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

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 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...