Gender, Class, and the Performance of a Black (Anti) Enlightenment: Resistances of David Walker and Sojourner Truth

Throughout the nineteenth century, the discourse around black subjection and freedom was never far from a rhetoric and practice of enlightenment. According to critic Saidiya Hartman, "the equality of rights to be extended to freedmen depended upon the transformation of former slaves into responsible and reasonable men. As would be expected, the norms at issue were masculinity, rationality, and restraint."¹ Indeed, before and after legislative emancipation, black freedom was paradoxically defined by its capacity for restraint. Not only did this definition emerge out of a white supremacist fiction and fear of black recklessness (or unenlightenment), but, more profoundly, it worked to shape and constrain performances of freedom advocated by black activists themselves.

This essay examines how gender and class figured centrally in these performances and modes of comportment. In particular, I consider how David Walker's black reformist insistence on focused movement, moral uplift, and masculine refinement was often counterposed against (even if animated by) acts ideologically imagined as wayward, nonsensical, unenlightened, and off-track. Strikingly, the latter set of performances were often gendered and classed in ways that suggest a powerful set of associations (forged in Revolutionar y War-era American Enlightenment philosophy) between blackness, (the absence of) manhood, poverty, slavery, and unenlightenment.

In particular, Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia, argues that the "imagination [of black people] is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought [i]ncoherent and eccentric."² He further maintains that the "eccentric" absence of reason is attributable to "nature" and not to condition.³ In many ways, Jefferson's claim that black people privilege sentiment over reason resonates with European Enlightenment claims about white women. For Immanuel Kant, (white) women are more inclined to sense than reason, "love pleasantry and [being] entertained by trivialities."⁴ Implicit in Jefferson's formulation, then, is an understanding of black men (the default gender under attack) as lesser men, unmanly, indeed, feminine, unrestrained, and irrational.⁵ The language of comportment (how one holds oneself, behaves, performs) is, for Jefferson and other Enlightenment thinkers, always already racialized, gendered, and classed.

Significantly, David Walker countered Jefferson's racist document by attributing black unenlightenment to white supremacy and racial slavery. His Appeal to The Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) is a formalized response to Jefferson and the Euro-American Enlightenment project, more broadly, as well as a call for a Black Enlightenment; an uplift project that dissociated enlightenment from racial difference but naturalized its relationship to manhood and formal education. For Walker, formal literacy and moral rectitude (what he esteems as central to the project of black enlightenment) facilitates the emergence of black manhood. Such manhood, determined as coextensive with racial enlightenment, is impossible if black people remain enslaved. Not only does slavery refer to actual bondage but also to a state of intellectual and moral ignorance. Whether legally free or not, to be uneducated is, for Walker, tantamount to enslavement.

This assumption held by Walker and by leading statesmen and women connected to the reformist impulse in antislavery (Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, et al.) held profound implications for formally illiterate radicals such as Sojourner Truth. Truth's illiteracy, for many, tied her to slavery and with it, unenlightenment; as a result, her rhetorical and bodily enactments of freedom were often reduced to a form of racialized, intellectual caricature. Even though Truth offered a philosophy of liberation, the racial, economic, and sexual logics of supposedly enlightened embodiment missed the profundity of her revolutionary movement.

David Walker

Antislavery activist and author of the Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), David Walker entered the world untethered to the shackle by law and yet haunted by its rattle. This particular contradiction was a painful reality for free blacks living in the Lower Cape Fear region of Wilmington, North Carolina, who were forced to cohabitate with the unfree. "[Reacting] with particular intensity against being grouped with the unfree—not, however, because...