Black Revolution and Martin Delany’s Blake

Jerome McGann’s edition of Martin R. Delany’s Blake will fast become the definitive source for scholars engaging this formative work in nineteenth-century literary studies. McGann’s laborious comparison between the versions in the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African—made especially so because of the poor printing quality of the WAA—leads him to postulate that Delany undertook substantial revisions of the text in anticipation of its publication in the WAA and to conclude that the WAA text is the more complete version of the novel, even as it must be read together with the AAM text so as to correct the endemic orthographic inconsistencies and textual problems in the WAA printing. Fascinatingly, McGann also posits that Delany might have considered binding the chapters into a more traditional novelistic arrangement, from which the text in the WAA was adapted. These insights are welcome conclusions about this work. Here, though, I want to focus on the edition’s emphasis on religious structures vis-à-vis Delany’s sense of personhood and on the edition’s sense of the novel’s ending.

While in the introduction McGann discusses Delany’s “commitment to the ideals of enlightenment, liberty, and individual enterprise” (xiii), he nevertheless insists that “religion dominates the political action” of the text (xxiii). For this reason, McGann spends quite some time in both the introduction and the notes expounding upon these religious references. But I find that this interpretive framework overlooks what I have always perceived to be Blake’s commitment to liberal personhood, and his insistence that black persons have access to self-possession and bodily sovereignty. Even Delany’s resolve regarding the subject of black emigration relies on the foundational tenet of black self-government. Although these ideals are not necessarily antithetical to religious ones, I do find that McGann’s insistence on religion as the guiding and organizing principle of Delany’s vision of black revolution across the Americas to be limiting. Delany’s attachments to normative political and legal structures—to include citizenship, marriage, and possession, for example—are problematic given that liberalism is organized around the dispossession—of property and of humanity—of black persons. Regardless, I insist that Delany’s representation of black radicalism in Blake is structured on certain foundational liberal principles regarding personhood and the category of the human, and he repeatedly proposes that black persons occupy the nation-state form in ways that extend personhood across the color line. Therefore, while McGann’s “corrected” edition makes possible novel interpretations of the novel, in some cases his analyses can be limiting.

For example, Blake’s participation in a slaving expedition, I insist, is not an example of the importance of providential design. Rather, his participation on the slaver results in the human cargo being freed in Cuba and also marks their entrance into the revolutionary activities on the island as self-possessed persons. More importantly, this moment reflects the centrality of radical and unlawful acts of self-possession that Blake repeatedly insists upon throughout his travels in the US South, in Cuba, and on the high seas. After all, what is the act of slave escape, a behavior Blake repeatedly encourages, if not an act of radical self-possession through theft? Given that this act of self-possession exists in defiance of state and national laws, Delany seems also to speculate that a blind adherence to the state and its institutions is not the means to achieve personal and communal autonomy and independence.

It would seem, then, that enslaved persons’ participation in acts of theft is a response to the illegality and corruptive influence of slavery. This is perhaps most clearly reflected in the refitting and renaming of a slaver from Merchantman to Vulture. The predatory and morally corrupt nature of slavery, Delany seems to claim, also threatens to damage the very foundations of possession, property, and economic life in the Americas. For this reason, I have always held that Blake proposes that all black persons, too, become thieves, and that they break any laws that aid in their suppression. Perhaps most provocatively, breaking the...