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The French Writer Alexandre Dumas As an African American Lieu De Me´Moire

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The French Writer Alexandre Dumas As an African American Lieu De Me´Moire Journal of Global History (2010) 5, pp. 395–422 ª London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 doi:10.1017/S1740022810000203 Creating a local black identity in a global context: the French writer Alexandre Dumas as an African American lieu de me´moire Eric Martone Department of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Social and Behavioral Sciences Building, Stony Brook, NY 11794–4348, USA E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Western expansion and domination through colonial systems served as a form of globaliza- tion, spreading white hegemony across the globe. While whites retained the monopoly on ‘modernity’ as the exclusive writers of historical progress, ‘backward’ African Americans were perceived as ‘outside’ Western culture and history. As a result, there were no African American individuals perceived as succeeding in Western terms in the arts, humanities, and sciences. In response, African American intellectuals forged a counter-global bloc that chal- lenged globalization conceived as hegemonic Western domination. They sought to insert African Americans as a whole into the history of America, (re)creating a local black American history ‘forgotten’ because of slavery and Western power. African American intellectuals thus created a ‘usable past’, or counter-memory, to reconstitute history through the inclusion of African Americans, countering Western myths of black inferiority. The devastating legacy of slavery was posited as the cause of the African Americans’ lack of Western cultural acclivity. Due to the lack of nationally recognized African American figures of Western cultural achieve- ment, intellectuals constructed Dumas as a lieu de me´moire as part of wider efforts to appro- priate historical individuals of black descent from across the globe within a transnational community produced by the Atlantic slave trade. Since all blacks were perceived as having a uniting ‘essence’, Dumas’ achievements meant that all blacks had the same potential. Such identification efforts demonstrated African Americans’ social and cultural suitability in Western terms and the resulting right to be included in American society. In this process, African Americans expressed a new, local black identity by expanding an ‘African American’ identity to a wider range of individuals than was commonly applied. While constructing a us- able past, African Americans redefined ‘America’ beyond the current hegemonic usage (which generally restricted the term geographically to the US) to encompass an ‘Atlantic’ world – a world in which the Dumas of memory was re-imagined as an integral component with strong connections to slavery and colonialism. With the rise of the global book trade, Alexandre Dumas (1802–70) became one of the most popular authors not just in France but also throughout Europe and the United States. His works, such as The three musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–46), Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 29 Sep 2021 at 00:52:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms395 of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022810000203 j 396 j ERIC MARTONE were quickly translated for sale abroad. However, the transformation of literature as a form of ‘art’ to one of popular commercial entertainment was not greeted with universal praise by American critics. The nineteenth-century reviewer Albert Southwick noted of Dumas that ‘in the book trade no name of [a] modern author has had a higher marketable value than his’, yet ‘enlightened critics... lament that he has abused his talent ... by degrading literat- ure into a mere trade...in utter forgetfulness of any high motive or aim’.1 Nevertheless, the rising global book trade enabled the works of popular writers from diverse European coun- tries and the US to transcend more easily their own national literatures and become part of a Western body of global literature. Dumas was such a famous figure in the US that Charles Ranhofer, a noted nineteenth-century chef at New York’s Delmonico’s restaurant (then regarded as one of America’s finest dining locations), created the Salad a` la Dumas to hon- our the French writer, and the biographer Jacques Lucas-Dubreton claimed in 1928, that Dumas ranked after Napoleon in an American newspaper’s survey of the most famous men of the nineteenth century.2 Despite his popularity, knowledge about Dumas’ black ancestry had been largely un- known in the US among the majority population during the 1830s and 1840s, the years in which he was at the peak of his fame. Many Americans generally assumed that such cul- tural acclivity was characteristic of ‘whites’. In describing Dumas’ family history, an 1843 edition of the North American Review declared simply that Dumas was ‘of honorable, though not of wealthy, parentage’. His father’s status as the son of a French nobleman and an African slave from Saint Domingue (now Haiti) was omitted, for he was described only as a ‘general in Napoleon’s army’ who ‘served with distinction in Egypt’.3 This omis- sion was not unique. For example, an 1849 review of Dumas’ novel The memoirs of a physician also recounted the writer’s background without mentioning his black ancestry and praised him as ‘a most extraordinary man’.4 Moreover, the omission of Dumas’ black ancestry was often accompanied by images in English-language publications that empha- sized his Caucasian features (see Figure 1), contrary to his image in later contemporary photographs (see Figure 2). Such a practice maintained the illusion that he was not of black descent. Dumas’ black ancestry became widely known in the US during the 1850s. From 1852 to 1855, Dumas published his multivolume memoirs, which gave details about his father’s life and black ancestry. The memoirs, readily available in French for the educated elite as well as francophone Americans, were translated into English in abridged form in 1890 and in a complete edition in 1907–09.5 In the US, an advocate of the ‘one-drop rule’, individuals 1 Albert P. Southwick, ‘Alexandre Dumas pe`re’, The Galaxy, November 1870, pp. 691, 694. 2 Betty Gilbert Gubert, ‘Delmonico’s’, in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., Encyclopedia of New York City, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 325; Jacques Lucas-Dubreton, The fourth musketeer, trans. Maida Casteltun Darnton, New York: Coward-McCann, 1928, p. 271 3 ‘Works of Alexandre Dumas’, North American Review, January 1843, p. 115. 4 ‘Review of The memoirs of a physician by Alexandre Dumas’, United States Democratic Review, January 1849, p. 90. 5‘Mesme´moires’, in Frank Wild Reed, A bibliography of Alexandre Dumas pe`re, Pinner Hill, Middlesex: J.A. Neuhuys, 1933. For a review of the full translation, see George Hellman, ‘The memoirs of Alexandre Dumas: lively reminiscences of the French novelist whose life synchronized with thrilling historic events’, New York Times, 12 October 1907. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 29 Sep 2021 at 00:52:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022810000203 j DUMASASANAFRICANAMERICANLIEU DE ME´ MOIRE j 397 Figure 1. Anonymous portrait of Dumas, c.1840. Mary Evans Picture Library. with any black ancestry were theoretically ‘black’. Therefore, as the French literary scholar Michel Fabre has noted, ‘in American terms he [Dumas] was a Negro’.6 Not all American reviews of Dumas’ memoirs noted his black ancestry, but many, such as Littell’s Living Age’s 1852 review, certainly did. The review revealed that he had a grandmother ‘of color’ and a father who was ‘a mulatto giant’.7 6 James David, Who is black? One nation’s definition, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1991; Lawrence Wright, ‘One drop of blood’, New Yorker, 25 July 1994, pp. 46–55; Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: black American writers in France, 1840–1980, Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: Illini Books/University of Illinois Press, 1993, pp. 1, 19–20. 7 ‘Review of the autobiography of Alexandre Dumas’, Littell’s Living Age, December 1852, p. 587. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 29 Sep 2021 at 00:52:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022810000203 j 398 j ERIC MARTONE Figure 2. French postcard, c.1907–15, reprinting a photo portrait of Dumas, c.1860s, pub- lished by J. L. C. – Legui. Author’s collection. While the knowledge of Dumas’ black ancestry made him controversial among major- ity Americans, whose reactions ranged from disparaging Dumas and his works as ‘African’ to marginalizing his black ancestry by rationalizing that his ‘white’ ancestry was dominant, it made him popular with other components of the population who iden- tified with him because of his racial status in American terms. Dumas did not treat the black condition explicitly in his most popular works. Yet many African Americans read The Count of Monte Cristo in particular as an allegory of their own condition and iden- tified with the novel’s themes of justice, emancipation, and hope. They seemingly related to the title character, Edmond Dante`s, an innocent sailor imprisoned in the Chaˆteau d’If, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 29 Sep 2021 at 00:52:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022810000203 j DUMASASANAFRICANAMERICANLIEU DE ME´ MOIRE j 399 who escapes, finds a secret treasure, and seeks justice against those who had him impri- soned. As Michel Fabre has suggested, Monte Cristo’s popularity stemmed from the fact that Dante`s’ victory ‘over injustice could function as a parable for black endurance and eventual freedom’.8 The African American writer Charles W.
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