Commentary: Critical Disruptions

Written independently of one another, the four excellent essays on nineteenth-century African-American cultural studies in this issue of American Literary History display an exemplary commitment to enlarging the archive, challenging conventional paradigms, and reconceiving connections among literary discourses, race, and nation. As I was considering what held these essays together, I found an answer in John Ernest's "Liberation Historiography," where he describes the shared intent of disparate antebellum African-American historians to disrupt the master narratives that sought "the containment of blackness within white nationalist history." All four essays in this issue perform such critical disruptions. African-American passing narratives are conventionally presented as expressive of desires for whiteness; P. Gabrielle Foreman provides a new way of thinking about those narratives as expressive of desires for a matrilineal black collectivity. Numerous historians have depicted white and black abolitionists as ascetic moral reformers with a commitment to a racially inclusive US; Elisa Tamarkin offers a strikingly different picture of abolitionists as convivial cosmopolitans who at times seemed prepared to dispense with the particularities of nation. Standard treatments of nineteenth-century Liberia conceive of that nation as the puppet of the white-directed American Colonization Society; Etsuko Taketani, by attending to the black voices in Sarah Hale's Liberia, reveals a heretofore muted black agency and postcolonial consciousness in that novel, and in Liberian history itself. Twentieth-century historians have tended to ignore the work of nineteenth-century African-American historians, or to dismiss their histories as merely celebratory compendiums of notable African Americans; Ernest, in contrast, discusses a wide range of African-American historical texts that "unwrote" white nationalist history. Read as a group, the essays not only challenge conventional understandings but also, as I hope to suggest, each other. Readers of these essays will encounter not one continuous narrative but a series of deft interventions promising further interventions to come.

I begin with Foreman's "Who's Your Mama?: 'White' Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom" because it is the essay of the four under consideration that most got under my skin (as it were). A meditation on the politics of skin, "Who's Your Mama?" ambitiously addresses, in a transatlantic context, debates on race and gender in African-American narrative, photography, slave advertisements, theater, and other cultural discourses and media. Focusing on the narratives of Louisa Picquet and William and Ellen Craft, Foreman develops a compelling argument about the need to "differentiate passing narratives and white mulatta genealogies from antipassing texts." She shows how Picquet and Ellen Craft made pragmatic use of their phenotypically indeterminate status to stake claims to the legal and social privileges of whiteness, even as they sought to affirm their genealogical ties to their black mothers. Foreman's critical disruption, then, is to assert that the "white" mulatta wasn't so white after all, as her analyses demonstrate that "Picquet and Craft exhibit a racial will that defies identification with the Law of the (white) Father."

Foreman is at her best in her discussion of Hiram Mattison's Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon (1861), which she reads as "exemplary in its revelation of the tensions between nineteenth-century white patriarchal and black maternal mulatta genealogies." Mattison, who had editorial control of Picquet's narrative, emphasizes the sexual vulnerability that comes with Picquet's light complexion, and attempts to present an antimiscegenetion moral that occludes her interest in black people. But as Foreman elaborates, Picquet, who tells her life history to Mattison, attempts to convey a very different story of her desire to recuperate her black familial and maternal relations. Foreman's rich analysis attends to questions of gender and race, and contextualizes Louisa Picquet in relation to the discourse of slave advertisements, debates on photography and racial identity, and the transatlantic interest in racial uncertainty and performance in such plays as Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon and Lord Byron's Mazeppa. Given the Crafts' celebrity in Great Britain, the transatlantic context also works...