Seditious Prose: Patriots and Traitors in the African American Literary Tradition

Abstract

This essay explores the recurring figure of the traitor in African-American letters, arguing that literary portrayals of the crime of treason reveal the fundamental tension between black loyalty to the nation and the nation’s betrayal of the race, and indeed demand that we reconsider the terms of treason itself. In three nineteenth-century texts by African American writers—Victor Séjour’s 1837 “The Mulatto,” Frederick Douglass’s 1853 “The Heroic Slave,” and Sutton Griggs’s 1899 Imperium in Imperio—faithful black subjects are inevitably betrayed by racialized law and custom and the refusal to acknowledge the possibility of a black subject fully incorporated into the nation. Asking whether and how blacks writers can navigate the chasm between loyalty to race and loyalty to nation, this essay interrogates the twinned metaphors of patriotism and treason as literary responses to the seeming incommensurability of racial and national citizenship.