We often place
Martin Delany’s significance in his early conception of Black Nationalism and
commitment to the notion of resettlement in other countries, and this week’s
readings of Blake do a nice job of
using transnational methodologies to lend nuance to how the writer saw this playing out through his fiction. Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo rightly points to an
approach in Blake that seeks a
transnational synthesis of hemispheric black freedom while utilizing a
cosmopolitan knowledge of individual national custom and practice: “Blake is
supranational in that nation-state borders are repeatedly transgressed,
blurred, and negated, and differences between individuals and groups residing
in disparate countries are frequently represented as nonexistent, minor, or
irrelevant. At the same time, Blake is a profoundly nationally oriented text”
(582). Delany’s pre-occupation with borders throughout the text is somehow able
to simultaneously register as transnationally driven yet profoundly conscious
of national difference. One of the ways,
I argue, the text expresses this dual commitment is through Henry’s insistence
of the emancipatory power of money and capital. Martin Delany compares the
emancipatory power of money between that of Cuba and the United States to
further argue for the transnational future of the African American
community.
Somebody named
Andy Doolen rightly locates the text’s economic consciousness in its historical
refiguring of the slave trade as imperialist and capitalist, primarily through
Henry Blake’s use of the Vulture and
the Middle Passage in the second half of the book. The larger point here, for Doolen, lies in
Delany’s use of both the slave ship and the Dismal Swamp to write a revisionist
US history that simultaneously acknowledges the American Revolution as
unfinished in its quest for “freedom” and the Atlantic slave trade as revealing
the commodification of African Americans via racial capitalism. By synthesizing
the historical work done in the Dismal Swamp and on the Vulture, Andy does what
I have never been able to do in my own reading of this novel: namely, make a
clear sense of how the very different revolutionary visions in the first and
second half are related. Yet while I
agree that the book seeks to criticize the capitalist mode of the slave trade
by taking the narrative to Cuba, one’s access to capital also finds a strange
ally in Henry Blake’s planned US slave rebellion.
In order for
the financial prospects of emancipation and revolution in Cuba to land fully on
the reader, Delany figures personal capital as crucial to a successful slave
fugitive, saying to Andy and Charles: “they must have money, if they want to be
free. Money will obtain them everything
necessary by which to obtain their liberty.
Money is within all their reach if they only knew it was right to take
it” and “it is your certain passport through the white gap, as I term it”
(43). Henry later repeatedly underscores
the power of the gold coin in bribing river ferryman on his way to Canada,
Delany’s narrator stressing the golden eagle as the very embodiment of freedom. In this context, the freedom must be stolen
(or perhaps redistributed) from masters as a matter of right, but Delany’s
notion of right does not stem from a Lockean sense of natural right, but from
the legal framework of the nation state, particularly US fugitive slave laws as
necessitating the various bribes that occur as Blake’s group journeys north
from Mississippi.
The emancipatory
power of capital becomes legally sanctioned in Cuba with the combination of
legal knowledge and personal capital that allows Maggie/Lotty to go free under
Spanish Cuban slaveholding laws: “This law gives the slave the right, whenever
desirous to leave his master, to make him a tender in Spanish coin, which if he
don’t accept, on proof of the tender the slave may apply to the parish priest
or bishop of the district, who has the right immediately to declare such a
slave free” (183). The Spanish coin,
here, can be seen as a symbolic foil to the US gold eagle coin, one of them
given as a bribe to border watchmen operating outside of the law, the other legally
and religiously sanctioned. It seems
that in Blake, Delany offers a legal
vision where capital can play an emancipatory role under the law, but this
vision can only come to fruition outside of any US, given the segregationist
laws brought about in Cuba largely resulting from the political efforts of
white US Southerners, as opposed to the Spanish law allowing an individual to
gain manumission in the same manner as Maggie.
Without US influence in Cuba (or an imagined national elsewhere),
African Americans following Delany’s vision could transition from the status of
commodity, the object bought and sold through gold currency, to individuals
given the right to use capital for their own purposes, whatever they may be: to
own rather than be owned.
I have been thinking about the use of money in "Blake," and I found your ideas in the final paragraph instructive. I ultimately chose not to write on it, because I couldn't work my way out of the tangle of Delaney's simultaneous unmasking of the imperialist role of capital and his insistence that capital is a necessary instrument in the fight for black emancipation. Perhaps the latter point is merely a practical one - after all, in a capitalist system, greater agency can be achieved through the amassing of personal capital. But there is an economic side to Delaney's vision of emancipation, and it is difficult, at least for me, to pin down. Delaney seems to have gone through many phases in his thinking about emancipation, freedom, the nation-state, economics, etc. over the course of his life, and these manifold positions - some seemingly contradictory, such as his Nationalist dream contrasted against his military service - make him a compelling figure both historically and in our developing understanding of racial ideologies in the U.S.
ReplyDeleteMatt,
ReplyDeleteI am glad that you decided to make the case for Nwankwo’s point about the ways in which Delany’s Blake “expresses [a] dual commitment through […] Henry’s insistence of the emancipatory power of money and capital. Martin Delany compares the emancipatory power of money between that of Cuba and the United States to further argue for the transnational future of the African American community.” I have to admit that I am not too convinced about Nwankwo’s idea of a cosmopolitan “knowledge” or citizenship, but your approach to proving this “dual commitment” through the power of capital is on point. Like Ben, I also considered writing about mobility and money, because as you clearly point out this is part of what allows Henry to be able to access different places and people. However, I think that his mobility is also a result of Delany’s ability to make him political. Henry’s actions are clearly intended and planned and not at all disregarding of border or power hierarchies. We can observe this when Henry has to disguise himself as a slave. In my understanding of cosmopolitan citizenship, there is no need for masking oneself because money handles difference. Yet, reading your post I am wondering if maybe part of the cosmopolitan “knowledge” that Nwankwo refers to is about covering difference? And if so, is that really transnationalism?
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your post this week and was also struck by the description of the process of buying freedom though for slightly different reasons. In light of the necessity of presenting tender to the religious authority should the master not accept the author, I was made to think of the Biblical practices concerning cleanness from various diseases. For example, should one find oneself stricken by leprosy and later recover, one would be required to show oneself to the priest to be pronounced clean. In Delany's text, the language seems to resonate with that Biblical tenor. Therefore, the suggestion might be that buying freedom from slavery was somehow akin to recovering from a deadly disease.