Copyright by Tyler Grant Mabry 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Tyler Grant Mabry Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Seizing the Laurels: Nineteenth-Century African American Poetic Performance Committee: Martin Kevorkian, Co-Supervisor Helena Woodard, Co-Supervisor Coleman Hutchison Shirley Thompson Joanna Brooks Seizing the Laurels: Nineteenth-Century African American Poetic Performance by Tyler Grant Mabry, B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2011 Seizing the Laurels: Nineteenth-Century African American Poetic Performance Tyler Grant Mabry, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011 Supervisors: Martin Kevorkian and Helena Woodard The diverse voices of African American poets from the nineteenth century have yet to receive their due. The critical gap is regrettable, because the nineteenth-century phase of the African American poetic tradition, although sparser and less philosophically unified than some later phases, nevertheless constituted a true tradition, connecting writers to one another and to writers of the coming century. Nineteenth-century black poets laid the groundwork for their artistic descendants both stylistically (by “signifyin’” on the tropes of their contemporaries) and thematically (by interrogating Euroamerican claims to exclusive political and moral authority), while building communal sites for literary and political activity such as the black press, the book club, the abolitionist circuit, and the university. In order to adequately theorize the nineteenth-century African American poetic tradition, we need a new critical narrative that would contextualize nineteenth-century African American poetry by emphasizing its interactions with various currents of literary and political enterprise in America and abroad. This study will gesture towards some of the possible outlines of such a narrative, while also suggesting a new set of hermeneutics for apprehending the achievements of early black poets, urging an examination of the early black poetic tradition in terms of performativity. A critical emphasis on performativity is particularly well-suited to the explication of nineteenth- iv century African American poesis for several reasons. Firstly, because the poetry so often centers around acts of repetition and revision, the primary texts are vulnerable to being misunderstood as imitative. By insisting that poetry’s meaning is generated through relationships between poets, texts, and various readers, the performative emphasis helps to spotlight the competitive and revisionary nature of much black poetry. Secondly, when African American poems are read as performances, their political dimensions come into sharp relief. This study examines the performances, personas, and prophecies of George Moses Horton, Frances Harper, Joshua McCarter Simpson, and Albery Allson Whitman in order to generate a deepened critical understanding of nineteenth-century African American poesis. v Table of Contents Chapter 1: Towards a Narrative of Nineteenth-Century African American Poetry ….1 A Brief Metahistory of Nineteenth-Century African American Poetry………....3 Performativity and Nineteenth-Century African American Poetry……..………8 African American Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America…………..………..21 Horton as the “Fettered Genius”: Romantic Poetry in Bondage………….……28 Performance, Persona, and Prophecy: African American Poetry Between George Moses Horton and Paul Laurence Dunbar………………………41 Chapter 2: Prophecy and Witness in the Poetry of Frances Harper…...………….….46 “Heard You That Shriek?” – Performance and Witness in Harper’s Early Poetry…………………………………………………………………….48 “I’ve Come to Share the Fortunes of My Race” – Performing Moses in the Reconstruction South…………………………………………………….57 “We Are Marching Along” – The Institution-Building Work of Harper’s Occasional Poetry…………………………………………………..……85 “A Fairer Hope, A Brighter Morn”: Visioning America’s Racial Future…...…94 Chapter 3: Parody and Performance in the Lyrics of Joshua McCarter Simpson.....102 “To Change the Flow of Those Sweet Melodies” – Parody in The Emancipation Car…………………………………………………………...…………107 The Emancipation Car as Performance Script………………………………..120 Figures That Seemed to Be Facts: Prophecy in The Emancipation Car……...125 Chapter 4: A.A. Whitman and "The Negro of the Future"………………...……….129 Not A Man and Yet a Man: Overview………………………………………..134 Whitman and “The Negro of the Future”…………………………….………141 “Dark Mystery”: The Madness of White Loon……………………………….147 “Those Who Read Will Feel Acquainted With Me”: A.A. Whitman’s Poetic Persona………………………………………….………………………164 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..179 vi Chapter 1: Towards a Narrative of Nineteenth-Century African American Poetry The vibrant and diverse voices of African American poets from the nineteenth century have yet to receive their due. When included in general anthologies, black poetry from this era tends to be represented by the same handful of brief protest lyrics: Horton’s “Of Liberty and Slavery,” Harper’s “The Slave Mother’s Lament,” Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask,” and select others. Although these poems are significant and creatively vital works, they do not begin to indicate the scope and variety of the emerging tradition. Between the publication of Horton’s first volume, The Hope of Liberty, in 1829, and the publication of Dunbar’s final volume, Lyrics of Love and Laughter, in 1903, over thirty black writers published volumes of verse, and over a hundred more published individual poems in magazines and periodicals.1 This body of work encompasses a broad range of poetic subjects and modes, and includes narrative verse, religious meditation, political protest, occasional verse, introspective lyrics, and dialect poetry. Over the past fifteen years, increased attention has been paid to several individual writers, particularly Horton, Harper, and Dunbar. However, a number of the most original and exciting poets (James Monroe Whitfield, George Boyer Vashon, Albery Allson Whitman, and James Edwin Campbell come most forcefully to mind) have been neglected nearly altogether. And, perhaps more importantly, there has been no sustained effort, on the part of Americanists or African-Americanists, to theorize the early tradition as a whole. The most widely deployed critical narrative of African-American literature theorizes black poetry as a quintessentially modern phenomenon that begins to achieve coherence and authenticity with the appearance of Dunbar’s dialect poetry, and comes 1 See Sherman, Invisible Poets. 1 into full flower with the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Poets such as Whitfield, Vashon, Simpson, Whitman, and Campbell, who lie outside the scope of such a narrative, are poorly understood and generally overlooked. The critical gap is regrettable, because the nineteenth-century phase of the African American poetic tradition, although sparser and less philosophically unified than some later phases, nevertheless constituted a tradition in the fullest sense, connecting writers to one another and to writers of the coming century. Nineteenth-century poets were laying the groundwork for their artistic descendants both stylistically (by “signifyin’” on the tropes of their contemporaries2) and thematically (by interrogating white Americans’ claims to exclusive political and moral authority), while building communal sites for literary and political activity such as the black press, the book club, the abolitionist circuit, and the university. In order to begin theorizing the nineteenth-century African American poetic tradition, my project proposes a new literary narrative which would contextualize nineteenth-century African American poetry by emphasizing its interactions with various currents of literary and political enterprise in America and abroad. My project will also suggest a new set of hermeneutics for apprehending the achievements of early black poets, by urging an examination of the early black poetic tradition in terms of performativity. But before considering an alternative narrative of nineteenth-century black poetry, it is useful to understand how this body of work has been constructed and evaluated by previous generations of poets and scholars. 2 See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey. 2 A BRIEF METAHISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY By the mid-nineteenth century, several critics and editors had begun constructing a critical understanding of American poetic history. Samuel Kettell’s Specimens of American Poetry (1829) and especially Rufus Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) had begun to build the American canon, listing its major and minor figures, analyzing its trends and variations, appraising its native strengths and defects, and cataloguing its characteristic themes. A comparable understanding of black poetic history, on the other hand, did not begin to develop until the early twentieth century, with the publication of anthologies of black verse. The first such anthology was James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). Johnson’s collection was closely followed by three others – Robert T. Kerlin’s Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), White and Jackson’s An Anthology of American Negro Verse (1924), and Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927). Although these anthologies contained scant material by the poets