Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469640921
- eISBN:
- 9781469640945
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469640921.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter considers varied forms of political life made possible through the framework of theft. Recognizing that the hemispheric slave trade is a piratical act in the context of the novel, these ...
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This chapter considers varied forms of political life made possible through the framework of theft. Recognizing that the hemispheric slave trade is a piratical act in the context of the novel, these pages argue that Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass suggest that slaves too should engage in piratical economic behaviors as a response to the illegal commercial activities undergirding the peculiar institution. By exploring the economic impact of enslaved subjects as thieves, Black participation in the market emerges as a strategy that disrupts the proper operations of exchange and doubly creates a “b/Black” market. Illegal trade, in the hands of an enslaved population, is a way for enslaved bodies to stake claims to personhood and, ultimately, freedom. Read alongside the significant historical events of the mid-nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859-1862) frame an interest in the intersections of economic freedom and liberal principles as they come to bear on the enslaved Black subject in the nineteenth century.Less
This chapter considers varied forms of political life made possible through the framework of theft. Recognizing that the hemispheric slave trade is a piratical act in the context of the novel, these pages argue that Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass suggest that slaves too should engage in piratical economic behaviors as a response to the illegal commercial activities undergirding the peculiar institution. By exploring the economic impact of enslaved subjects as thieves, Black participation in the market emerges as a strategy that disrupts the proper operations of exchange and doubly creates a “b/Black” market. Illegal trade, in the hands of an enslaved population, is a way for enslaved bodies to stake claims to personhood and, ultimately, freedom. Read alongside the significant historical events of the mid-nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859-1862) frame an interest in the intersections of economic freedom and liberal principles as they come to bear on the enslaved Black subject in the nineteenth century.
Regis M. Fox
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813056586
- eISBN:
- 9780813053431
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056586.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
“‘They Won’t Believe What I Say’: Theorizing Freedom as an Economy of Violence” analyzes Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) in which Wilson exposes the coerciveness of imbricated discourses of ...
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“‘They Won’t Believe What I Say’: Theorizing Freedom as an Economy of Violence” analyzes Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) in which Wilson exposes the coerciveness of imbricated discourses of sentimentality, Christianity, and economic determinism sustaining the liberal problematic. In particular, Wilson offers a dense engagement with questions of materiality, citing it as a critical register of political meaning and experience. As Wilson implicates abstract rationalism in hierarchizing socially constructed processes of investment and exchange, she similarly reimagines dominant ideologies of self-help and self-determination in the context of working class and underclass exploitation in the antebellum U.S. North, revising governing perceptions of interracial altruism and charity. Invoking blackness, fugitivity, and associated figurations of opacity in Our Nig in order to challenge Western liberal dictates toward ocularcentrism, order, and coherence, Wilson also provocatively manipulates liberal tropes of childhood, innocence, and joy.Less
“‘They Won’t Believe What I Say’: Theorizing Freedom as an Economy of Violence” analyzes Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) in which Wilson exposes the coerciveness of imbricated discourses of sentimentality, Christianity, and economic determinism sustaining the liberal problematic. In particular, Wilson offers a dense engagement with questions of materiality, citing it as a critical register of political meaning and experience. As Wilson implicates abstract rationalism in hierarchizing socially constructed processes of investment and exchange, she similarly reimagines dominant ideologies of self-help and self-determination in the context of working class and underclass exploitation in the antebellum U.S. North, revising governing perceptions of interracial altruism and charity. Invoking blackness, fugitivity, and associated figurations of opacity in Our Nig in order to challenge Western liberal dictates toward ocularcentrism, order, and coherence, Wilson also provocatively manipulates liberal tropes of childhood, innocence, and joy.
