution.

Thinking about anxieties over Cuba really clarifies why Haiti might be on people's tongues for reasons other than insurrection. I'm thinking of taking a look at Life and Times next to get more of a sense of Douglass's own thoughts on both Haiti and Cuba next.

From Stowe to Delany

Short post today as I'm transitioning from Stowe, criticism, and other stuff into rereading Blake. It still has the original flags and underlining from when I read it four years ago but for the life of me I can't remember a thing about it.

Reading the introduction today, it occurred to me that I've been ignoring the discussions within abolitionist circles regarding Liberian colonization and black assimilation, the former being Stowe's original position, the later being Douglass'. Delany originally was with Douglass but broke with him later and attempted to raise funds for black emigration to Central America. It might be interesting to look at the way those debates, particularly the ones surrounding Liberian colonization, reflect a sort of belated Middle Passage anxiety. And even if they don't, they provide a different kind of transatlantic context for the literature.

Delany's an interesting character. I know I've said I'm thinking of making the chapter primarily about Dred, but Blake raises interesting questions about literary representation of slaves and free blacks. Because he frames it as a response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, it might be interesting to look at the ways in which he plays with dialect, domesticity, and masculinity.