Diasporic Reasoning: The Idea of Africa and the Production of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America by Shea William Bigsby Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Ian Baucom ___________________________ Fred Moten ___________________________ Maurice O. Wallace Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2012 ABSTRACT Diasporic Reasoning: The Idea of Africa and the Production of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America by Shea William Bigsby Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Ian Baucom ___________________________ Fred Moten ___________________________ Maurice O. Wallace An abstract of a Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2012 Copyright by Shea William Bigsby 2012 Abstract This dissertation explores the significance of Africa (both as a literal geographic space and as an imagined or symbolic space) in 19 th century American intellectual and literary culture. I argue that when nineteenth-century intellectuals grappled with the institution of slavery, the significance of slave revolt, and the extent of black intellectual capacities, they dealt not only with a set of domestic social and political concerns, but also with a wider epistemological crisis surrounding the very idea of Africa and Africanness. The paradoxical legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, which produced unthinkable dislocation and suffering even as it created new diasporic networks of black affiliation built around a common African origin, forced a reexamination of conventional thinking about history, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, education, and civilization. Diasporic Reasoning traces the impact of the idea of Africa on specific American intellectual outlets, including popular historiography, the novel, and the university. I contend that in each of these cases, the engagement with the idea of Africa enriches the possibilities of thought and leads to a fruitful reframing or refinement of established ideas, genres, and institutions. I begin with an exploration of the different historiographic uses of “representative men” in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men and William Wells Brown’s The Black Man (Chapter One). I argue that Brown’s contribution to the genre of collective biography complicates the apparent “universalism” of Emerson’s earlier text, and forces us to rethink the categories of the iv universal and the particular. In Chapter Two, I continue to examine the impact of the African diaspora upon historical consciousness by arguing that the encounter with the specter of slave insurrection produces cognitive (and in turn, formal) ruptures in two historical novels, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes . Chapter Three focuses not on a literary genre, but on the circulation of knowledge through the institution of the modern university. Building from a comparative reading of the educational philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edward Wilmot Blyden, I argue that Blyden’s provocative conception of an “African university” draws out and extends upon the implications of Emerson’s thinking on education. Finally, in the Epilogue, I look at the syncretic uses of ”Ethiopianism” in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood , J. A. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound , and W. E. B. Du Bois’ Darkwater in order to explore the new paths that Pan-African and diasporic thought would take in the twentieth century. I argue that these works reflect the degree to which an evolving anthropological understanding of the idea of “culture” and the specific political contexts of anti-colonial struggles across the African continent would complicate the kinds of intertextual possibility available in the nineteenth century. This dissertation thus traces the often-surprising intellectual interrelations of America and the African diaspora, and in so doing, opens up a more nuanced approach to the study of nineteenth-century literary and intellectual culture. v This dissertation is dedicated to Alison, who kept me going and to Truman Bekalu Bigsby, who lights up my life and to the memory of John Gustave Bleir vi Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 The Dialectics of Diaspora ............................................................................................... 1 1.2 Scholarly Precedents ...................................................................................................... 10 1.3 Ideas of Africa: Making Use of Ethiopia, Haiti, and Liberia .................................... 14 1.4 Diasporic Reasoning: Overview of Project and Summaries of Chapters ............... 21 2. The Distillation of Diasporic Culture: Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Wells Brown’s Anthologies of Representative Men and Women ................................................... 27 2.1 The Temporality of Knowledge in Emerson’s Representative Men .......................... 39 2.2 Brown’s Revolutionary Historiography: The Collision of Past and Present in “The Black Man and His Antecedents” ............................................................................. 45 2.3 Emerson’s Portraits: The Reach Towards the Infinite and the Limits of Representativeness ............................................................................................................... 55 2.4 Assembling the Racial Past, Present, and Future: Brown’s Representative Men and Women and the Nature of the Type .......................................................................... 64 2.5 The Unstable Boundaries of the Form: Emerson’s “John Brown” and Brown’s “Man Without a Name” ...................................................................................................... 81 3. Narrating the Irreducible: The Practice of Historical Fiction in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno & George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes ............................................. 89 3.1 Emplotting Interpretation: The Making of Meaning in Benito Cereno and The Grandissimes ......................................................................................................................... 100 3.2 Palimpsests of History: Textual and Historical Precedents for Benito Cereno and The Grandissimes .................................................................................................................. 114 3.3 Dances of the Night: The Carnivalesque and the “Shadow of the Ethiopian” .... 134 vii 4. Educational Institutions, the Self, and (Black) Civilization: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edward Wilmot Blyden on the Location(s) of Knowledge ......................................... 142 4.1 The Idea of a (Black) University: The Arc of Blyden’s Educational Philosophy . 146 4.2 The Organic Unity of Knowledge: The Role of the University and the Nature of Knowledge in Emerson and Blyden ............................................................................ 158 4.3 Redefining the Contours of Knowledge: The Engagement with Multiplicity and the Making of African Knowledge ................................................................................... 170 4.4 The Liberian Scholar and the (African) American Scholar: A Synthesis .............. 189 5. Epilogue: The Fate of Ethiopianism in Pauline Hopkins, J. E. Casely Hayford, and W. E. B. Du Bois ............................................................................................................................... 194 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 210 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 223 viii 1. Introduction 1.1 The Dialectics of Diaspora The history of the United States has long been intertwined with that of the African continent, primarily through the historical entanglements of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which quite literally brought Africans and African cultures to the Americas, and created through the American slave systems conglomerates of ethnically- and culturally-diverse African-descended peoples. The traces of African “roots” in slave culture and the broader significance of an imagined African “homeland” for black Americans had a deep impact on cultural and intellectual developments within the United States throughout the nineteenth century. From the efforts of the American Colonization Society to establish a colony of freed slaves on the coast of West Africa in Liberia, to lingering fears about the implications of the Haitian Revolution, to the many bold writings of African-Americans who linked their struggles to an imagined African homeland, we can see the significance of Africa in the evolution of American thought and culture—and, conversely, the significance of America in the evolution of a diasporic or black international intellectual