William Wells Brown Research Articles

The Hemingses of Monticello as an African American Novel

The extraordinary and highly creative archival work of Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello has altered our understanding of early American history. But I confess that I ultimately read Gordon-Reed's approximately 700-page family biography from cover to cover because it engages the imagination and offers the pleasures that we traditionally associate with the literary. With its multigenerational perspective on family history, its close attention to the psychological, its thick descriptions of law, politics, and other historical matters, and its strong narrative flow, The Hemingses of Monticello resembles classic realist novels such as Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. With its attention to interracial sexuality, The Hemingeses of Monticello also resembles classic nineteenth-century African American novels such as Frank Webb's The Garies and Their Friends, Charles Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars, and William Wells Brown's Clotel. The family resemblance to Clotel is especially pertinent because that novel presents a ficionalized account of two daughters and three grand daughters of Thomas Jefferson and the slave woman whom Brown calls Currer, and because it draws on what were then the rumors of Jefferson's sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Those rumors were circulated by Jefferson's political enemy James Callender in 1802 and then were picked up by abolitionists and British travelers during the 1830s through the 1850s. That there possibly could have been a sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings was discounted by most twentiethcentury historians until the results of genetic testing were published in the science journal Nature in 1998 (Foster). But before genetic testing, there was Annette Gordon-Reed's 1997 Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which meticulously sifted through the evidence and made a compelling case for regarding the Jefferson-Hemings relationship as part of the historical record. I mention Brown's Clotel because I've edited two Bedford Cultural Editions of the novel and in each case was profoundly influenced by the work of Gordon-Reed. For the edition of 2000, I was grateful to a historian whose work guided me away from the hype of the recent genetic testing and engaged crucial aspects of early national slave culture. Her work helped me to see that Brown in Clotel was as much a historian as a fiction writer; and I think it's fair to say that both Brown and Gordon-Reed suggest how fine the line is between fiction and history. For the just-published second edition of Clotel, Gordon-Reed helped me to think in more complex ways about the problematics of interracial love--whether as described in a novel like Clotel or in a history like The Hemingses of Monticello. From William Wells Brown, or Annette Gordon-Reed, or both talking back and forth to one another in my head, I've learned how difficult it is to disconnect power from love when thinking about interracial relationships in a slave culture, and how mysterious and complicated are the workings of history. I want briefly to consider a particularly mysterious and complicated moment in The Hemingses of Monticello: Gordon-Reed's account of the pregnant Sally Hemings's decision in 1789 to return with Jefferson to Virginia instead of remaining in Paris, where she would have been free. In the manner of the best novelists, Gordon-Reed keeps interpretation open about motivation, limning character, psychology, and material concerns, but ultimately respecting the uncertainties of history and the human. Gordon-Reed writes about this mysterious moment: Why would [Sally Hemings] trust Jefferson, and why would she, under any circumstances, return to Virginia with him? …

The Haitian Revolution and the articulation of a modernist epistemology

The focus of this article is a critical look at the epistemological treatment of the Haitian Revolution by progressive 20th-century scholars such as C.L.R. James, Eugene Genovese, Robin Blackburn, David Geggus and Susan Buck-Morss. Their ideas and modes of thinking, knowing and constructing meaning, in respect of the cognitive and general epistemological basis of the Haitian Revolution, are examined in comparison to 19th-century black abolitionist thinkers such as Pompee Valentin Vastey, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown and James Theodore Holly. The essay concludes that the 20th-century progressive Haitian revolutionary scholars have too uncritically relied on the 18th and 19th-century occidental ontological and epistemological complex to construct narratives of the Haitian Revolution. By doing so, they denied or underestimated the cognitive agency of Africans in the making of the Haitian Revolution and thus presented a distorted picture of the Haitian Revolution in Haitian revolution studies.

William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe , and Fugitive Tourism

At start of his career as an agent for Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, William Wells Brown participated in two events that highlight issues at stake in his later travels abroad. First, sometime in spring of 1847, he visited Boston exhibition of Panorama of Mississippi River, which amazed him with its mild portrayal of and gave him idea of constructing panorama of his own that would counter proslavery bias of this apparently innocuous, but obviously partial view of celebrated landscape. (1) Later, in November of that year, he famously declared to Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society that slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented (Lecture 4). The problem, as Brown presents it, is not just lack of public knowledge about slavery, but also inevitable failure of any effort to do more than [slavery] as we think it is. No representation, not even his own, can convey the real condition of (4). If Brown's visit to attraction in Boston reminded him of how thoroughly proslavery images pervaded antebellum culture--and how often they went unremarked--then his urge to counter Mississippi panorama with his own account of may have sharpened his sense of problems inherent in any attempt to represent either individual or collective experience of trauma on scale of in United States. Brown also understands, as he makes clear in Salem, that his efforts are constrained by what he calls fastidiousness of his predominantly white audience and by generic expectations they bring to slave narrative. When Brown traveled to Europe in 1849, he continued to address these problems as both professional lecturer and as tourist, that is, as celebrated fugitive slave publicly performing conventional practices of nineteenthcentury aesthetic tourism. (2) This essay argues that Brown's experience as tourist led him to unlikely discovery that growing popularity of presented opportunities to extend his audience and provided new set of genetic and aesthetic conventions that could serve his work as writer and antislavery activist. In contrast to his predecessor Frederick Douglass, who emphasizes radically different meanings Great Britain held for him as rude, uncultivated fugitive and for young gentlemen in search of knowledge, ... pleasure, and refinement of their rough democratic manners (Autobiographies 677), William Wells Brown publicly adopts role of cultivated fugitive, integrating and its representational strategies into his own antislavery discourse. (3) With publication of Three Years in Europe, Brown produces new kind of tourism that adopts key conventions of Anglo-American travel historical sightseeing, museum-going, literary pilgrimages, and sentimental encounter with Other--and transforms them into powerful counter-narratives that expose instability of monumental histories of nation, empire, and race. tourism enabled Brown to represent slavery--and to represent himself as fugitive slave--in ways that facilitated his career-long critique of parochialism, historical myopia, and barely concealed violence that sustained in United States. By embracing conventions of Anglo-American as no African writer had before, Brown politicizes antebellum travel, further exposes fallacies and hypocrisies of slaveowning republic, and establishes for himself what his first biographer calls a position among literary men never before enjoyed by any colored American (J. Brown 82). (4) In both Three in Years Europe; or, Places I have Seen and People I have Met, and later U. S. edition of Brown s travels, The Fugitive in Europe, Brown chronicles visits to an exhausting array of conventional attractions, He visits picturesque ruins and palaces, climbs church towers and monuments, and revels in his proximity to European celebrities living and dead. …

WILLIAM WELLS BROWN

Travel and travel writing imply freedom of mobility and agency. That a fugitive slave like William Wells Brown could become a tourist is significant because it destabilizes our understanding of tourism. In The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (New York: Jewett, Proctor & Worthington, 1855), Brown grounds his critique of his tour in the experiences of his early life as a slave and in his insistence on ethical responsibility. He interrogates the inequities of American society by revisiting European history from the perspective of the oppressed. Brown moves beyond touristic hedonism to anchor the tourist subject onto the larger canvas of historical and socio-political reality. This paper explores Brown's shifting identity through Urry (The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, London, Sage, 1990) and MacCannell's (‘Tourist Agency’, Tourism Studies, vol. 1, pp. 23–38, 2001) reading of the tourist gaze.

A Transnational Temperance Discourse? William Wells Brown, Creole Civilization, and Temperate Manners

In the nineteenth century, temperance movements provided the occasion for a transnational discourse. These conversations possessed an intensity throughout Britain and the United States. In America temperance often became associated with strongly nationalistic Euro-American forms of identity and internal purity. Nonetheless, African American reformers and abolitionists bound themselves to temperance ideals in forming civil societies that would heal persons and provide communal modes of democratic freedom in the aftermath and recovery from chattel slavery. This paper explores the possibilities of temperance as a transnational discourse by considering its meaning in the life and work of the African American author and activist, William Wells Brown. Brown expressed a “creole civilization” that employed the stylistics of the trickster as a unique mode of restraint that revealed a peculiar power of passivity that was able to claim efficacy over one’s life and community. This meaning of temperance diverges from and dovetails with certain European meanings of civilization that were being forged in the nineteenth century. Brown was in conversation with temperance reformers in America, Britain, and Europe. He imagined the possible meaning of temperance in African, Egyptian, Christian, and Islamic civilizations. He speculated upon the possibility of temperance as a defining characteristic of a transnational civilization and culture that would provide spaces for the expression of democratic freedom. Brown reimagined temperance as a form of corporeal restraint that offered a direct and sacred relation to the land, space, people that appeared in between an ethnic nationalist ethos and the European imperialistic civilization.

Introduction: New Essays on “Race,” Writing, and Representation in Early America

IntroductionNew Essays on “Race,” Writing, and Representation in Early America Robert S. Levine (bio) The essays in this issue of Early American Literature are linked by their interest in race, which remains a problematic term in early American studies (see, for example, the roundtable on race in the 2006 Early American Literature [41.2]). Inspired by Henry Louis Gates’s edited collection “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1986) and Toni Morrison’s “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (1989), US Americanists of the past several decades have tended to address race in relation to black-white binaries; but as Ralph Bauer and others have shown, race in early American studies should also be thought of in relation to creolization, nationalism, colonialism, a range of ethnicities, capitalism, styles of discourse, and native studies. In the hybridized space of the Americas in particular, what made a person “white” or “black” or “red” when there were interracial sexual relations across the color line? And when did color really matter, and in what ways? Reflecting on Thomas Jefferson’s rumored sexual relations with his slave Sally Hemings, William Wells Brown, in his 1853 Clotel, presents light-complected slaves whose genealogical connections to “black” people were sometimes well known and sometimes not. Brown’s large aim in this and other of his writings was to destabilize race so that racial thinking itself would come to seem a form of (cultural) insanity. Perhaps more crucially, by underscoring the links between Thomas Jefferson and the situation of the 1840s and 1850s, Brown wanted to call attention to the centrality of racial ideologies to the first sixty years of the new republic. Brown’s insights have been developed by a number of recent critics, who have argued for connections between US literary nationalism and a white racial nationalism (see Gardner). With respect to race, one of the distinct contributions of this set of essays is the chronological time frame, which diverges from a deceptively coherent [End Page 199] focus on the “rise” of the US nation from the late 1780s to the 1850s to examine instead the late seventeenth century to the mid-1830s. Race, writing, and representation, in such a frame, become even more unstable, given the significant differences between racial thinking in the 1670s and the 1830s, and given as well the disconnection, before the 1770s and 1780s, of race and nation. “Race” in this issue puts pressure on how we might think about “early America” itself. Four of the six essays focus on the period running roughly from 1820 to 1836, with 1836, in this issue, being the year that saw the publication not of Emerson’s Nature, one of the key texts of a nation-based US literary studies, but of the Jamaican James Williams’s A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, a text that needs to be read in transatlantic and hemispheric contexts. Nicole N. Aljoe’s “‘Going to Law’: Legal Discourse and Testimony in Early West Indian Slave Narratives” usefully enlarges the frame for studying the slave narrative in the Americas, showing how crucial access to the law was to West Indian ex-slaves, as well as how crucial legal form was to The History of Mary Prince (1831), Negro Slavery as Described by a Negro: Being the Narrative of Ashton Warner (1831), and Williams’s 1834 narrative. Though Aljoe is correct in saying that US slave narratives tend not to focus on specific interactions with the justice system, the far-reaching implication of her argument is to help us see the importance of law to conceptions of race and to nineteenth-century slave narratives. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Brown, and many other post- 1836 US writers of slave narratives appeal to natural rights in the way of the West Indian writers described by Aljoe. By taking account of the white amanuensis in the narratives of Prince, Warner, and Williams, Aljoe also provides fresh perspectives on the role of white editors and publishers in black literary production. But perhaps the most useful aspect of Aljoe’s essay in the context of this issue is the implied challenge to any study of slavery and race...

Theresa and Blake: Mobility and Resistance in Antebellum African American Serialized Fiction

“How do you solve a problem like Theresa?” asks Frances Smith Foster in the Winter 2006 issue of the African American Review. Speaking specifically of “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” (1828), published serially in four installments of Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm’s Freedom’s Journal, Foster notes how it challenges our notions of black literary history. It predates by several decades what were assumed to be the first works of fiction by African Americans (e.g., “The Heroic Slave” by Frederick Douglass in 1852, and William Wells Brown’s Clotel, published in England in 1853). It is not a slave narrative. It is not even set in the United States. And it focuses on the trials and tribulations of three women—a widowed mother and her two daughters—rather than men. Indeed, Foster proclaims, the discovery of this story demonstrates that “neither fiction as a genre, Haiti as a topic, nor (black) women as heroic protagonists were unfamiliar to the readers of Freedom’s Journal” (“Forgotten” 637). More importantly, she writes, its dissimilarity to recognized forms of nineteenth-century African American writing, in particular the slave narrative—which William L. Andrews describes as “the dominant mode of black antebellum narrative” (“Novelization” 23)—indicates “the need for a more complete and accurate corpus, canon, or reconstruction of literary history” (“Forgotten” 633). “Theresa,” however, is not completely anomalous. In fact, it bears many similarities to another work that also departs from the conventions of “African American Literature”: Martin R. Delany’s Blake: Or, the Huts of America, twenty-six chapters of which were serialized in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, and serialized in its entirety in the Weekly Anglo-African from November 1861 to May 1862. Both works take the West Indies as their setting, black revolution as their subject, and test the boundaries of believable storytelling. What is most striking about the two works, however, especially in contrast to the slave narrative, is the mobility of the characters as well as the exotic settings they occupy. Theresa, her sisters, and her mother, Madame Paulina, travel across Haiti, unattended and unmolested, while Delany’s Henry Blake foments slave insurrections throughout the American South as well as Cuba. In this, the two works reflected the periodicals in which they appeared. Although Freedom’s Journal, the Anglo-African Magazine, and the Weekly Anglo-African were all published in New York City, they provided readers with a wide range of content. They did not simply cover the day’s (or week’s) events, but also included essays, poetry, anecdotes, and fiction that exposed readers to people, places, and ideas from around the world. Ultimately, when seen in light of their publication in African American periodicals, “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” and Blake demonstrate the extent to which

At Home in the Crystal Palace: African American Transnationalism and the Aesthetics of Representative Democracy

At Home in the Crystal Palace:African American Transnationalism and the Aesthetics of Representative Democracy Stephen Knadler (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution "Above all, an American slave auction must be there, with William and Ellen Craft on the block, Henry Clay as auctioneer, and the American flag floating over it." From "American Slavery in the World's Fair," by Henry C. Wright, Liberator, 28 February 1851, 36. Images: "The Virginian Slave," from Punch 20 (1851): 236; The Greek Slave, sculpture by Hiram Powers, 1851 copy from the 1841 original, marble, 165.7 × 53.3 × 46.4 cm., Yale University Art Gallery. [End Page 328] I have a very strong desire (which I have smothered in my own breast, as it has been idle to cherish it, on many accounts) to visit England this summer, and be one of the universal multitudes at the World's Bazaar. What a miracle of contrivance, skill and taste is the building in which it is held! It ought to be allowed to remain as long as iron and glass can defy the storms of time or the fate of empires. Whatever drawbacks there may be about this exhibition, (and I have no doubt there are many), I am convinced that it will do much toward hastening the days of universal reconciliation, when nation shall no longer lift up sword against nation, and there shall be none to molest or make afraid. —William Lloyd Garrison, letter to Elizabeth Pease (23 June 1851) The individual living in a political order … with mimetic representation need never step outside him or herself, need never see the world from an other point of view, and can therefore afford to remain a stranger in the political order. Mimetic representation stimulates the creation of a political order where nobody really encounters anybody else, because all believe that they live in a mimetic harmony with the collectivity. —F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics (1996) At the end of his 1852 slave narrative, James Watkins recounts his lecture tour among abolitionist audiences in England, Ireland, and Scotland. Despite his exhausting schedule, Watkins [End Page 329] Click for larger view View full resolution "Opening of the Great Industrial Exhibition of all nations, by her most gracious majesty Queen Victoria and his royal highness Prince Albert, on the 1st of May, 1851." Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LCUSZ62–93899. [End Page 330] informs his readers, he took time out to attend the 1851 Great Exhibition of All Nations at the famed Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London (the first world's fair), with its 100,000 displays from around the world. "Oh how I wish," Watkins goes on to declare, "that all my enslaved brethren had had their freedom to see such a sight and the opportunity. I always long for my joys to be shared by them."1 It would be easy to trivialize this remark as little more than a vague regret over the slave's lack of leisure and amusement. However, during the run of the exhibition between May and October 1851, many black abolitionists, like others in the antislavery community, including William Lloyd Garrison, saw the Crystal Palace as a preeminent Victorian Era symbol of a new internationalism. Even the fugitive slaves and free men and women of color who were not granted the opportunity to visit could follow the unprecedented event closely in Frederick Douglass' Paper, which highlighted the importance of the World's Fair throughout the summer in its "Foreign Items" column."2 While nineteenth-century historians extensively parsed the fair's role in the social control of capitalist labor and in the legitimation of colonial empires,3 diasporic African Americans, either as part of their transatlantic antislavery work or labor migrations, would re-appropriate the Crystal Palace—using it as a key trope to imagine a public space of cosmopolitan subversion that would complicate ideas of representative citizenship. Bypassing the nationalistic representational logic on display in the manufactures and arts of many nations, writers such as Josiah Henson and William Wells Brown were witness to an aesthetic democracy in which what stands in for or represents the nation and its people...

Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. Trish Loughran . New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xxv+537.

<i>Trish Loughran,</i> The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870<i>The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870</i>. Trish Loughran . New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xxv+537.

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution R. Darrell Meadows (bio) Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution. By Matthew J. Clavin. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. viii, 238. $39.95 cloth) In recent years, scholars have shown with increasing subtlety the breadth and depth of the long shadow that the Haitian Revolution cast over the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Matthew Clavin's new book contributes to this literature by exploring manifestations of historical memory of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in late antebellum and Civil War America. Following a similar binary thread that Edward Bartlett Rugemer traced in The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (2009), Clavin likewise situates the origins of this historical memory in contemporary accounts of the Haitian Revolution produced in the 1790s and early 1800s, especially those based on first-person narratives of the white "victims" of the revolution. These early works established an indelible narrative about the revolution, the abolition of slavery, and race war that, in the U.S., shaped subsequent arguments of both slaveholders and abolitionists. Clavin does an excellent job of showing that conservatives and reformers frequently invoked the memory of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution. In the 1820s and 1830s, abolitionists sought to counter the proslavery narrative (that their efforts would provoke slave rebellion) by praising Toussaint Louverture's "compassion, probity, and integrity at the expense of his militancy and defiance." By the eve of the Civil War, according to Clavin, radical abolitionists had "transformed Louverture into a symbol of black masculinity and violence that they deployed to bring about the destruction of slavery" (p. 35). Chapter three continues this line of argument for the period between John Brown's raid and the outbreak of war. [End Page 308] Here and at other points, Clavin is less successful in his analysis of the proslavery camp, missing clues in his own evidence that suggest it was not only memory of the Haitian Revolution that informed southern perspectives. Discussing the 1860 proslavery writing of Professor Albert Taylor Bledsoe of the University of Virginia, for example, Clavin's evidence makes clear how steeped the proslavery camp was in the history of the French Revolution—especially French Jacobinism, and the slaughter of innocents and violent destruction they associated with it. In part two, Clavin focuses entirely on the Civil War years after 1862 when the arming of slaves and emancipation became fundamental components of Union war policy. Again, the Haitian example often took center stage in these debates. Unitarian minister John Weiss's Atlantic Monthly articles, published in 1862-63, in fact, anticipated Clavin's work. Weiss noted, for example, how for decades Northerners and Southerners had similarly, though for different ends, invoked the history of "St. Domingo." And now partisans on all sides invoked memory of the Haitian Revolution to weigh in on the question of African American recruitment. For John Weiss, the "history of the Haytian Revolution" was "positive proof that negroes have made good soldiers" (p. 83). William Wells Brown, Wendell Phillips, and others made the same point. In various ways, Clavin shows how antislavery politicians like George Boutwell and Charles Sumner, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, James Redpath, and Lydia Maria Childs regularly drew on the Haitian example. But in invoking Toussaint, many writers avoided his use of military violence and the essential participation of slave-soldiers in ultimate overthrow of the French regime. Rather, they depicted the freedmen of Saint-Domingue as docile and contented with Toussaint's new labor regime, arguing by analogy that freed American slaves would be the docile children that Southerners claimed them to be. Perhaps the clearest example of how memory of the first French emancipation could affect decision making was William Whiting's The War Powers of the President, and the Legislative Powers of Congress in Relation [End Page 309] to Rebellion, Treason, and Slavery (1862), which impressed Lincoln enough that he appointed Whiting solicitor of the War Department. In this work, Whiting had expressly drawn upon the actions of the French civil commissioner...

Chaotic justice: rethinking African American literary history

What is African American about African American literature? Why identify it as a distinct tradition? John Ernest contends that too often scholars have relied on naive concepts of race, superficial conceptions of African American history, and the marginalization of important strains of black scholarship. With this book, he creates a new and just retelling of African American literary history that neither ignores nor transcends racial history. Ernest revisits the work of nineteenth-century writers and activists such as Henry 'Box' Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, and Sojourner Truth, demonstrating that their concepts of justice were far more radical than those imagined by most white sympathizers. He sheds light on the process of reading, publishing, studying, and historicizing this work during the twentieth century. Looking ahead to the future of the field, Ernest offers new principles of justice that grant fragmented histories, partial recoveries, and still-unprinted texts the same value as canonized works. His proposal is both a historically informed critique of the field and an invigorating challenge to present and future scholars.

"Sons of White Fathers": Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour's "The Mulatto"

Marlene L. Daut, "'Sons of White Fathers': Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour's 'The Mulatto'"(pp. 1–37) Although many literary critics have traced the genealogy of the tragic mulatto/a to nineteenth-century U.S. letters, in this essay I argue that the theme of tragedy and the mixed-race character predates the mid-nineteenth-century work of Lydia Maria Child and William Wells Brown and cannot be considered a solely U.S. American concept. The image can also be traced to early-nineteenth-century French colonial literature, where the trope surfaced in conjunction with the image of the Haitian Revolution as a bloody race war. Through a reading of the Louisiana-born Victor Séjour's representation of the Haitian Revolution, "Le Mulâtre" or "The Mulatto," originally composed in French and first published in Paris in 1837, this essay considers the implications of the conflation of the literary history of the tragic mulatto/a with the literary history of the Haitian Revolution in one of the first short stories written by an American author of African descent.

Unexpected places: relocating nineteenth-century African American literature

In January of 1861, on the eve of both the Civil War and the rebirth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Christian Recorder, John Mifflin Brown wrote to the paper praising its editor Elisha Weaver: It takes our Western boys to lead off. I amproud of your paper.Weaver's story, though, like many of the contributions of early black literature outside of the urban Northeast, has almost vanished. Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature recovers the work of early African American authors and editors such as Weaver who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based Recorder during and after the Civil War.In conversation with both archival sources and contemporary scholarship, Unexpected Places calls for a large-scale rethinking of the nineteenth-century African American literary landscape. In addition to revisiting such better-known writers as William Wells Brown, Maria Stewart, and Hannah Crafts, Unexpected Places offers the first critical considerations of important figures including William Jay Greenly, Jennie Carter, Polly Wash, and Lizzie Hart. The book's discussion of physical locations leads naturally to careful study of how region is tied to genre, authorship, publication circumstances, the black press, domestic and nascent black nationalist ideologies, and black mobility in the nineteenth century.Author: Gardner, Eric Publisher: University Press of Mississippi Illustration: N Language: ENG Title: Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature Pages: 00272 (Encrypted PDF) On Sale: 2009-08-20 SKU-13/ISBN: 9781604732832 Category: Literary Criticism : American African American

Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America

Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America. By John R. McKivigan. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. 291. Cloth, $45.00.)Reviewed by Michael Les BenedictJames Redpath was a remarkable man, playing a role in a disconcerting number of the social reform movements of the mid to late nineteenth century. As ubiquitous as Forrest Gump a century later, unlike the fictional character, Redpath was no mere observer. A journalist, editor, agitator, and impresario, he was at the center of things.Redpath left no collection of papers, and John R. McKivigan, the Mary O'Brien Gibson Professor of History at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, has spent many years digging up information about his peripatetic subject, publishing a new edition of Redpath's Roving Editor in 1996 (University Park, PA, 1996). author of War Against Proshvery Religion (Ithaca, NY, 1984), the editor or coeditor of numerous books on slavery, and since 1994 the director of Frederick Douglass Papers, McKivigan has done an excellent job of ferreting out a large quantity of information. He has explored the published writings of Redpath's associates and rummaged through countless manuscript collections for letters to, from, and about Redpath to provide a thorough biography in which his subject's character comes through clearly.Redpath's family immigrated to Michigan from Scotland in the late 1840s. After a few years as a novice reporter in Detroit, Redpath was hired away by Horace Greeley and went to work for the New York Tribune, the most influential newspaper in the country, rising to exchange editor - the person responsible for scanning other newspapers for stories interesting or important enough to reprint. Responsible for the regular feature The Facts of Slavery, Redpath developed mild abolitionist leanings and a bright idea. He would go South and report on slavery directly, interviewing not only white southerners but the slaves themselves. Taking jobs with leading local newspapers, he kept his activities secret, sending reports to abolitionist journals in the North. He published his collected letters as Roving Editor.Moving on to Kansas, Redpath not only reported but also participated in efforts to make it a free state, getting to know John Brown in the process and playing a tangential role in Brown's abortive raid on Harper's Ferry and a major role in his defense afterward - including the publication of a best-selling biography. Redpath then traveled to Haiti and became the country's General Agent of Emigration. He established a promotional newspaper and sent subagents to recruit settlers for the black republic, rekindling a controversy in the black community over emigration. When this effort stalled after a promising start, Redpath turned to publishing. His small company put out cheap paperback classics for soldiers, radical antislavery polemics, and a few books for general readers. His authors included Wendell Phillips, the escaped slave William Wells Brown, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman, with all of whom he remained friends. This cash-strapped operation folded, forcing Redpath to renew his journalism career as a war correspondent with Sherman's army. As he was well known as sympathetic to the freedmen, the military put him in charge of Charleston's schools, which he ran with surprising success, insisting that black and white pupils attend the same schools, if not the same classes. He lost his job in the conservative reaction fomented by President Andrew Johnson in the fall of 1865. …

Stowe and Brown Revisited: Fiction-Made Characters in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada

Debates on Ishmael Reed’s neo-slave narrative Flight to Canada (1979) and its rewriting of African American identity and history can benefit from an in-depth comparative analysis focused on the writer’s reconfiguration of two significant nineteenthcentury figures - the black pacifist and the rebellious mulatto. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and philosophical views as well as on African American studies, this paper discusses the way in which Reed’s novel de/re-constructs the images of the black pacifist and the rebellious mulatto, in close intertextual connection with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853). If nineteenthcentury authors insisted on self-made models of manhood, Reed’s postmodern writing proposes fiction-made characters, parasitically feeding on earlier texts. In true postmodern fashion, Reed’s heroes refuse to be labeled as either “real” or “imaginary,” to wear only nineteenth-century costumes, and to be pinned down to a certain temporal or spatial dimension. By rewriting the nineteenth-century texts, Reed exposes the conventional versions of black identity that transform “black history into mythic fiction,” warning us that we should be equally afraid of romanticized or demonized representations of the African American character (Campbell 1986, xi)

Clotel, by William Wells Brown: An Electronic Scholarly Edition (review)

Clotel, by William Wells Brown: An Electronic Scholarly Edition (review)

Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (review)

Reviewed by: Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery Aimee Zygmonski Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. By Glenda R. Carpio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; pp. 304. $74.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Glenda Carpio’s accomplished first book, which offers an interdisciplinary analysis of historical literature, recent performances, satirical novels, and biting visual wit, expands the meager bookshelf of African American humor studies. Rather than trying to cover the many facets and variations of the entirety of African American humor, Carpio wisely concentrates on the connections between slavery and black humor. Mel Watkins and Daryl Dickson-Carr have already explored such topics, but this book offers new ways to consider black humor. As Carpio notes, her book does not “provide a historical account” (as Watkins’s collections do), but rather investigates “the relationship between violence and humor” complicating the “distinctions between polite and popular representations of slavery” (28). For Carpio, slavery “becomes such a subject only in the most piercing tragicomedy, one in which laughter is disassociated from gaiety and is, instead, a form of mourning” (7). She also considers how humor responds to manifestations of racism, whether as in the old adage “got to laugh to keep from crying” or in the deep African American tradition of signifyin’. Carpio argues that humor does not simply reflect the tragedy of slavery, but also traces the intricacies of racial discord. She tracks the relationship between stereotypes and humor and considers how the use of stereotypes to critique situations or social injustices can actually liberate the contested stereotype and not merely support its continuity. The artists she discusses offer nuanced variations of black humor, and while each approach is different, Carpio subtly links their work together in the shared art of “conjuring” and their abilities to invoke not only past injustices, but also to contextualize them in the present moment. The book is divided into chapters each of which is focused on one or two figures. These include a historical investigation of the fiction of William Wells Brown and Charles Chesnutt; performances by comedians Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; Ishmael Reed’s satire; the paintings of Robert Colescott and the silhouettes of Kara Walker; and the early plays of Suzan-Lori Parks. Despite Carpio’s assertion that her book is not a history of black humor, the chapter on Brown and Chesnutt does provide a historical context for African American humor and oral culture, focusing on the two authors’ strategic use of humor and the ways in which they appropriate black stereotypes from “vehicles of humor against African Americans Americans to sources of humor by African Americans” (34). Theatre scholars know Brown for his dramatic readings of his play The Escape, while the writings of the less-familiar Chesnutt recall the early twentieth-century work of satirist George Schuyler (Black No More) and Ishmael Reed (whom Carpio later discusses in detail). Carpio argues that both used humor as a “distancing mechanism” (37), and their place in her book prepares readers for the work of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century humorists she considers. The book’s strongest chapter concerns the work of comedian Richard Pryor. In it, Carpio asks whether Pryor’s particular brand of humor “redress[es] American Slavery” (73). Through analysis of recordings of Pryor’s live stage shows, Carpio tracks the comedian’s ability to connect to black audiences through the use of destructive black stereotypes and his own unique performative strategies as a conjurer. For example, his excessive use of the “N-word” offers a “bridge between the divisive past and an equally, if differently, divisive present” (89). Pryor’s subsequent renunciation of the N-word in performances and efforts remove risqué material from them in the early 1980s mirrors the change in comedian Dave Chappelle, known for his equally outlandish and biting wit during the two seasons of his Chappelle’s Show on Comedy Central (2003–05). While Carpio does not afford Chappelle the same in-depth analysis as she does Pryor, she links the two performers in style and content, suggesting that their humor seeks a collective catharsis from the effects of racism and offers...

Coloring Universal History: Robert Benjamin Lewis's Light and Truth (1843) and William Wells Brown's The Black Man (1863)

The idea of universal history is conventionally associated with nineteenth-century writers and the project of imperialism. This article presents an expanded definition of universal history, one that covers unified histories of the known world or universe, histories that aim to illuminate universal principles, histories of the world unified by the workings of a single mind, and histories of the world that have passed down through unbroken lines of transmission. Encompassed in the broader range of this definition are works by authors who are conventionally seen as marginalized by nineteenth-century historiography. Using the works of two African American authors—Robert Benjamin Lewis and William Wells Brown—as a case study, this article highlights the complexities and cross currents of universal history writing by those on the margins, and the importance of voluntary associations in the production and circulation of their texts.

History Repeating Itself: Passing, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and The President's Daughter

History Repeating Itself:Passing, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and The President's Daughter Sinéad Moynihan (bio) The nineteenth-century fascination with mixture corresponded with racial segregation, "sciences" of purity, and white supremacy; how do you know that history is not just repeating itself? —Suzanne Bost This article analyzes Barbara Chase-Riboud's rarely-examined The President's Daughter (1994) in the context of the resurfacing of passing narratives in the contemporary moment, emphasising the indebtedness of such narratives to Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). The story of the mixed-race daughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Chase-Riboud's novel is not the first African American-authored text to engage this subject, an honor belonging to William Wells Brown in his novel Clotel; or, the President's Daughter (1853). Although Chase-Riboud acknowledges Brown's Clotel in Sally Hemings (1979) and in the title to and pages of its sequel, her 1994 novel in fact owes more to Twain's novella than it does to either its mother-text or to Brown's novel. When, in the 1860s, an abolitionist friend presents Harriet Hemings with Brown's novel, Harriet undergoes the uncanny experience of reading her own "biography," which is fiction (The President's Daughter 327). She subsequently remarks that "If I was fiction," then "this country was fiction. Was I plausible? You tell me" (446). If her encounter with Brown's novel forces her to consider the point at which the distinction between biography and fiction collapses, her self-conception as "fiction" evokes more readily Twain's configuration of race as "a fiction of law and custom" and Roxy's "fiction created by herself" in Pudd'nhead Wilson (7). What is at stake with these borrowings from and revisions to Twain's fin-de-siècle ur-text in The President's Daughter, and, indeed, in the reappearance of the trope of racial passing in contemporary culture more generally, is a sense that, at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, there has been a resurgence of the fascination with mixed race figures—traditionally the focus of racial passing stories—that characterized the 1890s. Coded as disquiet in the late-nineteenth century and celebration in the late twentieth, Suzanne Bost argues that in both periods, "fear and celebration work in tandem: the fascination with mixture corresponds to (and potentially masks) racist efforts to contain fluidity and to reinstitute categories" (185). Chase-Riboud's references to Twain's novel are effective because revisiting a narrative of passing in another narrative of passing one hundred years later reinforces at a formal level the key question posed by Bost, in Chase-Riboud's novel thematically, and in this article: is (literary) history repeating itself? This discussion sets The President's Daughter alongside Twain's novella, arguing that, after announcing such [End Page 809] concerns epigraphically, Chase-Riboud revisits central motifs from and themes of Pudd'nhead Wilson—twinning, the nature/nurture debate and fingerprints—throughout the novel. Her engagement with Twain's novella reflects an ongoing investment in issues of mixed-race identity and passing that belies the supposed datedness of such concerns. "Passing" Into the Present Although the term passing is increasingly used to denote a wide range of performative practices, from its origins it referred most commonly to "passing as white." A prevalent trope in white- and later black-authored fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, passing, according to Juda Bennett, no longer seems to engage contemporary novelists: "The long list of authors from the first half of the twentieth century . . . is hardly balanced by the short list of contemporary writers who have addressed this figure of racial ambiguity" (205). The "short list" which Bennett provides consists of Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982), Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998), Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth (1999) and Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) (214). Although Bennett argues that Toni Morrison evokes the passing myth "without actually representing the phenomenon of passing, and in this way Morrison decenters and deforms the passing figure" (205), he fails to take account of other African American authors who are engaged in similar projects, particularly Paul Beatty...

Laughing fit to kill: black humor in the fictions of slavery

Introduction 1. Laffin fit ter kill: Black Humor in the Fiction of William Wells Brown and Charles W. Chesnutt 2. The Conjurer Recoils: Slavery in Richard Prio and Chappelle's Show 3. Conjuring the Mysteries of Slavery: Voodoo, Fetishism, and Stereotype in Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada 4. A Comedy of the Grotesque Robert Colescott, Kara Walker and the Iconography of Slavery 5. The Tragicomedy of Slavery in Suzan-Lori Parks' Early Plays Bibliography