Electric Dialectics Delany’s Atlantic Materialism

This chapter explores the association between Atlantic fetishes and American spiritualisms. This association emerges glancingly in Marx’s Capital and more substantively in the writing of blacks in the diaspora, particularly Martin Delany’s magazine writings in the late 1850s. Via analyses of Atlantic fetishisms as well as their migration into Delany’s spiritualized electrical theories and his quasi-fictional work Blake, the chapter traces the Atlantic origins of what it calls a relational materialism. This relational materialism emerges from the conflux of cultures at the frontiers of merchant capitalism. For this reason, it isn’t wholly subsumed within a capitalistic conception of value. Moreover, it tends toward pluralistic logics by which antagonisms and alliances emerge through the play of circumstances instead of being absolute or determined in advance.