Early African American Print Culture

6. Black Voices, White Print: Racial Practice, Print Publicity, and Order in the Early American Republic

c h a p t e r 6 Black Voices, White Print: Racial Practice, Print Publicity, and Order in the Early American Republic corey capers On or about July 14, 1816, a broadside titled Invitation, Addressed to the Marshals of the “Africum Shocietee,” at the Commemoration of the “Abolition of the Slave Trade” appeared in the Boston vicinity. Invitation simultaneously announced and satirized the commemoration of the end of the trade, which was organized and led by Bostonians of African descent but included white Bostonians who actively watched the processions, sometimes gave sermons, and even extended the celebration through complimentary newspaper announcements and reportage (Figure 6.1). It was printed on rough paper measuring approximately eleven by eighteen inches, probably produced in a large run, sold for a few pennies, pasted on tavern walls, and read aloud for all within hearing range. To the left of its centered title, it features an animallike figure, in elegant dress and a cane, standing on a barrel apparently in the act of making an announcement. The body of the broadside is composed of two columns of text in a ridiculous fictive black dialect, featuring a letter of invitation and instructions to one of the commemoration’s marshals and several toasts parodying Boston’s African Society as the “Africum Shocietee” in a fictive black dialect. As late colonial and early national newspapers and almanacs had frequently trafficked in jokes at the expense of African Americans, there is little noteworthy about Invitation itself. It is interesting, however, as among the Figure 6.1. Invitation, Addressed to the Marshals of the “Africum Shocietee” (Salem, Mass., 1816). Courtesy of the Trustees of Boston Public Library. Black Voices, White Print 109 earliest iterations of a series of broadsides and newspaper accounts that figured African American celebrations of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade as “Bobalition,” a corrupted form of “abolition.” Circulating in print through most of the United States and even in England until at least the mid-1830s, Bobalition should be a matter of concern for students of early African American print culture for several reasons. Bobalition provides us with further evidence that some white writers and printers as well as their audiences deemed African American processions and orations, as well as their printed surrogates in newspapers and pamphlets, significant enough to comment upon, in celebration and execration. More important, Bobalition epitomizes the conditions of possibility of black writing in the early republic and antebellum years, providing some sense of the logic, figures, and practices against which black writers fought and necessarily engaged. Relatedly, as a concept embodied in literary and graphic figures that were embodied in print on paper that circulated widely in time and space over an increasingly dense national and international communications infrastructure, Bobalition was a technology for the production and maintenance of racial difference in a world where the significance of class differences seemed to be melting away. Building on earlier scholarship concerning Bobalition, which shows how it excluded African Americans from legitimate participation in U.S. civil society , I am concerned here with how Bobalition was productive of new entities and new relations between the practice of racial distinction and the emergent U.S. political order. To that end, I examine Bobalition through the lens of racial practice, a term I have coined to help grapple with the active and contingent character of ordering the world along an axis of putative racial difference. Among the most prominent means of Bobalition’s racial practice are translation and figuration. As Eric Cheyfitz and scholars in science and technology studies have reminded us, one of the earliest meanings of “to translate” is “to carry from one place to another.” Discursively, translation is relevant to Bobalition in the substitution of “Bobalition” for “abolition” that it entails. Likewise, in a perverse act of re- figuration, the satiric broadsides and related news accounts that enact the Bobalition discourse stand in the place of authentic news accounts of black celebrations that, in turn, stand in lieu of the actual performances of African Americans. In short, African American celebrations have been moved from their initial locations and, in the process, transformed into farce. Translation as a more explicitly material practice pertains to Bobalition in terms of the repertoire of figuration drawn upon to create the broadsides. 110 corey capers The printer would have (self-consciously or not) chosen strategies of...