The Language of Politics in the Literary Archive of Black Sovereignty

Abstract

The Language of Politics in the Literary Archive of Black Sovereignty Karen Salt (bio) The forced migration of more than eleven million Africans to the New World presents a tremendous challenge to memory—but not only to memory: to ethics, politics, and, most of all, justice. —Christopher Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle In a letter dated June 27, 1889, Ebenezer D. Bassett beseeches Frederick Douglass for a job.1 Across five pages, Bassett argues that Douglass, as the newly appointed US minister resident to Haiti, could use his skills as a fluent French speaker and translator. The letter appeared a few days after Douglass officially accepted his post and was different in tone and content from the other congratulatory letters that [End Page 392] crossed Douglass’s desk. Bassett congratulates Douglass, but he also pleads his case for employment, noting that he knew Haiti and Haitians intimately. His links were formed through multilingual hemispheric articulations of black power and transatlantic racial equality. In offering his services to Douglass, Bassett hoped to return to Haiti for the same reason that he went decades before: politics. Bassett’s is a name that few outside of diplomatic specialists will recognize today. He was born in 1833 in Litchfield, Connecticut, into a prominent family comprising people of African, Pequot, and European descent. His parents were involved in Connecticut’s black community and introduced Bassett to political service. Bassett flourished as a child, working the family’s land and excelling at school. He attended Yale University (where one of his sons would complete a degree) and became an educator. Through these networks, Bassett worked tirelessly for social justice.2 Bassett actively participated in black community politics in New England, but his activism extended beyond the borders of the United States. In 1869, two decades before Douglass’s ministerial post to Haiti, Bassett was appointed as the first diplomat of African descent to represent the United States abroad. Diplomatic historians have noted Bassett’s achievements in the diplomatic core, but his political thought and writing have been overshadowed by Douglass’s time in Haiti and the twentieth-century US foreign policy work of African American diplomats such as Ralph Bunche.3 It is time we study Bassett as a political writer whose translational contributions to the literary and political discourse of black futurity in the nineteenth century signal the critical importance of language in the remaking of the critical geographies of blackness in the Atlantic world. Bassett was a fluent French (and Kreyòl) speaker who translated material for those within and outside the black and French Atlantic. Bassett did more than just make French material accessible to black US audiences. He represented Haitian and American interests as a diplomat for both nation-states. (In fact, he was appointed twice as a member of the Haitian diplomatic core in the United States). During these appointments, he used French, English, and Kreyòl to bridge the political futures and promise of black sovereignty in the United States and in Haiti. Representing black political power both nationally and internationally, Bassett traversed racial, political, and linguistic lines through the infrastructure of the nation-state. Bassett capably situated himself within a community of politically active multilingual Atlantic actors who crossed easily between New [End Page 393] York, Washington DC, Paris, London, and Port-au-Prince. Switching between these geographical sites was not about crafting an interstitial identity. No matter how tempting it might be to see these diplomats as part of a black Atlantic world beyond the nation-state, the nation-state provided the framework for their engagement (and the constraints) of their interaction. In essence, their work as diplomats gave them space to imagine and craft articulations of black citizenry and black political rights in the United States (and other sites in the Atlantic world) that drew on Haiti’s black sovereignty. Within these spaces of diplomatic discourse, they responded to attempts to deny the significance and influence of black national and/or physical bodies. The nineteenth-century literary archive of black sovereignty of which Bassett’s writings are a part offers critics complex Atlantic frames of analysis. It highlights black politics alongside and within the structures of power...