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This chapter focuses on Pittsburgh's Martin R. Delany, who advocated a black-led back-to-Africa movement much like the one proposed first by James Forten and Paul Cuffee, and then developed by Benjamin Coates. Like his predecessors, Delany hoped that a successful colony under black leadership would create the conditions for both self-rule and economic independence, proving black equality while combating both slavery and racism. Like Forten, he was convinced that this could be achieved only under genuine black leadership. Delany's emigrationist vision was actually an extension of the self-help and racial uplift agenda created by the gradualists and Forten. Based on the premise of select emigration, it can best be described as a “City on a Hill”—an intended showcase of black self-sufficiency and achievement. It was part of, rather than a departure from, his lifelong efforts to gain a legitimate place for blacks in American society.

The epilogue looks ahead to the reemergence of black discussions of African identity and black emigrationism during the 1850s. It examines the efforts of Martin R. Delany, sometimes called the “father of African nationalism”, to encourage black emigration from the United States during the 1850s, and to the sense of African identity that he articulated while advocating emigration. The epilogue suggests the persistence of many ideas initially offered by the first generations of self-styled “Africans”, and some of the costs of the demise of the remarkable vision that activists like Equiano, Allen, Coker, and Cuffe had developed.

Turning to the publication of Martin Delany’s serial novel, Blake; or the Huts of America, in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, this chapter argues that black experiments with natural science helped to produce early works of black speculative fiction. This chapter casts Blake as a work of proto–science fiction that challenged the impoverished conception of the human found in both racial science and mainstream abolitionism. It is especially interested in a cosmic and existential model of fugitivity that Delany develops in both Blake and in his writings on astronomy in the Anglo-African.

This chapter examines how emigration and colonization converged in Frederick Douglass's battle with Martin Delany and those “black nationalists” who argued for the creation of a black American homeland in Africa. It explores black leaders' positions on emigrationism in view of the American Colonization Society's colonization project. It also considers Douglass's intentional conflation of colonization and emigration as a political strategy in order to advance his anticolonization agenda. In particular, it analyzes Douglass's rejection of the idea that a widespread emigration movement would be beneficial to the majority of blacks, as well as his argument that the pro-emigration rhetoric espoused by men like Delany encouraged colonizationists' view that African Americans desired to leave the United States rather than lobby for inclusion.

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.

In Chapter 5, sentimentalism becomes event-oriented as possibilities for revolt resonate throughout the Caribbean and the United States. Questions of violence, hemispheric politics, and community collide in narratives of slave resistance, including Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853), Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto” (1837), Cuban author Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), and Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859–62). Each text engages the racial, gendered, and economic exploitations of slavery while contemplating sentiment’s role in organized acts of slave violence; together these fictions highlight transamerican structures of enslavement and racialization that complicate US racial discourses. The chapter culminates in a discussion of Blake’s construction of a militarized affective abolitionism, which builds on prior nineteenth-century fictions’ challenges to slavery and racism. As the novel insists upon a sentimentalism that works at the level of “the people,” it makes sentiment revolution-ready.

This chapter focuses on the September 1848 National Convention of Colored Freedmen, which called for women's “equal” participation in the proceedings. It lifts the debate over women at the Cleveland convention out of the realm of the novel and resituates it as a reflection of the many streams of influence that were shaping African American public culture during the 1840s. Female influence was giving way to women's rights in black activist circles, a shift that opened a door to a rethinking of the gendered character of fraternal orders, churches, and political organizations. Key in this moment was a new understanding about the underpinnings of inequality. Prejudice grounded in sex was no less arbitrary than that grounded in color, activists argued, with both African Americans and women subject to “despotic acts of legislation and false judicature,” as Martin Delany put it.

This chapter discusses the historical role that African and Afro-Protestant revival and conjure religion played in fomenting slave rebellions in the Americas. Pointing to the influence that slave insurrections had on antebellum antislavery novels in the wake of the sectional crisis, the author establishes the historical and theoretical grounds for what he calls the novel of enthusiasm. He does this in two ways. First, the chapter explores the cross-fertilization between black cultures of enthusiasm and emergent Romantic sensibilities in nineteenth-century aesthetics, especially the novel. Second, the chapter analyzes two interconnected prose works as novels of enthusiasm (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred and Martin Delany’s Blake), both of which link cultures of slave insurrection to cultures of enthusiasm and uniquely place US black resistance in a transatlantic context among insurgent maroons. Furthermore, the author contends that Stowe and Delany turn novel writing itself into an enthusiastic contact zone (of call and response) with the reader, soliciting us to speed up the political crisis of slavery through direct intervention.

This chapter explores the association between Atlantic fetishes and American spiritualisms. This association emerges glancingly in Marx’s Capital and more substantively in the writing of blacks in the diaspora, particularly Martin Delany’s magazine writings in the late 1850s. Via analyses of Atlantic fetishisms as well as their migration into Delany’s spiritualized electrical theories and his quasi-fictional work Blake, the chapter traces the Atlantic origins of what it calls a relational materialism. This relational materialism emerges from the conflux of cultures at the frontiers of merchant capitalism. For this reason, it isn’t wholly subsumed within a capitalistic conception of value. Moreover, it tends toward pluralistic logics by which antagonisms and alliances emerge through the play of circumstances instead of being absolute or determined in advance.

This introductory chapter discusses the archive of abolitionist spatial practices to show how literary abolitionism promotes geography as a key discourse of abolitionist political intervention. It examines the work of Martin Delany’s Blake to elaborate the category of abolitionist geography. Blake embodies what has come to be understood in contemporary critical discourse as spatial realism. It acknowledges lines of kinship connection among enslaved and free Africans in the Western Hemisphere that traditionally have been elided by a myopic U.S. focus in accounts of African American culture.

This chapter adds a consideration of the economic horizon to contemporary scholarship that examines the radical and, at times, emancipatory “entanglements” between slaves/ex-slaves and the environment. The chapter’s three sections present a developing arc of “unadjusted emancipations,” tracing various ways that slaves and ex-slaves negotiated and leveraged the antebellum era’s systemic production of bad debts in order to distort or circumvent standard formations of emancipatory logic. The first examines Stowe’s Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) in light of ecological-economic hermeneutics. In its reading of Dred, the interface between humans and ecology spied by scholars who study the parahuman closes with an unsettling interface between personhood and developing models of capital. The second looks at the ways Brown’s novel Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) and his appended “Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown” manipulate the era’s production of bad debts in order to craft points of divergence from standard channels of emancipation. The third considers how the titular character of Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859-62) and his “secret” move throughout the South’s plantations in ways that radically compound. Reading the modality of secret as a blurred Moten-esque push toward a fugitive sociality of bad debt, the chapter examines how the novel presents innovative forms of resistant collectivity.

This chapter considers Vaughan’s first decade in southwestern Nigeria (1855-67) in the context of West Africa’s major developments: warfare, migration, slave trading, missionary Christianity, and colonialism. During the warfare that convulsed the region for much of the nineteenth century, thousands of captives were exported as slaves to the Americas. Others were rescued by the British Navy and landed at Sierra Leone; some of these, along with ex-slaves from Brazil and Cuba, later returned to Yorubaland. Meanwhile, missionaries from Britain and a few from the United States pushed inland. Though Vaughan had come to Yorubaland as a carpenter for American Southern Baptist missionaries, he was living separately from them when he was taken captive during the brutal Ibadan-Ijaye war. He escaped to Abeokuta, where the African American activist Martin Robeson Delany had recently tried to negotiate a settlement for black American immigrants. Vaughan and the other diasporic Africans in Yorubaland may have hoped to fulfill their dreams of freedom in the land of their ancestors, but they found something more complicated. As this chapter shows, freedom as autonomy meant vulnerability, while freedom as safety or prosperity was best achieved through subordination to strong, autocratic rulers, who profited from slavery themselves.

This chapter examines the resonances of the Stono rebels’ calls of liberty in African American literature, focusing on the human rights claims made by early African American writers such as Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Omar ibn Said, Olaudah Equiano, Martin Delany, Prince Hall, and Frederick Douglass. It explores how slaves who turned into rebels were depicted in nineteenth-century African American fiction, along with their struggle for liberty and dignity.

Discusses Appalachia’s African American citizens during the pre- and post-Civil War years. The presence of slavery and African Americans in the region has often been obscured by myths and incorrect assertions about the relative mildness of slavery in the mountain South. Yet, the African American community was very much a part of Appalachian culture and society, both during and after the Civil War. Their stories and the stories of Appalachian abolitionists seek to correct these myths and correctly inform of the region’s role during this tense time in American history.

The first of three chapters on the power of chocolate cities, this chapter centers the life, activism, and pioneering efforts of abolitionist and black woman lawyer Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Exploring her migrations above and below the Canadian border, the authors highlight her sophisticated and politically informed racial geography of the United States. Detailing the movement of black people throughout the domestic diaspora, this chapter illustrates the how gender, place, race, and power collided in the lives of black people before and after the Emancipation Proclamation.