Wells Brown Research Articles

Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions. Geoffrey Sanborn

Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions. Geoffrey Sanborn

Literary Cultures of the Civil War ed. by Timothy Sweet

Reviewed by: Literary Cultures of the Civil War ed. by Timothy Sweet John Casey Literary Cultures of the Civil War. Edited by Timothy Sweet. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8230-4960-2. 280 pp., cloth, $44.95. Timothy Sweet's collection of essays, Literary Cultures of the Civil War, carries on the tradition of reshaping the composition and analysis of the cannon of Civil War literature that was inaugurated in the 1990s and early 2000s by scholars such as Kathleen Diffley, Elizabeth Young, and Alice Fahs. Each section of the book either brings to the reader's attention a new body of writing that has previously been overlooked by those interested in the literature of the period or reframes our understanding of existing texts. The first group of essays examines Civil War–era African American authors and the literary culture they created. Thomas Wentworth Higginson's writings and [End Page 428] those of William Wells Brown are probably both fairly well known among Civil War scholars, but the interpretations Jeremy Wells and John Ernest give in their respective essays offer new insights into these texts. Less well known to most readers of Civil War literature are the letters written by African American soldiers that Christopher Hager examines in his essay; these show the important role military service played for African American males in creating literacy and with it a sense of civic identity. Hager also demonstrates that letters should be considered part of the literary culture of the war, as they reveal, particularly in the case of African Americans, the sources of literary techniques that would come to define later works of fiction. Faith Barrett's essay on the poems of George Moses Horton brings to light the works of an author not commonly discussed in studies of Civil War literature. Her essay serves as a useful bridge between parts of the book, as her analysis of Horton's status as an African American poet sets the stage for the discussion of poetry's role in the Civil War era that is examined in the next section. The essays of the book's second section focus on the neglected genre of poetry. Civil War literature has traditionally been judged by its novels. However, as these essays point out, poetry was actually the most commonly written genre during and immediately following the war. Timothy Sweet's piece on Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Samuel Graber's on Walt Whitman's war poems provide new readings of well-known poems. These readings situate them within the larger poetic production of the period and remind us that both authors were in fact writing war literature. Coleman Hutchison's essay provides a valuable window into a now nearly lost tradition of southern poetry that tried to articulate a nationalist vision for the Confederate states. His analysis of the anthology War Poetry of the South, which the well-known South Carolina author William Gilmore Simms, edited during the Civil War, outlines southern poets' attempt to explain the war to themselves and their readers and imagine a future for the South separate from the United States. The final section of the book emphasizes the literature of nation and regionalism. These essays use genres and texts regularly overlooked by scholars of Civil War literature to provide new insights into the commonly examined connection between fiction and communal identity during the war and in its aftermath. Particularly striking in this section are essays by James Berkey on the newspapers northern soldiers published during the war, Jane E. Schultz's study of Kate Cumming's hospital journal and the particular form of "Confederate Realism" that emerges from the pages of that work, and Jillian Spivey Caddell's analysis of the imagery of Andersonville in portrayals of postwar regionalism. These essays demonstrate the broad range of literary texts and themes that emerge when the cannon of Civil War literature is expanded to include genres other than the war novel. All of the essays in this collection provide useful insights for scholars of Civil War literature. Perhaps the greatest contribution of this work, however, is its insistence that scholarship on the literary cultures of the war...

Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the ConstitutionGothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American Literature

Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the ConstitutionGothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American Literature

Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe

Building on his previous investigations of antinationalist themes in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, J. Gerald Kennedy offers a comprehensive study of the ways that Poe and several of his contemporaries practiced unconventional ways of representing America and/or its past. While many antebellum writers insisted that America was a chosen nation, a unified, liberty-loving polity, others “presented contrary images of American life,” exposing “nation-building as a massive, fractious, and grimy endeavor” (x). Some of these critiques, such as the antislavery salvos of William Wells Brown, were the fruit of conscious effort, but other texts expressed traumas and fears hidden within what Kennedy, borrowing a term from Fredric Jameson, calls “the political unconscious,” a reservoir for the irrepressible unease about national life that shaped literary expression. Dedicated to the three decades before 1850, which year F. O. Matthiessen considered the beginning of the “American Renaissance,” Strange Nation is a remarkably comprehensive work wherein Kennedy analyzes several prose texts in multiple genres, including travel writing, the novel, the romance, the tale, and autobiography in various forms; and by treating a diverse lineup of writers such as William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, John Rollin Ridge, and William Gilmore Simms, to name only six, Kennedy makes a compelling case that gross inconsistencies between national ideals and political realities preoccupied nineteenth-century writers of all regions within the United States and the surrounding territories, and that this tension created a national angst from which works of ideological complexity and emotional power emerged. Arranged topically, Strange Nation contains sections devoted to the following subjects: literary portrayals of Europe and the European roots of many American cultures (Chapter 1), accounts of European travel written by Americans (Chapters 2 and 3), texts about conflicts, military and political, between white settlers and Native Americans (Chapters 4 and 5), literary depictions of the Revolution (Chapter 6), responses to the slavery crisis (Chapter 7), and writing about westward expansion (Chapter 8). In the introduction and Chapter 9, which serve as bookends for Strange Nation, Kennedy establishes the unsettling texts of Poe as models of writing that queers exceptionalist conceptions of national life and reveals “the cultural conflicts emanating from racism, religious bigotry, sexism, slavery, Indian removal, nativism, sectionalism, and many other antebellum controversies” that divided Americans, whose grim experiences countered the “fictions of unity” characteristic of celebratory nationalism (x).A critical tour de force, Strange Nation exhibits the vitality of American writing before the sectional crisis of the 1850s. Particularly effective is Kennedy's technique of juxtaposing works by major authors and writings of their lesser-known contemporaries. For example, Chapter 6 contains analyses of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy as well as Saratoga, a rarely discussed novel of the Revolution penned by Eliza Cushing. This procedure helps Kennedy demonstrate that subversive themes pervaded much writing produced during the heyday of American literary nationalism. Throughout Strange Nation, Kennedy relies on summary, which seems, at times, excessive, but the summaries are useful for readers unfamiliar with the more obscure texts examined in the book; furthermore, the accumulation of detail achieved through summary bolsters Kennedy's argument. More important, interpretive commentary that is often fresh and thought provoking peppers the book. One memorable example is Kennedy's detailed response to Simms's The Partisan, a novel set in the late eighteenth century and marked by its author's awareness of class strife in Revolutionary society, a discord that Simms linked, as Kennedy argues, to social problems of the Jacksonian era, troubles that exposed deep divisions within a supposedly unified nation. Equally intriguing is Kennedy's well-supported claim that the (in)famous frontier fighter Alexander Macomb, not Richard M. Johnson, was the “model for” General A. B. C. Smith, the broken-down “military hero” of “The Man That Was Used Up,” an 1839 story in which Poe “deconstructs the illusion of sacred destiny that … legitimizes assaults on demonized enemies” (213–14, 217). A number of other Poe texts, from the early tale “The Fall of the House of Usher” to Eureka, the treatise written during the author's last year, also receive new readings, all of which reveal Poe's efforts “to comprehend the strangeness of antebellum national imaginings” (35). Kennedy's book is especially important for Poe scholars eager to explain the author's anomalous position in the American literary canon. As Kennedy indicates, Poe was not a spokesperson for a particular ideological camp; he was a “patriotic skeptic,” a principled but not unprejudiced contrarian warning Americans against the dangers of self-regarding nationalism, which can breed reckless contempt for the moral norms and limits that make communal existence possible (400). Thus the Poe evoked in Strange Nation is not without heroism, a nobility of spirit that still commands respect.

Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe

Building on his previous investigations of antinationalist themes in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, J. Gerald Kennedy offers a comprehensive study of the ways that Poe and several of his contemporaries practiced unconventional ways of representing America and/or its past. While many antebellum writers insisted that America was a chosen nation, a unified, liberty-loving polity, others “presented contrary images of American life,” exposing “nation-building as a massive, fractious, and grimy endeavor” (x). Some of these critiques, such as the antislavery salvos of William Wells Brown, were the fruit of conscious effort, but other texts expressed traumas and fears hidden within what Kennedy, borrowing a term from Fredric Jameson, calls “the political unconscious,” a reservoir for the irrepressible unease about national life that shaped literary expression. Dedicated to the three decades before 1850, which year F. O. Matthiessen considered the beginning of the “American Renaissance,” Strange Nation is a remarkably comprehensive work wherein Kennedy analyzes several prose texts in multiple genres, including travel writing, the novel, the romance, the tale, and autobiography in various forms; and by treating a diverse lineup of writers such as William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, John Rollin Ridge, and William Gilmore Simms, to name only six, Kennedy makes a compelling case that gross inconsistencies between national ideals and political realities preoccupied nineteenth-century writers of all regions within the United States and the surrounding territories, and that this tension created a national angst from which works of ideological complexity and emotional power emerged. Arranged topically, Strange Nation contains sections devoted to the following subjects: literary portrayals of Europe and the European roots of many American cultures (Chapter 1), accounts of European travel written by Americans (Chapters 2 and 3), texts about conflicts, military and political, between white settlers and Native Americans (Chapters 4 and 5), literary depictions of the Revolution (Chapter 6), responses to the slavery crisis (Chapter 7), and writing about westward expansion (Chapter 8). In the introduction and Chapter 9, which serve as bookends for Strange Nation, Kennedy establishes the unsettling texts of Poe as models of writing that queers exceptionalist conceptions of national life and reveals “the cultural conflicts emanating from racism, religious bigotry, sexism, slavery, Indian removal, nativism, sectionalism, and many other antebellum controversies” that divided Americans, whose grim experiences countered the “fictions of unity” characteristic of celebratory nationalism (x).A critical tour de force, Strange Nation exhibits the vitality of American writing before the sectional crisis of the 1850s. Particularly effective is Kennedy's technique of juxtaposing works by major authors and writings of their lesser-known contemporaries. For example, Chapter 6 contains analyses of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy as well as Saratoga, a rarely discussed novel of the Revolution penned by Eliza Cushing. This procedure helps Kennedy demonstrate that subversive themes pervaded much writing produced during the heyday of American literary nationalism. Throughout Strange Nation, Kennedy relies on summary, which seems, at times, excessive, but the summaries are useful for readers unfamiliar with the more obscure texts examined in the book; furthermore, the accumulation of detail achieved through summary bolsters Kennedy's argument. More important, interpretive commentary that is often fresh and thought provoking peppers the book. One memorable example is Kennedy's detailed response to Simms's The Partisan, a novel set in the late eighteenth century and marked by its author's awareness of class strife in Revolutionary society, a discord that Simms linked, as Kennedy argues, to social problems of the Jacksonian era, troubles that exposed deep divisions within a supposedly unified nation. Equally intriguing is Kennedy's well-supported claim that the (in)famous frontier fighter Alexander Macomb, not Richard M. Johnson, was the “model for” General A. B. C. Smith, the broken-down “military hero” of “The Man That Was Used Up,” an 1839 story in which Poe “deconstructs the illusion of sacred destiny that … legitimizes assaults on demonized enemies” (213–14, 217). A number of other Poe texts, from the early tale “The Fall of the House of Usher” to Eureka, the treatise written during the author's last year, also receive new readings, all of which reveal Poe's efforts “to comprehend the strangeness of antebellum national imaginings” (35). Kennedy's book is especially important for Poe scholars eager to explain the author's anomalous position in the American literary canon. As Kennedy indicates, Poe was not a spokesperson for a particular ideological camp; he was a “patriotic skeptic,” a principled but not unprejudiced contrarian warning Americans against the dangers of self-regarding nationalism, which can breed reckless contempt for the moral norms and limits that make communal existence possible (400). Thus the Poe evoked in Strange Nation is not without heroism, a nobility of spirit that still commands respect.

Common ground: positioning Ireland within studies of slavery, anti-slavery and empire

ABSTRACTThis article positions Ireland as a significant literary and political space for fugitive slaves, and for black anti-slavery activism more generally. William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Highland Garnet and Amanda Smith were amongst those who visited and wrote about Ireland in the antebellum and postbellum periods. Their writing portrays Ireland and their Irish experience quite differently, but in ways that help position Ireland within the wider political currents of slavery, anti-slavery and empire. It considers Ireland as a literary space which facilitated the publication of black and abolitionist literature in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The article also evaluates some of the literary and historical opportunities that exist to elaborate the theme of Ireland, slavery, anti-slavery and empire, and situates the following articles as examples of this emerging body of work.

One More Time with Feeling: Repetition, Reparation, and the Sentimental Subject in William Wells Brown’s Rewritings ofClotel

AbstractThe publication history of Clotel, which was rewritten and rereleased three times in twenty-five years, puts considerable strain on conventional readings of sentimental activism’s focus on the exceptional individual and private resolution. In the patterns of repetition and transformation that emerge from Brown’s self-duplication, I therefore argue that Clotel and its successors provide a new historiography of systemic trauma that is highly relevant to current debates on redress and reparations in the United States. Read together, this interlinked series reshapes what narrative can be, producing scenes that refuse to be marshalled into the discrete chronology of simple plot and a host of characters whose lives overlap and blur in their shared circumstances and joint wounds.

Troubling the white supremacy–black inferiority paradigm: Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown in Europe

This article examines the geographical and metaphorical journeys of such nineteenth-century antislavery lecturers as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, who crossed the Atlantic to visit Great Britain, France, and Italy. Black travellers crossed the ocean, as Douglass put it, to combat ‘American prejudice against the darker colored races’. Douglass and Brown used different strategies that were available to black men to perform racial protest against discrimination and prejudice. As they moved across the ocean, they challenged American white supremacist ideology by reinventing their identities as cultured cosmopolitans engaged in a journey from discrimination to acculturation, moving toward acceptance and equality.

Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature by Judith Madera

Reviewed by: Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature by Judith Madera Wendy Whelan-Stewart (bio) Madera, Judith. Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Durham: Duke U P, 2015. Judith Madera's Black Atlas begins with mid-nineteenth-century African American writers' keen awareness of the politicized nature of national borders and the race-based ideologies that carve space into place and manage the movements of black bodies and texts. Assembling works whose narratives hinge on characters' navigation, migration, or exploration, she grounds her readings in attending to "black flow" or the repeated movements of fictional and actual black communities, voices, or texts over spaces. A focus on flow flexibly and advantageously connects the fictional worlds of, for instance, Martin Delany's Blake, where interest in Cuba as a future site for African American emigration, revolution, and eventual independence runs against white America's interest in annexing Cuba as a slave state, and Pauline Hopkins's novel about the coalescing of Southern migrants from the Reconstruction South with the existing (and slowly eroding) African American community in literary Boston. She reveals the remarkable strategies five authors use to textually puncture, dismantle, reverse, or reconfigure the ongoing and racialized mapping of regions, states, and territories by nineteenth-century imperialist America. Madera's theoretical scaffolding draws its terminology from the disciplines of literary and cultural geography, cartography, Black Atlantic studies, postnational American Studies, and the exciting, new tradition of Hemispheric American studies. The dizzying combination allows her to reach surprising conclusions about nineteenth-century African American authorship and the use of texts to study how boundaries between, for example, free and slave states or territories are demarcated and devitalized or how public platforms for black men can be rewritten as spaces for black women's voices. Readers unfamiliar with postmodern theories of geography (such as the idea that space is not so much static setting as it is flux or that geography is defined less by material topographies and more by discursive and performative processes) will find Madera conscientiously instructive, and those already familiar with this newest form of criticism will find her work with diasporic African American communities well-suited to studies about space as process. Those who prefer close readings to the wider sweep of the literary geographer will find their footing in discussions of Francis Harper's Contending Forces and Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Goodness of St. Rocque. Madera also thankfully introduces Martin Delany's serialized Blake and James Beckworth's frontier memoir to wider audiences. The arc of the book moves from a study of writers problematizing (inter-)national borders to those writers using intimate regional spaces to probe intranational boundaries. [End Page 155] Chapter One begins with William Wells Brown's Clotel and the way it disturbs Thomas Jefferson's claim that slavery is contained by region and not representative of the larger nation. Rather, Madera argues that Clotel intentionally presents a character who is the enslaved daughter of a nation's president and who troubles the borders of the nation's capital in Washington D.C, which conflates both the slave-holding South and the free soil of the Nation. In the same chapter—Madera also points to Brown's nonfiction to illustrate the larger aim of her work, writers' scrutiny of the "symbolic structures of white territorialization" and the "dominant organizational codes of place" (3). She follows William Wells Brown's private (and later published) meditations on moving beyond Missouri into the North and eventually into Europe. Each of Brown's movements away from pro-slave spaces brings new social encounters that affirm Brown's personhood and reveal to him and to white Americans and Europeans the arbitrary and artificial construct of his supposedly innate inferiority. Brown's movements through place reveal the processes (or repeated "performances") that underpin social codes (5). In the second chapter, Madera selects two works dealing with America's territorial overreach and its attempt to enlarge slave-holding spaces. Martin Delany's Blake looks southeastward to Cuba while James Beckwourth's The Life and Adventures of James Beckwourth pans west of the Mississippi. Blake studies America's interest in Cuba...

William Wells Brown: An African American Life by Ezra Greenspan

William Wells Brown: An African American Life by Ezra Greenspan

“[H]eroic bravery in more than one battle”: The Creation of Heroes in William Wells Brown’s Multi-Edition Clotel

“[H]eroic bravery in more than one battle”: The Creation of Heroes in William Wells Brown’s Multi-Edition Clotel

Suicide and Survival in the Work of Kara Walker

Young, black and Artistgifted, dead at sixteen overwhelmedbyan overdose of sentimentality,admiration and awe.-Kara Walker: The Renaissance Society at the University of ChicagoKara Walker's visual essay, Chronology of Black Suffering: Images and Notes, 1992-2007, was assembled from items in Walker's personal picture files and included in the catalog for her retrospective exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Within the essay, Walker includes an altered promotional still from the obscure film Professional Sweetheart (1933) written by Maurine Watkins, best known for her play Chicago (1926). The original still captures the character Vera, a maid played by the actress Theresa Harris, appealing to a group of white male characters. Vera holding her arms out before her, with her wrists turned upward, as if she were pulling a string taut. Walker has altered the still in a number of ways, most notably by adding splashes of red paint that transform the still into a pulpy image of suicide (fig. 1). Although the iconography of suicide in Walker's body of work has not been comprehensively studied, it extensive. Walker's images of suicide refer to representations of the suicides of slave women and mothers in nineteenth-century abolitionist narratives, where these deaths functioned rhetorically to engender sympathy and condemn slavery's injustices. Narrative, Walker explains, is very important to my work. I appropriate from many sources . . . frontispieces for slave narratives, authentic documents, as well as a novel or a great sort of artistic spectacle (quoted in Golden 2002, 47). Walker's life-size silhouette Cut (1998) (fig. 2) draws from the frontispiece of William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), which depicts Clotel's leap into the Potomac, and from an illustration in Jesse Torrey's A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery (1817), which shows a woman named Anna leaping from a window after learning she would be returned to slavery without her children.In her sensitive account of Anna's leap, historian Terri L. Snyder argues that the act of slave suicide contained within it the contradictions of slavery itself:Suicide, an anguished assertion of personhood, undermined the human commodification . . . fundamental to enslavement. Once dead, a slave ceased to be an object of property, an entity to be traded, or a subject from which to extract labor. In this sense, self-destruction by enslaved people was often viewed as an act of power, a visceral rejection of enslavement as well as a visible statement of personhood. Yet there was a fatal cost in asserting the power to die, of course. Death by suicide was not always, consistently, or even typically, an unequivocal, unambiguous, or intentional act. (Snyder 2015, 4)The suicide rate of slaves likewise equivocal and difficult to ascertain, as suicidal deaths were misperceived or went unrecorded (Lester 1998, 9). Nevertheless, narrative accounts of slave suicide survive in abolitionist literature, in oral accounts passed down intergenerationally, and in Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews of ex-slaves (Snyder 2015, 14). Walker's images of suicide are half fictions that assume and transform the contradictions Snyder outlines while attending to the ways in which history apocryphal, romanticized, and ever-present. To the image of Clotel's suicide included in Chronology of Black Suffering, for example, Walker added a red superhero cape (fig. 3). Clotel plays the tragic mulatta in Brown's narrative, and by recasting Clotel's suicide as a scene of heroic self-sacrifice, Walker alludes to the superwoman stereotype, a contemporary controlling image rooted in the myth that black women are unshakable and thus not susceptible to depression or suicidal tendencies (Jones and Shorter-Gooden 2003, 21).The image of Anna's leap from A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery reproduced in the exhibition catalog Walker created for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (fig. …

Black atlas: geography and flow in nineteenth-century African American literature

Black Atlas presents definitive new approaches to black geography. It focuses attention on the dynamic relationship between place and African American literature during the long nineteenth century, a volatile epoch of national expansion that gave rise to the Civil War, Reconstruction, pan-Americanism, and the black novel. Judith Madera argues that spatial reconfiguration was a critical concern for the era's black writers, and she also demonstrates how the possibility for new modes of representation could be found in the radical redistricting of space. Madera reveals how crucial geography was to the genre-bending works of writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, James Beckwourth, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. These authors intervened in major nineteenth-century debates about free soil, regional production, Indian deterritorialization, internal diasporas, pan–American expansionism, and hemispheric circuitry. Black geographies stood in for what was at stake in negotiating a shared world.

Fact, Fiction, and the Industry of Violence: Newspapers and Advertisements in Clotel

William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) is formally complex and features paratextual elements that stymied early critics, who judged the antislavery novel by somewhat rigid generic conventions. As a result, Clotel ’s historical significance has often overshadowed its radically experimental aesthetics. The very elements used to deem Clotel aesthetically inferior, namely the inclusion of newspaper articles and advertisements, actually expose and attempt to remedy the representational inadequacies of conventional abolitionist texts. Brown deploys paratexts strategically within Clotel ’s fictional narrative in order to undermine readers’ assumptions and challenge them to continually position themselves with and against reified texts.

William Wells Brown: An African American Life by Ezra Greenspan (review)

William Wells Brown: An African American Life by Ezra Greenspan (review)

Joe: The Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend by Ron J. Jackson Jr. and Lee Spencer White (review)

Reviewed by: Joe: The Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend by Ron J. Jackson Jr. and Lee Spencer White Brian Elliott Joe: The Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend. By Ron J. Jackson Jr. and Lee Spencer White. Foreword by Phil Collins. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Pp. 352. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Joe: The Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend by Ron J. Jackson Jr. and Lee Spencer White is an ambitious work that attempts to provide a fuller biography of William Barret Travis’s servant, Joe. Joe’s survival of the epic battle at the Alamo and his later accounts of the contest not only galvanized support for the Texian cause of independence, but also made him a bona fide Texas hero. Utilizing myriad primary sources, most notably the probate records of Joe’s former master Isaac Mansfield, the authors detail Joe’s tumultuous life from boyhood to legend. Through their investigation of this famous Texas figure, the authors shed light on the complex nature of life in bondage and provide a unique vantage point from which modern readership can view the Texas Revolution. Over the course of twenty-six chapters, Jackson and White’s sweeping narrative takes Joe from his boyhood in Missouri, to his life as a servant under Travis in Texas. Throughout the early chapters, the authors highlight the hardships faced by Joe, including familial separation, harsh punishments, backbreaking labor, and the inability to control his fate. The complexities of master-slave relations are best seen in the relationship between Travis and Joe. Despite his inferior position to Travis, Joe was given an incredible amount of trust and responsibility. Travis, while at times “forced” to carry out punitive measures with his property, forged a strong relationship with Joe. This is most evident in their time together during the Texas Revolution. As a body servant to Travis at the Alamo, Joe experienced firsthand all the famous moments of the siege. In the fires of war, Joe made the choice to tie his fate to that of his master and the Texas cause, fighting alongside men who viewed him as nothing more than chattel. Joe ironically survived the Mexican onslaught and was allowed to live because he was a slave. The events following the Alamo cemented Joe’s legacy as a Texas legend. Spreading the word of his master’s gallant stand at the Alamo, Joe rallied the Texans to oust Santa Anna’s regime in their newly minted republic. Joe, however, was still a slave and remained one despite his growing fame. Joe later escaped to the Travis family plantation in Alabama, lived out the remainder of his days under the name “Ben,” eventually gained his freedom, and was forever remembered as an Alamo legend. [End Page 224] This investigation of Joe is a masterpiece of historical research. The discovery of Joe’s relation to the famed frontiersmen Daniel Boone, not to mention that one of Joe’s brothers was famous abolitionist William Wells Brown, further increases the importance of Joe’s footprint in Texas history. At the same time, Joe’s relationship with Travis lends further credence to the idea that master-slave relations were not simple affairs but relationships defined by unpredictable human connections. While at times Jackson and White’s investigation seems too speculative, their abundance of primary sources reassures suspicious readers and delivers a must read for those interested in slavery or the Texas Revolution. Brian Elliott University of North Texas Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

Before Harlem: The Franco-Haitian Grammar of Transnational African American Writing

Before Harlem:The Franco-Haitian Grammar of Transnational African American Writing Marlene L. Daut (bio) In The Practice of Diaspora, Brent Hayes Edwards argues that 370,000 African Americans who “served in the segregated American Expeditionary Force in France” and the “nearly 620,000 soldiers” from French colonies in Senegal and the Sudan, “along with hundreds of African American visitors and expatriates,” helped post–World War I Paris to become “a vibrant cosmopolitan space for interaction that was available neither in the United States nor in the colonies.” “Paris is crucial,” Edwards writes, “because it allowed boundary crossing, conversations, and collaborations that were available nowhere else to the same degree.”1 Yet the connections, both formal and imagined, between anglophone and francophone “practices of diaspora” far predate the postwar period of the Harlem Renaissance and the international journals and movements with which it came to be associated. Not only was postrevolutionary Haiti a physical meeting place throughout the nineteenth century for various African American refugees and other politically minded people of color like Prince Saunders, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass, but it was also an intellectual meeting place for myriad antislavery writers and artists of color from across the Atlantic world.2 A series of textual “firsts” by writers of African descent living in the Atlantic world intimately connected Haiti and the Haitian Revolution to abolitionism in France, England, and the broader circum-Caribbean. These firsts included the anonymously published “Theresa; a Haytien Tale,” a serialized short story which appeared in 1828 in the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal.3 Freedom’s Journal also published several excerpts of the British botanist William Hamilton’s English translation of Baron de Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères (1816), which is probably the first example of what we now call critical race theory, and which formed a crucial part of a hemispheric American print culture.4 Across the Atlantic, another writer of hemispheric significance, the Louisiana-born Victor Séjour, published what is considered by many to be the first African American short story, [End Page 385] “Le Mulâtre” (1837), which describes a fictional slave revolt in colonial Saint-Domingue. Importantly, Séjour’s abolitionist tale was published in the Martinican abolitionist Cyrille Bissette’s Parisian journal Revue des Colonies, which was the “first French serial directed by and produced for people of color.”5 The Revue, whose aim was to “‘group together’ and give ‘the greatest publicity’ to the problems and injustices faced by persons of color,”6 also reprinted in 1837 a short biographical sketch and three poems written by Phillis Wheatley, the first African American poet to publish a book of poetry. If Anna Brickhouse has recovered the abbé Grégoire’s original 1808 publication of these poems and their reprinting by Bissette in 1837 as a part of an integral nineteenth-century “transamerican” literary public sphere,7 long before these reprints and translations, Wheatley had already been crowned the first poet laureate of an African Americas that included not only the United States, England, and France, but also the Caribbean. Thirty-eight of the original thirty-nine poems that made up Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) were appended to the 1801 US translation of the French abolitionist Joseph Lavallée’s 1789 adventure novel about a runaway slave from Saint-Domingue, which had originally been translated and published in London in 1790 as The Negro Equaled by Few Europeans (1790/1801).8 Haiti’s critical position in this transatlantic public sphere, one in which texts move via translation, reprint, representation, and adaptation among the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean, calls upon us to recognize as intimately transnational the geography of African American literary emergence. In one of the first African American novels, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853), originally published in London, for example, William Wells Brown copied a significant portion of his descriptions of life on antebellum US plantations from the British abolitionist John Relly Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1853). Brown borrowed again from Beard in his 1854 abolitionist speech turned pamphlet, “St. Domingo, its Revolutions and its Patriots...

Abolitionist Geographies by Martha Schoolman (review)

Reviewed by: Abolitionist Geographies by Martha Schoolman Pia Wiegmink Martha Schoolman. Abolitionist Geographies. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014. 240 pp. $75.00 cloth/ $25.00 paper. In Abolitionist Geographies, Martha Schoolman approaches abolitionist literature through the lens of geography; she draws attention to the multifaceted and often highly ambivalent ways in which spatial confines and geographic knowledge had significant impact upon abolitionist discourses. Her geopolitical approach thus brings to the fore what were central conundrums for abolitionists, such as the questions of white paternalism vis-à-vis black resistance, immediate versus gradual emancipation, accommodationism versus radical abolition, and nonviolent means of moral suasion versus armed rebellion. In her Introduction, which begins with a discussion of “the quintessential North American geographic novel” (1), Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America (1859-62), Schoolman maps the “literary geography” (5) of U. S. abolitionism in a period from the Emancipation of the West Indies (1834) to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (1859). What follows are five densely argued chapters, which focus on different (albeit primarily white) authors and key themes of “literary abolitionism” (1), a term that unfortunately remains rather vague as it is not clear what informed Schoolman’s selection of primary texts, which range from classic abolitionist fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to Emerson’s essay Nature (1836), a text that is seldom discussed in the context of abolition. Chapters one and two focus on white New England intellectuals and the geopolitical context of the British West Indies. Schoolman first examines the emerging abolitionist thought of New England intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing via their “convalescent southern travel” (36) and draws attention to the repeated and highly ambivalent intersection of discourses of illness and abolition. “What if,” Schoolman asks, the “parlors [of northerners] and their stomachs could do without plantation produce, but their lungs could not recover without the plantation climate?” (35). In typical fashion for Abolitionist Geographies, several other aspects are interwoven in this already complex topic of abolitionists’ transatlantic and hemispheric “itineraries of illness in the 1830s” (35): Schoolman reflects, for example, upon New Englanders’ conflicting observations concerning post-emancipation wage labor conditions (in comparison to slavery) and gradual emancipation (in contrast to immediate emancipation). Taken together, these multiple discourses show how the transnational flows of material goods, the corporeal experience of illness (and the travel it necessitates), and competing [End Page 387] economic visions of global labor are inextricably entwined in New England’s abolitionist thought. In the second chapter, “August First and the Practice of Disunion,” Schoolman examines the “strategic superficiality of the August First Celebration” (82) to commemorate Emancipation Day as an event of universal rather than national relevance. She shows how white American abolitionists turned Emancipation Day into a model for a peaceful end to slavery in the U. S., which was politically in sync with Garrison’s doctrine of nonviolence. Furthermore, Schoolman demonstrates how white abolitionists failed to acknowledge important precursors to emancipation in the West Indies, such as the slave revolt in Jamaica in 1832, in order to emphasize white control and deliberately construct a lack of black agency in the process of emancipation. While Schoolman’s line of argument is reasonable, her narrative would have benefited from a more detailed discussion of African American commemorations––and their equally strategic use of this transnational event––as they have been examined by Mitch Kachun (Festivals for Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915, 2003) and Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie (Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World, 2007). Chapter three analyzes black cosmopolitanism in William Wells Brown’s first travel narrative Three Years in Europe (1852). Schoolman argues how Brown, during his stay in Europe, gained a black cosmopolitan consciousness that was decidedly different from the typical notion of cosmopolitanism as a movement from the rural new world of slavery to the freedom of the metropolitan cities of the old world. During his attendance at the international peace conference in Paris in 1849, for example, Brown became aware of “the fragile tranquility of the present and the upheavals of the past” (116)––a realization which made him...

Harriet Jacobs and the Recirculation of Print Culture: Figure 1.

Following a brief introductory paragraph, William Wells Brown reprints two advertisements in the opening to the third chapter of Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853). The advertisements are said to be from newspapers “published in the vicinity” of Natchez, where the character Currer is living, and they attest to the brutality of slaveholders and slavecatchers in the area by showing, as Brown states, “how they catch their negroes” (96). Visually set off from the narrative prose, these advertisements conform to familiar typographic conventions, which include listing the names of the subscribers and the dates of publication at the end of each block of text (see fig. 1). Brown’s novel is littered with reprinted texts such as these—texts that frequently trouble the boundary between the documentary and the literary. Later in this third chapter, there is a long, reprinted account of a lynching sourced from the Natchez Free Trader and another reprinted account that describes the discovery of a runaway slave den in a Southern swamp (98-99). Even while these newspaper items document the historical reality of violence perpetrated against runaway slaves, the chapter ends with Brown precariously asserting that Currer—the fictional character mentioned at the start of the chapter— was present at the lynching described in the first newspaper account. This conclusion presents a jumble of documentary, fictional, reprinted, and original texts all within the space of a page, and Brown’s claim that his fictional character was a witness to a historical event destabilizes the relationship between the reprinted texts and the fictional prose. In the case of Clotel, it seems impossible to decide whether the reprinted texts are an apparatus that serves the fiction or whether the fiction is simply an occasion for the interlacing of diverse source materials. Indeed, this question has been a subject of scholarly debate since the mid-twentieth century; early critics of the novel described the now canonical 1853 edition as a “loosely structured skeleton of a plot” (Heermance 164) by a “limited and pedestrian writer” (Davis xii) while later critics praised the same text as “a stunning example of literary pastiche” (Levine 7) that exhibits Brown’s “brilliant experimentation with literary form” (Fabi xxv). Whether these reprinted texts

Siân Silyn Roberts Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861. Siân Silyn Roberts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 239.

Siân Silyn Roberts Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861. Siân Silyn Roberts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 239.