The Works of James M. Whitfield: America and Other Writings by a Nineteenth Century African American Poet by James M. Whitfield (review)

This complete collection of Whitfield’s extant writing makes a strong case for expanding the attention scholars of African American literature have so far paid him. Levine and Wilson take some worthwhile editorial risks to fill out their picture of Whitfield’s career, following recent trends in nineteenth-century American studies that emphasize the complexities of print culture and national identity. Readers of poetry will appreciate the inclusion of both Whitfield’s only complete volume of verse and his later occasional and periodical pieces, while more historicist scholars will find much of interest in his prose, which largely concerns the colonization movement.

Levine and Wilson include the entire 1854 pamphlet Arguments, Pro and Con, on the Call for a National Emigration Convention, which contains not only Whitfield’s letters to Frederick Douglass’s Paper in favor, but also short pieces by Douglass and William J. Watkins opposing. Flouting more conventional author-centric standards of textual editing, this decision thus affords a much more richly detailed picture of the debate. Whitfield’s support of this movement was not unique among his contemporaries, even the poets. George Moses Horton, for instance, fantasized of immigrating to Liberia from the late 1820s and finally managed to do so after the end of the Civil War. Whitfield entered the conversation at a later moment than Horton, and joined Martin Delany (on whom Levine has done extensive work elsewhere) in favoring the idea of emigration to the Caribbean or Latin America. Scholars working on the national limits of American studies and American identity have found colonization schemes useful sites for thinking through period attitudes towards imagined community, and these materials represent a useful repository for this kind of inquiry. For instance, the back-and-forth between Whitfield and Watkins over the “proximity” of black-nationalist thinkers and their conventions “to those of our brethren who are in bonds” illuminates perceived connections between the fates of enslaved and free blacks via print and oratorical culture (132). Levine and Wilson frame these issues with attentive sophistication, and fill in crucial historical details. Their decision to build the last part of the book around Whitfield’s later years in California also draws on contemporary critical preoccupations with nineteenth-century US geo-political imaginaries, and their biographical researches indicate that Whitfield transferred his hopes for free black community (if not proper nationalism) to the American West.

The pamphlet largely consists of a series of bravura performances by Whitfield, and Watkins begins each of his responses by complaining about the “interminable prolixity” of the poet’s prose (141). Twentieth-century critics who downgraded Whitfield for the Victorian syntactic elaborations of his verse have ignored the political dimension it takes in these debates, and one hopes that the editors’ decision to include this material will complicate later assessments. Whitfield’s work ably toggles between Romantic vision and political rhetoric. Partly following the lead of Edward Whitley’s reading of Whitfield in American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (2010), Levine and Wilson compare him to Whitman several times. Like the good gray poet, Whitfield aspired to a kind of bardic nationalism and absorbed the contradictions of his moment. After all, his great poetic achievement comes in the form of an account of the fate of Black people in America, even as he vociferously advocated their emigration.

The fault that Watkins finds in Whitfield’s prose, its “prolixity,” actually comprises the virtues of his writing throughout the volume. At its most energetic and involving, Whitfield’s syntax elaborates his conceits in serial subordinate clauses. In “How Long,” he surveys the crimes of the slaveholders’ republic, making comparisons to other forms of historical oppression:

Here might the cunning Jesuit learn—    Though skilled in subtle sophistry,And trained to persevere in stern,    Unsympathizing cruelty,And call...