In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 Slavery’s Ruins and the Countermonumental Impulse This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. . . . Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting . America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. —Frederick Douglass, oration delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852 What kind of a difference might the time of mourning make to national history ? Frederick Douglass’s deployment of the rhetoric of lamentation, in a speech delivered in Rochester, New York, now known as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” provides an unexpected answer to this question. The distinction that Douglass emphasizes in the first two sentences of the passage cited in the epigraph, a distinction that is at once possessive and affective , develops the shift in perspective cited in the speech’s eventual title: what Douglass describes as an effort to “see this day, and its popular characteristics , from the slave’s point of view.”1 Douglass challenges the unquestioned historical significance of this monumental occasion by recalling the present-tense melancholy that it obscures, amplifying the way the “jubilee shouts” of the holiday do not simply distract listeners from the “mournful wail of millions” but actually augment the pain behind that cry as they dramatize the distance between nationalist celebrations of progress and the slave’s asynchronic suffering (368). The speech mines the emotional archive of sentimentality as a means of contesting the nation’s indifference to the slave’s situation, insisting on critical action, not celebration, as the response proper to the date. But the temporal force that distinguishes Douglass’s speech—its insistence on the time that he calls now—does not emerge, crucially, from its citation of mournfulness alone, since the conventional rhetoric of mourning, 169 which valued the past without necessarily effecting any change in the present , would not in itself generate that transformative force. The temporal structure of individual mourning corresponds, as I will show in this chapter, to the cultural work done by national-public memorial; both sacralize foundational virtues—the freedoms of the nation, the affections of the family— to legitimate the forward movement of national history. Yet it is precisely the conjunction of history and virtuousness that Douglass, in his speech, wishes to unsettle, insofar as this conjunction underwrites the very complacency that prolongs the mournfulness of the slave. Hence, his citation of grief is not an opening to reparative feeling-in-common, an appeal to persuade his audience to weep along with him. Instead, his deliberate deployment of the grief of the slave and the lingering mournfulness of the freedman develops an essentially countermonumental perspective on the legacy of the American Revolution. The belatedness emphasized in Douglass’s July 5 speech ironically quickens the pace of its relation to the present, as his scorching exposé of white American hypocrisy sidesteps the sentimental possibility of sympathizing with the mourning of the slave precisely insofar as such universalizing appeals to affect mystify conceptions of time. The desire to correct this mystification, as I will show, leads to the countermonumental nature of the speech’s revision of conventional tropes of mourning toward the temporal detonation that would, in Benjaminian terms, “blast open the continuum of [American] history.” In this sense, the countermonumental perspective links the speech to the distinct temporal force that Foucault assigned to the notion of countermemory: that of prompting the “transformation of history into a totally different form of time.”2 The subject of the countermonument is less the truth content of a given event than the formal arrangement of time around the event; in response to the sacralizing appeal of the monumental, the deliberately untimely countermonument marks out spaces in which damaged time becomes visible. In this chapter, I want to think through the countermonumental perspective by considering three 1850s challenges to the imperial logic of slavery: Douglass’s 1852 oration, Frances E. W. Harper’s 1854 poem “The Slave Auction ,” and Herman Melville’s 1855 novella “Benito Cereno,” all of which, I argue, simultaneously contest the temporal silencing effected in monumental historiography and force the sentimental heart to skip a beat. My point of departure here is a conviction that countermonumentalism, a term usually associated with postmodern challenges to the monumental aesthetic, should be understood not as a late-twentieth-century...

Share