Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature - Softcover

Madera, Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822358115 ISBN 13: 9780822358114

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Black Atlas presents definitive new approaches to black geography. It focuses attention on the dynamic relationship between place and African American literature during the long nineteenth century, a volatile epoch of national expansion that gave rise to the Civil War, Reconstruction, pan-Americanism, and the black novel. Judith Madera argues that spatial reconfiguration was a critical concern for the era's black writers, and she also demonstrates how the possibility for new modes of representation could be found in the radical redistricting of space. Madera reveals how crucial geography was to the genre-bending works of writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, James Beckwourth, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. These authors intervened in major nineteenth-century debates about free soil, regional production, Indian deterritorialization, internal diasporas, pan–American expansionism, and hemispheric circuitry. Black geographies stood in for what was at stake in negotiating a shared world.
 

About this title

About the Author

Judith Madera is Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Wake Forest University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Black Atlas

Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

By Judith Madera

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5811-4

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
INTRODUCTION On Meaningful Worlds, 
CHAPTER 1 National Geographic: The Writings of William Wells Brown, 
CHAPTER 2 Indigenes of Territory: Martin Delany and James Beckwourth, 
CHAPTER 3 This House of Gathering: Axis Americanus, 
CHAPTER 4 Civic Geographies and Intentional Communities, 
CHAPTER 5 Creole Heteroglossia: Counter-Regionalism and the New Orleans Short Fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, 
EPILOGUE Post Scale: Place as Emergence, 
NOTES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

The Writings of William Wells Brown

Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. The struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, forms, about images and imaginings. — EDWARD SAID, Culture and Interpretation

William Wells Brown's Clotel or the President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) has the distinction of being the first novel published by an African American. Yet during the bulk of its one-hundred-fifty-year literary existence, it has received little more than passing attention. Remarking on what at that time accounted for over a century's worth of criticism, J. Noel Heermance concluded in 1969 that Clotel was "not a work of sculpted unity resting on American soil," but rather "a nineteenth century 'deus ex machina' mobile, propitiously hanging from the sky." In the 1970s during the social ferment of Black Power, Clotel proved to be a problematic foundational piece for race scholars assembling an African American literary tradition. The novel's frequent characterization as a forerunner text for what would come to be known as the tragic mulatta trope was the source of repeated criticism. Even when Clotel was, in effect, recovered at the end of the 1980s in critical race studies by Bernard Bell and Blyden Jackson, it was still difficult to place. It was slotted as a sort of bridge venture between slave narrative forms and the presumably more complex and race-conscious kinds of black literature that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. To complicate matters, Brown retooled and republished the novel three additional times in the decade after 1853, changing the title and plot details as he went. As John Ernest archly observes, "critics have been so frustrated by the presence of so many sources and plots in one text that they have trouble seeing the one in the many — a unified artistic achievement greater than the sum of its parts."

Recently though, Brown's writings have gained footing as major works of nineteenth-century literature. They have been historicized by scholars such as John Ernest, Ezra Greenspan, Robert Levine, Christopher Mulvey, and Hollis Robbins precisely for their literary appropriations and for the ways Brown renegotiated the difficult terrain of nineteenth-century race culture. What is most striking to contemporary readers of Clotel (or later editions like Clotelle or Miralda) is the sheer thickness of subject materials. In Clotel alone Brown combined firsthand knowledge of black slave life and regional slaveholder practice with Victorian melodrama, the nineteenth-century historical romance, frontier humor, and religious oratory — all to expose the institution of U.S. slavery across the widest spectrum of national life. Yet within this breadth of textualities, a major component of Brown's representative practice still entreats further consideration. By taking the unwieldy archive of antislavery writings that transect Clotel as a starting point, this reading seeks to examine this novel — so long criticized on the basis of its structure — directly through its discourses on a national geography. Brown's geography is both referential and discursive. That is, the novel brings together stories and sketches in the outlines of referential, material space. Aesthetic representation frequently turns on some kind of spatial referencing (for example, a setting, core, backdrop). This is not necessarily new. But in the rich archives of nineteenth-century black print culture, inclusive of editorials, graphic broadsides, dictated narratives, serial fiction, and the bounded book, what gives Brown's literature its specificity is the ways it reveals how nation is materialized: through performances and travels.

Nation is a discursive struggle that is actualized into nonfictional boundaries. More than just an imagined frame for belonging, it imposes meaning on movements and segments the body's access to space and resources. At the same time, what the novel form facilitated was a way to approach the formative geographies of the United States as something more than a record of physical sites. As a genre, the novel was a malleable structure for organizing stories of human projection in the world with scales of knowing and belonging. It could gather different stories to effect new relations to place. This was a major development within early African American literature.

Second, but just as important, Brown's 1850s-era collective writings, including his multiform travel narratives, challenged the validity of a national republic as a kind of exemplary place, a manifest landscape underwriting claims about democracy, expansion, and the free exercise of republican virtue. Like his contemporary Martin Delany, he unseated notions of national territory as cohesive or of a piece. In the following pages I approach Clotel as a kind of textual outcrop from beneath the expanse of a U.S. national landscape. The novel tells a story about physical, indexable, North American spaces that do not feed back into any self-evident, iconic national form. This context then reveals a sequence of subnational sites, arranged to expose the inherent geographical tensions between the United States as a centralizing unit and the shapes of life that overlapped in regional culture. I term such sites "panic cartographies." Panic cartographies are spaces of dissimilitude, straining against their containing form; they are alternately sites of eruption and sites of quietude. But in their form they house the potential to undo not only what is close or proximate, but the broader collective.

Finally, Clotel is about the ways places were made. I argue that Brown first had to leave the United States before he could see the outlines of a form he subsequently mobilized in his fiction. The outline was nothing less than nation. Nation in Clotel is presented as a kind of political fiction, but it is a fiction with real-life consequences for national inhabitants. For example, Clotel is a layered deracination of Jeffersonian agrarianism in its strained mid-nineteenth-century forms and ongoing plantation practice. It was Jefferson who wrote in an 1801 letter to James Monroe that "it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws." These topographies of sameness could not, in Jefferson's words, "contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface." Jefferson was of special consequence for Brown. Among other things, he saw the former president as a leading contributor to a particular kind of nationalist landscape mythos, one supported by ideals of a national husbandman, land cultivation, and race-science. But Clotel goes further than this. Through its tangential plotlines, it appraises models of industrialism associated with the growing northeastern middle classes, which sustained dominant spatial practices. It also examines the kinds of slave-powered land and labor systems that had grown up in places like Missouri, where Brown himself came of age; such spaces were linked through water traffic to the slave markets of the Deep South. Brown's novel is thus a trove of archives, fusing narratives of national race culture together with voices, idioms, and variants of domesticity that showcased profoundly unstable national locales.

Transatlantic Correspondence: Narrative of William Wells Brown and The American Fugitive in Europe

In 1852 William Wells Brown, a fugitive St. Louis slave lecturing throughout Britain, delivered a speech titled "An Appeal to the People of Great Britain and the World." In it he condemned the U.S. federal government's sanction of slavery in both the Southern and Western states. He claimed: "Although the holding of slaves is confined to fifteen of the thirty-one States, yet we hold that the non-slave holding States are equally guilty with the slave-holding." One year later he reiterated this statement in Clotel's concluding polemical chapter: "The free states are equally bound with the slave states to suppress any insurrectionary movement that may take place among slaves. The Northern freemen are bound by their constitutional obligations to aid the slaveholder in keeping his slaves in their chains." Brown's insistence on national complicity in maintaining the institution of slavery, a foundational premise of the 1853 version of Clotel, could be traced to at least two formative developments. They were interlinked: his travels throughout Europe in the early 1850s and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850.

In 1849 Brown began what would be a five-year tour as an antislavery lecturer in Britain and France. His travel journals from this time reflect a growing interest in narrating cultural interactions (often the gaps between expectations and encounters) and the ways a given landscape might enlarge or restrict one's sense of self. For Brown, the experience of a new place could unfold practices and ways of knowing advantageous to black self-fashioning. The opportunity of traveling "to other climes" to "look upon the representatives of other nations" also invigorated his writing insofar as he came to experience the ways tourism engendered new forms of subjectivity. Traveling helped him reframe what the concept of nation could mean, and how epistemes of enclosure operated. In 1849 Brown served as a delegate to the World Peace Conference in Paris, and by 1852 he could list such luminaries as Victor Hugo, Alexis de Tocqueville, Alfred Tennyson, and Charles Dickens among his European friends and contacts. These encounters were detailed in what is considered to be one of the first travel narratives published by an African American, Brown's Three Years in Europe (1852). Most importantly, Brown's European travel offered a new window into licensed mobility without being subject to arrest or forced fugitive transfer. Announcing his arrival in Liverpool to William Lloyd Garrison in the pages of the antislavery Liberator in 1849, this escaped Missouri slave and national noncitizen concluded: "In the so-called Free States I had been treated as one born to occupy an inferior position; in steamers, compelled to take my fare on the deck, in hotels, to take my meals in the kitchen; in coaches, to ride on the outside; in railways, to ride in the 'Negro car;' and in churches, to sit in the 'Negro pew.' But no sooner was I on British soil than I was recognized as a man and an equal." Frederick Douglass made a similar pronouncement following his visit to Eaton Hall, "one of the most splendid buildings in England." Contrasting his ready access with a long list of banned sites of entry in the United States, he wrote: "As I walked through the building, the statuary did not fall down, the pictures did not leap from their places, the doors did not refuse to open, and the servants did not say, 'We don't allow niggers in here!'"

Brown's first European narrative also shared something in common with his 1847 Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, and the prefatory "Sketch of the Author's Life" in the 1853 edition of Clotel. In each text of personal enterprise, what is instrumental to the author's narration of life movements away from slavery is an understanding that place is constituted by performance and expectations. In his second European travel narrative, The American Fugitive in Europe, Brown recalled in close detail an incident he experienced at the World Peace Conference in Paris. The incident was significant because it demonstrated the ways users' expectations made place within spaces. It was an encounter with a slaveholder from the United States: "Just as I was leaving Victor Hugo ... I observed near me a gentleman with his hat in hand, whom I recognized as one of the passengers who had crossed the Atlantic with me in The Canada, and who appeared to be the most horrified at having a negro for a fellow-passenger. This gentleman, as I left M. Hugo, stepped up to me and said, 'How do you do, Mr. Brown? ... O, don't you know me? I was a fellow-passenger with you from America; I wish you would give me an introduction to Victor Hugo and Mr. Cobden.'"

The incident was further remarkable for Brown because it signaled how a change of physical locale might desituate behaviors. Slave subjectivity, the travel narrative illustrated, was prescriptive; it moved with its contexts. By disembedding the actors in this uncomfortable configuration (a lawfully enslaved African American and a "proslavery gentleman") from their physical domains, place performances became very different. Wrote Brown: "The man who would not have been seen walking with me in the streets of New York, and who would not have shaken hands with me with a pair of tongs while on the passage from the United States, could come with hat in hand in Paris, and say, 'I was your fellow-passenger.'"

Like Frederick Douglass, who posted transatlantic correspondences to Boston from England and Northern Ireland in the mid-1840s, Brown realigned his own positionality in the United States as a result of his travels. Travel prompted further questions about cultural conditioning, about something Mark Simpson more widely terms the "politics of mobility," or "the compensatory processes that produce different forms of movement, and that invest these forms with social value, cultural purchase, and discriminatory power." Brown's travels produced the formative impressions of place he developed throughout Clotel and conveyed through anecdotes of Virginia slave escape in My Southern Home (1880). European travel gave the author a sense of common ground on which he would be taken as a man — a curiosity in many cases. But he was certainly no slave in Europe. At the same time, travel — and not excluding forced transit — in the United States gave Brown his subject material. His extended contacts with slaves on U.S. waterways — first as an enslaved market assistant and riverboat steward, heading South; and later as a fugitive steamboat operator, transporting slaves to freedom on the major ports of Lake Erie, including Sandusky, Detroit, and Cleveland — were the sources for many of Clotel's patchwork anecdotes. Literature bridged place to performance. It could concentrate sites, infrastructures, and the very flows he facilitated on the Underground Railroad between 1834 and 1843. It was also a way to work out different frames of geographic attribution, like those that made landings of a coastline or districts of some homesteads. Literature gave expressive output to exploration. But it did not itself engender material access. In fact, for all his florid descriptions of England's literary heritage sites, Brown still exhorted other would-be fugitives not to come to England. His letter to Frederick Douglass' Paper makes clear, "there are numbers here, who have set themselves up as lecturers, and who are in fact little less than beggars."

Actually, filtering through Brown's oftentimes tedious compendiums of European museum visits, famous residences, and hotel stays is the insight that on both sides of the Atlantic, whether it be the United States, Canada West, Jamaica (with its postemancipation indentured labor schemes), or England, was the understanding that even the most kindred of places were shaped through conflict. Place was thus about its negotiation of that conflict. The work of inscribing a U.S. territorial imaginary, one that illustrated the ways nation at once absorbed annexation, militarization, and federalist collusions with a "sectional" slavery into its domestic union, was a project of moving parts. What Clotel does is map these parts, not into some neatly synthesized, conceptual economy but rather into something that best befit Brown's own mode of storytelling: Nation reads as a kind of sensational, affective cartography. Like other slave autobiographers, Brown exposed the U.S. nation's domiciles and shrouded locales. But the novel form takes this exposure further and aggregates these sites as constitutive pieces of nation.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Black Atlas by Judith Madera. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822358115
• ISBN 13: 9780822358114
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312