Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony

2. Abolitionist Discourse A Transatlantic Context

2. Abolitionist Discourse A Transatlantic Context Simply stated, the fundamental intellectual question that animates this project is: What does it mean for a slave to bear witness to, or to tell the “truth” about, slavery? Perhaps at first glance a deceptively modest query, the question raises four primary concerns of this book. First, through the analysis of representative white abolitionist writings from the period, it endeavors to provide a fuller, more textured understanding of such discourses. Second, this more complete understanding of white abolitionist and pro-slavery rhetoric enables us to appreciate the ways in which the narrative and rhetorical strategies of black-authored texts of the period are overdetermined by these discourses. Third, in a complex discursive terrain such as that occupied by the slave narrator, or “witness,” the status of testimonial “truth” becomes a real consideration. We must contemplate the ways in which this particular discursive situation calls for the production of a “truth” that not only performs a kind of authenticating gesture for the occasion of its telling but also accounts for the myriad complications posed by the commingling of abolitionist expectations with literary expectations and the objections of proslavers . And fourth, I examine how these new readings of blackauthored texts both fit into and beg a reconsideration of the traditional ways in which literary and intellectual history have 16 structured our understanding of literary production during the nineteenth century. This critical endeavor is one that includes some reassessment of how we think about Romanticism and abolitionism within the traditional bounds of nationally delineated contexts. Given the most established scholarly work surrounding British and American Romantic literature, it may at first be difficult to imagine what possible links Romanticism might have to racialized discourse. A deafening silence seems to pervade the scholarship of the period on the contributions of Blacks to and the participation of Blacks in the grand, master narratives of the literary genealogy of Romanticism. This statement does not intend to ignore the occasional (though sparse) mention and treatment by critics of certain canonical Romantic figures on issues surrounding slavery, abolitionism, slave revolts, and so forth. Rarely, however, do such treatments provide sustained readings of how these “aberrant” texts are integrated into the body of work by a writer or of where they belong among the larger literary sensibilities and trends of the period. For example, to my knowledge Emerson’s Antislavery Writings (1995), edited and introduced by Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, represents the first time that Emerson’s writings against slavery have been collected and contextualized in a sustained way. And while a work such as Gates’s Figures in Black treats how black writers of the latter part of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century were establishing a literary tradition of their own (all the while responding to white racist assertions about the ineducable nature of the African), it does not address how our understanding of the master narrative of literary history must be remapped in light of their literary production. Even more interesting, and somewhat disturbing, is that one does not have to look very far to discover that the ties between racialized discourse and Romanticism not only exist but are, in fact, quite abundant. This observation is interesting Abolitionist Discourse 17 because of the sheer amount of material by and about Blacks in the nineteenth century that is suppressed, enabling these kinds of silences. It is disturbing because scholarly mappings of Romanticism have endured this silence for so long.1 Literary Romanticism in England (roughly 1789 to 1832) coincides with the rise of British abolitionism (the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed in 1787)2 and the fierce parliamentary debates over the cessation of England’s participation in the international slave trade, which ended in the passage of the Abolition Bill in 1807. This act was followed by the passage of the Emancipation Bill in 1833. In the United States, literary Romanticism (roughly 1836 to 1865)3 is nearly concurrent with the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833) and the rise of the Garrisonian variety of abolitionism, culminating in the epic conflict of the Civil War. In addition to these relationships between the rise of Romanticism and of racialized discourse, another element in the context that gave rise to abolitionist discourse is the circulation of the language of “natural rights” and “natural laws” in the nineteenth century. Robert M...