Distributed Agency: David Walker’s Appeal, Black Readership, and the Politics of Self-Deportation

Abstract

Distributed Agency: David Walker’s Appeal, Black Readership, and the Politics of Self-Deportation Gordon Fraser (bio) Living as we are in a time of deportations, scholars must turn with renewed urgency to the resistance networks that have not only shaped prior moments of crisis but have also enabled resilience. We need a renewed understanding of how nineteenth-century literatures enabled communication networks among peoples that the United States government rendered subsovereign. Such a renewed understanding will allow us to examine the American Colonization Society, which in the nineteenth century presented one of the earliest schemes for deporting ostensibly subsovereign people. Officially formed in January 1817, the ACS was dedicated to the proposition that nominally free black people born in the United States should practice what came to be called “self-deportation,” which meant that free black people would emigrate of their own volition from North America to the west coast of Africa.1 The turn I propose—a consideration of the ACS’ deportation scheme as a foundational moment in the discourse surrounding United States deportations— echoes what Eric Gardner has called “literary criticism’s dominant presentism.”2 This focus reveals the networks of critique and resilience through which black people, nominally free and enslaved, voiced and practiced opposition.3 First [End Page 221] and most obviously, such a study brings us to David Walker, whose Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) defiantly condemned the ACS. But a return to Walker is not enough to fully understand resistance networks. Rather, we must understand not only those who voiced opposition, but those who distributed, circulated, read, or listened to critiques that Walker and others made. Click for larger view View full resolution American Colonization Society membership certificate, [1840?], American Colonization Society Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, [3], available online at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/images/memcertf.jpg. [End Page 222] This essay connects the Southern reading community that Walker’s Appeal produced and the Southern distribution agents and readers of two contemporaneous black newspapers: Freedom’s Journal (1827–29) and the Rights of All (1829). The circulation of these newspapers and Walker’s Appeal makes visible a single, if disaggregated and transforming, literary assemblage, as I will discuss below. Freedom’s Journal folded in 1829 when editor John Russwurm aligned himself with the ACS’ emigrationist politics and moved to Liberia. That same year, Samuel Cornish, Russwurm’s former partner, founded the Rights of All and expressed confusion and concern at Russwurm’s volte-face.4 As 1829 ended, Walker’s Appeal appeared, offering a more full-throated, radical condemnation of the colonization society (F, 201, 252).5 Russwurm, Cornish, and Walker all cultivated a wide-ranging readership, one that included people in Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, and other seemingly implausible places. Indeed, at least five Southern cities to which Walker distributed the Appeal were on the distribution lists of Freedom’s Journal and the Rights of All, and both the pamphlet and the newspapers also circulated in many of the same Northern cities.6 Walker, moreover, anticipated readers who were familiar with Freedom’s Journal, and even occasionally referred them to the newspaper’s back issues.7 Finally, as I will show, Walker’s agents also reproduced the distribution strategies that prior newspaper agents deployed, such as using a tavern to distribute their paper.8 [End Page 223] Walker and his Appeal have long symbolized uncompromising resistance to the structural operations of white supremacy broadly and to the ACS’ quasi-voluntary deportation schemes specifically. As Tavia Nyong’o notes, Walker’s Appeal offers a “negative cosmopolitanism that sets up black collective memory as a counterapparatus to sovereign subjectification.”9 The Appeal ’s moral clarity, in essence, prefigures contemporary scholars’ historical hindsight. Walker reveals how a regime of white supremacist deportation renders life intolerable for people of color, produces “wretchedness,” and coerces them into exile (A, 9, 21, 37, 47). Yet, as I will suggest, we must examine Walker’s clearly articulated moral vision in relation to the shifting ground of resilience. We must scrutinize not only what Walker wrote but also how the Appeal and its immediate precursors moved within and reconfigured a heterogeneous assemblage...