Thinkable Alternatives in African American Studies

Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861. By John Ernest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 426 pages. $59.95 (cloth). $21.95 (paper).

Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. By Patrick Rael. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 421 pages. $55.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper).

If we consider scholarship an indication of the health of a discipline, Patrick Rael's Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North and John Ernest's Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 suggest that recent reports of the death of African American studies have been greatly exaggerated.¹ Rael, a historian, and Ernest, a literary historian and critic, have produced interdisciplinary scholarship that speaks to the ongoing value of studying African Americans' challenge to, participation in, and "cofabrication" of Euro-American definitions of history, culture, and racial identity. Both books greatly enrich our study of antebellum African American thought, archivally and historically, with a wide range of insights pertaining to antebellum black Americans' negotiation of the contradictions inhering in U.S. nationalist ideology and in a democracy increasingly polarized around race. To this end, Rael and Ernest significantly broaden contemporary definitions of "protest" to include discourses of respectability and to revise assumptions of black history as merely "acts of record."

Like all good books, however, these texts also point to work that still needs to be done, particularly around our understandings of what constituted "politics" in largely disenfranchised black communities during the periods under consideration; how and if cultural forms substituted for politics; and the role, if any, of disagreements among African Americans in the consolidation of "black" racial identity, protest, and history. If formulations of antebellum "black identity" are in some sense the fruit of many decades' engagement with the thought and writings of black leaders, they still demand further interrogation into how processes of racial formation among blacks were influenced and modified by the challenges that intraracial difference of various kinds—class, gender, region, religion, and color—posed to them. In a field wherein we no longer assume (thankfully) the value of static and ahistorical notions of race—white or black—the challenge now lies in tracing the contradictions and constraints, as well as the opportunities, inhering in black Americans' adaptation of various languages for racial legitimacy, whether those of "morality," "respectability," "protest," or "history."

Patrick Rael's formulation of "black protest" and its links to black racial identity intervene in contemporary debates about antebellum black leaders whose middle-class values of thrift, industriousness, and respectability were often identified as "bourgeois" and inauthentically black in identity politics discourses. Building on Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's provocative and influential coining of the phrase "the politics of respectability," Rael's main argument is that African Americans "cofabricated" a discourse of respectability that was central to their racial activism and that this discourse constituted a form of protest against racial inequality. He makes a convincing case for recognizing that African Americans contributed to and influenced notions of character and respectability in their efforts for "elevation," notwithstanding their demographic, political, and cultural marginalization. In conventions and in the black press, in freemason and abolitionist societies, African Americans forged a "coherent structure of values and ideological presuppositions" to inequality that Rael argues displays "the integrity of their thought" and that is mistakenly viewed as foreign to African Americans as a group (7).

This analysis exposes the ironic similarities that exist between twentieth-century expectations of black authenticity and racist antebellum whites' disparagement of middle-class blacks. To this end, Rael's close study of Edward Clay's series of lithographs "Life in Philadelphia" illuminates the nineteenth-century minstrelsy-derived lineage of twentieth-century black middle-class ridicule. Middle-class discourse in the United States may have demographically excluded the majority of African Americans, but Rael shows that black leaders made long unrecognized cultural contributions that reaffirm African Americans' foundational role in the shaping...