Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature by Judith Madera

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Reviewed by: Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature by Judith Madera Wendy Whelan-Stewart (bio) Madera, Judith. Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Durham: Duke U P, 2015. Judith Madera's Black Atlas begins with mid-nineteenth-century African American writers' keen awareness of the politicized nature of national borders and the race-based ideologies that carve space into place and manage the movements of black bodies and texts. Assembling works whose narratives hinge on characters' navigation, migration, or exploration, she grounds her readings in attending to "black flow" or the repeated movements of fictional and actual black communities, voices, or texts over spaces. A focus on flow flexibly and advantageously connects the fictional worlds of, for instance, Martin Delany's Blake, where interest in Cuba as a future site for African American emigration, revolution, and eventual independence runs against white America's interest in annexing Cuba as a slave state, and Pauline Hopkins's novel about the coalescing of Southern migrants from the Reconstruction South with the existing (and slowly eroding) African American community in literary Boston. She reveals the remarkable strategies five authors use to textually puncture, dismantle, reverse, or reconfigure the ongoing and racialized mapping of regions, states, and territories by nineteenth-century imperialist America. Madera's theoretical scaffolding draws its terminology from the disciplines of literary and cultural geography, cartography, Black Atlantic studies, postnational American Studies, and the exciting, new tradition of Hemispheric American studies. The dizzying combination allows her to reach surprising conclusions about nineteenth-century African American authorship and the use of texts to study how boundaries between, for example, free and slave states or territories are demarcated and devitalized or how public platforms for black men can be rewritten as spaces for black women's voices. Readers unfamiliar with postmodern theories of geography (such as the idea that space is not so much static setting as it is flux or that geography is defined less by material topographies and more by discursive and performative processes) will find Madera conscientiously instructive, and those already familiar with this newest form of criticism will find her work with diasporic African American communities well-suited to studies about space as process. Those who prefer close readings to the wider sweep of the literary geographer will find their footing in discussions of Francis Harper's Contending Forces and Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Goodness of St. Rocque. Madera also thankfully introduces Martin Delany's serialized Blake and James Beckworth's frontier memoir to wider audiences. The arc of the book moves from a study of writers problematizing (inter-)national borders to those writers using intimate regional spaces to probe intranational boundaries. [End Page 155] Chapter One begins with William Wells Brown's Clotel and the way it disturbs Thomas Jefferson's claim that slavery is contained by region and not representative of the larger nation. Rather, Madera argues that Clotel intentionally presents a character who is the enslaved daughter of a nation's president and who troubles the borders of the nation's capital in Washington D.C, which conflates both the slave-holding South and the free soil of the Nation. In the same chapter—Madera also points to Brown's nonfiction to illustrate the larger aim of her work, writers' scrutiny of the "symbolic structures of white territorialization" and the "dominant organizational codes of place" (3). She follows William Wells Brown's private (and later published) meditations on moving beyond Missouri into the North and eventually into Europe. Each of Brown's movements away from pro-slave spaces brings new social encounters that affirm Brown's personhood and reveal to him and to white Americans and Europeans the arbitrary and artificial construct of his supposedly innate inferiority. Brown's movements through place reveal the processes (or repeated "performances") that underpin social codes (5). In the second chapter, Madera selects two works dealing with America's territorial overreach and its attempt to enlarge slave-holding spaces. Martin Delany's Blake looks southeastward to Cuba while James Beckwourth's The Life and Adventures of James Beckwourth pans west of the Mississippi. Blake studies America's interest in Cuba...