Defining Blake

With Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition, editor Jerome McGann presents us with what will be the definitive edition of Martin Delany’s important nineteenth-century novel, a key text for understanding both early African American literature and antebellum American literature more broadly. Returning to the novel’s first publications in the Anglo-African Magazine (AAM) and the Weekly Anglo-African (WAA), McGann brings his considerable editorial expertise—both theoretical and practical—to the notoriously complicated composition and print history of this crucial text.

Given the increasing interface between African American literary studies and print culture studies, it is fantastic that an eminent scholar such as McGann tackled the difficult task of editing Blake, a text full of challenges because of its partial and truncated printings in these two nineteenth-century black periodicals. My own reading of Blake as a product of collaborative intratextuality is indebted to McGann’s theorization of authorship as a fundamentally social act, and so I am excited about McGann’s edition. McGann’s attention to detail is exacting: he meticulously compares the AAM and WAA versions (especially in terms of the representation of dialect), gives fuller details of Blake’s composition history, and points us to the significant collation of the two versions produced online by Stephanie Kingsley. The material practices of periodical publishing are made manifest in many ways; when I read McGann’s phrase “poorly inked letters,” I grinned. I also appreciated particular insights that seemed to arise from McGann’s past scholarship on Byron, Romanticism, and British literature, as well as the way that McGann identifies essential thematic and narrative patterns in the novel. McGann has given us a reliable and corrected text from which readers of Blake for the foreseeable future will gain immeasurably.

Even given these attributes, however, I suspect the audiences of American Periodicals will find themselves desiring more detailed information on the periodicals themselves, especially as it impacts our understanding of the book’s content and its form—as Benjamin Fagan’s contribution to this roundtable does. In addition, they might wonder why this “corrected edition” of Blake does not more centrally foreground the last portion of the novel’s subtitle, A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba—excised completely from the Beacon Press edition—in its own title. (It does appear on the page preceding the text of Blake itself, and the “Historical and Critical Notes” section emphasizes that “the full title of Delany’s book, Blake: or, The Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba, is highly significant” [315].) At the same time, this opens avenues for future scholarship and raises questions like those Marlene Daut marks in her review.

The most provocative editorial decision, of course—and the one about which I am most torn—is that McGann conjectures about how the missing chapters of Blake end the novel, namely, that “Blake will conclude with a replay of La Escalera. Plácido and the other conspirators will be seized and executed” (xxiii), while a “remnant of the conspirators” will emigrate to Africa. On the one hand, I find McGann’s argument compelling. I appreciate his claim that this conclusion would be another instance in a pattern of quelled insurrections, and that this outcome aligns with both the historical fact of Plácido’s execution and Delany’s own political efforts to relocate free African Americans to Liberia. This argument also allows us to understand Blake as an early piece of African American speculative fiction, especially in McGann’s sense that the survivors will emigrate to “‘a world elsewhere’ of black actualities and black truth” (xxv). This opens up a way to think about Martin Delany alongside, for instance, Samuel Delany. Perhaps most importantly, it adds nuance to the moniker “revolutionary,” a term often used to describe this novel.

At the same time, however, I find myself wishing McGann had published his argument about how the novel ends in a separate, literary critical essay. Certainly, the distinction between “purely” interpreting literature and “purely” editing literature is a false one, but I...