Commentary: Critical Disruptions

Abstract

Written independently of one another, four excellent essays on nineteenth-century African-American cultural studies in this issue of American Literary History display an exemplary commitment to enlarging archive, challenging conventional paradigms, and reconceiving connections among literary discourses, race, and nation. As I was considering what held these essays together, I found an answer in John Ernest's Liberation Historiography, where he describes shared intent of disparate antebellum African-American historians to disrupt master narratives that sought the containment of blackness within white nationalist All four essays in this issue perform such critical disruptions. African-American passing narratives are conventionally presented as expressive of desires for whiteness; P. Gabrielle Foreman provides a new way of thinking about those narratives as expressive of desires for a matrilineal black collectivity. Numerous historians have depicted white and black abolitionists as ascetic moral reformers with a commitment to a racially inclusive US; Elisa Tamarkin offers a strikingly different picture of abolitionists as convivial cosmopolitans who at times seemed prepared to dispense with particularities of nation. Standard treatments of nineteenth-century Liberia conceive of that nation as puppet of white-directed American Colonization Society; Etsuko Taketani, by attending to black voices in Sarah Hale's Liberia, reveals a heretofore muted black agency and postcolonial consciousness in that novel, and in Liberian history itself. Twentieth-century historians have tended to ignore work of nineteenth-century African-American historians, or to dismiss their histories as merely celebratory compendiums of notable African Americans; Ernest, in contrast, discusses a wide range of African-American historical texts that unwrote white nationalist history. Read as a group, essays not only challenge conventional understandings but also, as I hope to suggest, each other. Readers of these essays will encounter not one con-