“Not Altogether Ridiculous”

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

Xenocitizens

Sociality under the sign of liberalism has seemingly come to an end—or, at least, is in dire crisis. Xenocitizens returns to the antebellum United States in order to intervene in a wide field of responses to our present economic and existential precarity. In this incisive study, Berger challenges a shaken but still standing scholarly tradition based on liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, the book uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum writers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models for thinking about personhood and sociality as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. Today, the old liberal-national model of citizen is not only problematic, but also tactically anachronistic. And yet, standard liberal assumptions that undergird the fading realities of humanist and democratic traditions often linger within emerging scholarly work that seeks to move past them. Innovatively reorienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, Xenocitizens offers us a new nineteenth century—pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.

Martin Robison Delany

Martin Delany emerged as a dynamic public speaker and advocate for the African American community during the turbulent years of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), the Civil War (1861–1865), and Reconstruction (1863–1877). Born free in Charles Town, (West) Virginia, to a free mother and an enslaved father, Delany learned to read and write from his mother. He settled in Pittsburgh as a young man, pursuing a variety of careers before founding ...

Martin R. Delany's Civil War and Reconstruction

Collectively the documents provide answers to the still unresolved existential question of Martin Delany historiography: Who was the real Martin Delany? Conflicting answers and interpretations compete for authenticity. Was Delany militant, anti-establishment, dogmatic and uncompromising; or, was he pragmatic, utilitarian, accommodating, and open to compromise when necessary? Could Delany have been a combination of some or all of these attributes? The documents show that he was not averse to reaching out across the racial and ideological divides to explore diverse political and social reforms strategies with political opponents, including erstwhile oppressors of his race (former slaveholders). They provide clarity to, and contextualize the “dualities” and ambiguities of his life and struggles, thereby enabling enhanced and informed understanding of the essential pragmatism and utilitarian underpinnings of his thought. Delany was a complex individual who defied ideological, political, and racial compartmentalization; always driven by considerations of what his reason and conscience dictated would best serve the interests of his race; even if it meant cooperating with former political adversaries. The documents also reveal a man who could at once appear unyielding in furtherance and defense of the interests of blacks, and yet not opposed to making concessions; a utilitarian and a pragmatist who when circumstances demanded, could be politically and ideologically resolute and dogmatic. The book highlights the ideological and political twists and turns of his Civil War and Reconstruction career and how these both endeared him to, and alienated him from, constituencies on both sides of the political and racial divides.