“To Refute Mr. Jefferson’s Arguments Respecting Us”: Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, and the Politics of Early African American Literature

Describing the political genealogy of early African American literature potentially opens the proverbial can of worms, if a 2006 roundtable published in Early American Literature is any indication. Titled “Historicizing Race in Early American Studies,” and featuring the eminent scholars Joanna Brooks, Philip Gould, and David Kazanjian, the roundtable reveals the fault lines of disagreement not only on how to historicize race but also on how to historicize its politics. The journal’s current editor, Sandra M. Gustafson, had invited the roundtable scholars “to think about the theoretical implications of their work for an understanding of ‘race’ in the early period” (310). In response, the scholars outline their methodologies of race and literary history by reciting and elaborating the arguments of their books, all published in 2003: Brooks’s American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures, Gould’s Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, and Kazanjian’s The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America.

To begin the debate, Brooks argues that the philosophical and practical impact of race on oppressed groups was quite evident. The very racial “concepts of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Indianness’ were essentially Euro-American inventions imposed upon people of color of various African and indigenous American ethnic affiliations to advance the economic and political dominance of whites” (315). Gould does not necessarily underplay this racial impact, but he does suggest that the meaning of race itself demonstrates a “far greater elasticity” than what Brooks permits (323). Interpreting “race in context of the historical formations of sentimentalism and capitalism,” Gould considers the mutual influence of transnational and transgeneric literatures, on the one hand, and “ideologies of race that are themselves unstable,” on the other (322).¹ Above all, the particular studies of Brooks and Gould proceed from different assumptions on the ideological construction and material tractability of race in early America.

Measuring the tractability of race leads to a submerged, though no less important, disagreement between Brooks and Gould on the criteria by which we should assemble a literary archive of early America. Should we examine the lives and literatures of the alleged perpetrators of racial discrimination, or those of the alleged victims, in order to historicize race? What is at stake in studying white imaginations of race as opposed to black experiences of racism? Gould rightly points out that cataloging the archive merely in these terms neglects the ideological infection of racism across the minds and actions of both whites and blacks. Yet Brooks also correctly asserts that reducing racism to merely an ideology threatens to ignore its practical or material devastation of minority groups.

Despite their different approaches to historicizing race, Brooks and Gould agree that the racial paradigm of human difference stood at the center of how the authors and subjects of primary texts negotiated, accumulated, and allocated political power in the early republic. Gould senses this agreement when he asks, “What does it mean, for example, to say that [Phillis] Wheatley is ‘free’? Or that she emancipates herself as a writer? The field is still in the process of engaging such questions. I would argue, as I think Brooks does, that addressing such questions necessitates thinking through the different registers on which the very terms ‘liberty’ and ‘slavery’ signified” (325). Just as relevant, we must study how early American literature served as the site of such thought, in which race, nature, slavery, politics, emancipation, liberty, and citizenship are defined in their contemporary terms, not retrofitted from our own. If we accept this precaution, how do we establish the political value and genealogy of early African American literature?

In this essay, I argue that before we can ascertain that early African American literature is political insofar that it has confronted racism, and before we can reach conclusions on the political motives, effects, and success of this corpus of texts, we should take a closer look at how the notions of literature and politics themselves resonated in early American debates. These debates involved white and...