Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770-1850

Epilogue: Transnationalism and Black Studies

In a thought-provoking essay, Ann duCille addresses the relative critical silence about William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel Clotel; or, The President ’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, attributing this neglect to a dislike of the bourgeois politics of the book. She quotes Addison Gayle, who in The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America rejected the novel for not adhering to black nationalist demands for fiction. DuCille recommends that African-Americanists take a step back and re-evaluate works previously rejected for mirroring white models. Her plea is important, and she gives at least two reasons for it. On the one hand, she prefers to consider the book “half-open” rather than “half-closed,” seeing Brown’s “mastery of neo-classical diction,” for example, as “a subversive deployment of the King’s English to tell the slave’s story” (456). On the other hand, she acknowledges Brown’s bourgeois inclinations, and concludes with an appeal for more generous reading practices: Yes, these novels are almost as concerned with color, class, and upward mobility as their detractors say they are, but is it possible to look at that concern not simply as an anxious emulation of the values of the dominant society but as a more honest engagement with the chromosomes of culture than many writers and critics are willing to make today? Is it the embaru Epilogue: Transnationalism and Black Studies rassment of our own black middle-class riches that makes this earlier pursuit of the American Dream look so bankrupt? What did it mean for a people, impoverished by slavery and denied the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of wealth and property, to claim a middle-class persona? (460) Rather than encouraging readers to see the novel as subversive, here she recommends a more genuine assessment of what she calls the “chromosomes of culture,” as part of her DNA metaphor about the African American literary tradition and its “biological” entanglements with the white tradition. After all, she says, bourgeois liberalism did constitute an important and liberating ideology for blacks at the time. One could contrast this position with that of Joanna Brooks, who in her review of Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, a collection of essays about the eighteenth-century slave narrative, chides the editors and the contributors for not adhering to the deeper meaning of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, which he defines as a “counterculture of modernity.” She argues that the collection’s repeated emphasis on “individualistic self-fashioning obscures the crucial importance of the late eighteenth century as a time when peoples of African descent in England and the Americas cultivated common Black identities and built new postslavery Black communities.” The notion of Black Atlantic “honors this creative, conscientious, and oppositional construction of Blackness.” She is particularly aggrieved that the editors of the collection “resist the positioning of early Black literature in relation to an African-American literary tradition” (358). In doing so, they seem to behave as a new generation of insensitive intruders: “The foundational and ongoing efforts of African-Americanists have brought legitimacy, respect, and resources to the study of Black literature and culture; the attraction of early Americanists and eighteenth-century British literature specialists to early Black Atlantic literature is a comparatively recent phenomenon” (359). Were she to use the same DNA metaphor as duCille —and if chromosomes could really carry indicators of race—Brooks would see the chromosomes of the early texts primarily as indicating blackness. This book agrees more with duCille than with Brooks, and for two reasons . First, the cosmopolitanism I observe in the black writers I discuss is, apart from a few gestures toward black nationalism among the Freemasons , of an expansive, cross-racial character. Second, this book shows the extent to which those texts were inspired by the culture of modernity. The stigmatizing of black texts as mere imitations of white texts has a 242 slavery and sentiment long and ugly history. That critical trend fortunately died down several decades ago, thanks to calls by such critics as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to abandon sociological reductionism for thorough and independent close readings.1 In this book, I have revisited the notion of white influence, but this time with more sophisticated tools. The editors of Genius in Bondage, Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, actually aim at underlining “the...