A Canada in the South: Marronage in Antebellum American Literature
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2017 A Canada in the South: Marronage in Antebellum American Literature Sean Gerrity The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1896 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] A CANADA IN THE SOUTH: MARRONAGE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE by SEAN GERRITY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 © 2017 SEAN GERRITY All Rights Reserved ii A Canada in the South: Marronage in Antebellum American Literature by Sean Gerrity This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. __________________ ___________________________________________ Date Eric Lott Chair of Examining Committee __________________ ___________________________________________ Date Mario DiGangi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Eric Lott Duncan Faherty Robert Reid-Pharr THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT A Canada in the South: Marronage in Antebellum American Literature by Sean Gerrity Advisor: Eric Lott This dissertation considers maroons—enslaved people who fled from slavery and self- exiled to places like swamps and forests—in the textual and historical worlds of the pre-Civil War United States. I examine a counter-archive of US literature that imagines marronage as offering alternate spaces of freedom, refuge, and autonomy outside the unidirectional South-to- North geographical trajectory of the Underground Railroad, which has often framed the story of freedom and unfreedom for African Americans in pre-1865 US literary and cultural studies. Broadly, I argue that through maroons we can locate alternate spaces of fugitive freedom within slaveholding territory, thereby complicating fixed notions of the sectional geography of freedom and mobility as they were tied to conceptions of liberalism in the antebellum United States. Whereas previous scholars, especially those whose work focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean, have tended to regard forms of marronage in relation to their potential for large- scale emancipatory schemes like those made famous by the maroons of Jamaica, Suriname, and Brazil (among others), I am less interested in the concrete or imagined connections between marronage and enslaved revolt and more interested in those between marronage and freedom- seeking practices via flight in their many possible forms and manifestations. In this sense, marronage becomes an optic through which I investigate the production of alternate formations iv of community, sociality, belonging, space, and ultimately geography and freedom that primarily African American writers in the 1850s were exploring through literary discourse. The texts I examine ultimately form a constellation which articulates a black-centered politics of resistance based on a freedom of movement disarticulated from liberal conceptions of citizenship and the nation state. The emphasis on the 1850s reflects a rise in attention to marronage after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, which effectively nationalized the institution of slavery in the eyes of the law. The mobility exhibited by runaway enslaved people who sought freedom by heading north, sometimes via the Underground Railroad, has been made to comport with the teleological narrative of the liberal subject in US history so as to appear as an example of those wrongfully denied liberal subjecthood valiantly striking out in search of it. The mobility exhibited by maroons, on the other hand, has been largely ignored in the US context because it does not comport with racial ideologies of assimilation and integration. This dissertation aims to demonstrate the extent to which marronage engages with contested, complicated, often nonliberal meanings of freedom for enslaved and fugitive African Americans in the antebellum United States as they were explored and articulated through representations of maroons in literary texts. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first and most profound debt of gratitude is to my dissertation committee at the Graduate Center: Eric Lott, Duncan Faherty, and Robert Reid-Pharr. They believed in this project from the get-go and have been the best academic support system I ever could have asked for. I am grateful as well to David Reynolds, in whose course the idea for this project first germinated; Kandice Chuh, for early guidance and for giving me the kick I needed to go “all in” on the study of marronage; Hildegard Hoeller, whose course and methodologies drove my early interest in slavery and abolition; and Carrie Hintz, who was always there to help me navigate funding. In my various teaching and fellowship engagements throughout CUNY, Phyllis Van Slyck, Steven Monte, Andrea Fabrizio, and Linda Hirsch have been extraordinary mentors. It would have been impossible to complete this project without generous financial support from the Advanced Research Collaborative, Early Research Initiative, IRADAC, English Department, and Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center. Beyond the Graduate Center, this project benefited from workshopping at the 2015 Futures of American Studies Institute and from research fellowships at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia and the Virginia Historical Society. My thanks go to Hoke Perkins at UVA and John McClure at the VHS for these opportunities to conduct archival research related to marronage. Lafayette College is where it all began, and I remain ever grateful to Steve Belletto, Chris Phillips, the late Bryan Washington, and the English department at Lafayette for their mentoring and support. To my parents, Rick and Kris Gerrity, my brother Ryan Gerrity and sister-in-law Carly Gerrity, along with my other family—Ben, Cathy, Jen, and Ryan, and all of my friends: I could never have asked for a better support system. I will be forever thankful to Cooper, who was by vi my side near constantly throughout the duration of this project. His company and companionship have been invaluable. This dissertation is dedicated to my wife, Megan, without whose boundless support none of this would have been possible, and to my grandmother, Celeste Lois Hildebrant, who I know is beaming with pride. It’s been a long, strange trip since the Reader’s Digest Word Power quizzes. vii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Fugitive Geography and the Production of Maroon Spaces in Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave 16 Chapter 2 Space, Race, and the Provisionality of Freedom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred 53 Chapter 3 A Maroon in the Garret: Rethinking the Politics of Fugitvity in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 87 Chapter 4 Marronage Disavowed: Martin Delany’s Blake and the Specter of Insurrection in the 1850s 157 Works Cited 194 viii Introduction Marronage arose concomitantly as a form of flight and resistance with the processes of captivity, forced migration, and enslavement that began in the African interior, moved to the barracoons on the continent’s western coast, proceeded across the middle passage, and ended at auction blocks and on plantations throughout the Caribbean and in European colonies scattered all over the Americas. It is not only a diasporic formation of freedom-seeking through flight, but one with its roots on the African continent itself, making it a circum-Atlantic practice employed continually by Africans and people of African descent over the course of over four hundred years of European colonization and enslavement. A long tradition of scholarship exists examining maroons, maroon communities, and various practices of marronage throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and western Africa, but the same cannot be said of the British colonies in North America and the United States. The reasons for this have to do with both historical differences and longstanding biases in the scholarship on the subject. Nation-based historical and anthropological studies of marronage in the Caribbean and Central and South America are numerous. Scholarship exists on marronage in nearly every modern-day nation in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, some of which still exists in languages other than English (primarily Spanish, French, and Dutch).1 Descendants of the longest lasting maroon communities continue to maintain a connection to their maroon heritage and traditions. In Jamaica, Queen Nanny of the Maroons is featured on the five hundred dollar Jamaican note; in Haiti a statue, “Le Negre Marron,” sits across from the 1 Three excellent overviews of this scholarship are: Richard Price, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: JHU P, 1973); Gad Heuman, ed. Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance, and Marronage in Africa and the New World (New York: Routledge, 1986); and, more recently, Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Kingston, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P, 2006). 1 presidential palace in Port-au-Prince; an imposing statue