Progress, Labor, Revolution: The Modern Times of Antebellum African American Life Writing

Abstract

In his influential study of black modernity, The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy writes that [i]n many respects white and black inhabitants of the antebellum plantation live[d] non-synchronously (57). Taking Gilroy a step further, I want to argue that non-synchronicity characterizes antebellum literature and life, traversing what have come to be viewed as discrete identity-based communities. The antebellum African American life narratives I will consider in this essay desire temporal homogeneity and yet still articulate time's actual variety, teaching us that time not only differed across the divide separating whites from African Americans but also differed elsewhere. In that the profound non-synchronicity that has been shown to define modernity under capitalism characterizes antebellum American literature as well, that literature is a literature of modernity.1 Even more importantly, this non-synchronicity of time in the African American life narrative, the definitive American and African American narrative genre, belies the canonical notion that in the antebellum US, identity evolved away from the local and particular toward the more general and abstract. Insofar as the literature of this period proposes that time fosters the emergence of national identity, racial identity, gender identity, and the like, literary history has mistaken this powerful rhetoric for a description of time's actual character and effect. Put another way, this literature argues that in its raw state time is singular and favors progress, which both allows for and necessitates the emergence of an abstract identity that binds individuals together as a group and at the expense of other local and individual features. For its part, literary history assumes that antebellum time was and did just these things and that as a result the antebellum US saw a flowering of such an identity.2 Yet, once we look past this literature's manifest commitment to imagining a causal relationship between time and generic identity, we see antebellum writing, including the life narrative,