Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-26
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black American ◽  
Black Leadership ◽  
Absolute Good

To engage Martin Robison Delany (1812–1885) is to confront the complexities and paradoxes of nineteenth-century black American leadership. He embodied the utilitarianism and pragmatism that the late August Meier described as the defining attributes of nineteenth-century black leadership.1 He refused to confine his life and struggles within the Manichaean good-versus-evil framework. There was no absolute good or absolute evil in Delany’s worldview. On the contrary, in crucial historical moments and contexts, Delany acknowledged only complex contending forces and interests, each with discernible merits and demerits. By characterizing Delany as someone who could not be classified “with either the good guys or the bad guys,” Delany aficionado Victor Ullman captured his ambiguity, or what many of Delany’s contemporaries perceived as his behavioral eccentricity....

Head

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-78
Author(s):  
Sarah Blackwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Black American ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
The North

This chapter explores the cultural significance of portraiture for nineteenth-century Black American writers. It argues that many Black writers engaged with portraiture in their texts to both question and reframe the new connections being made between portraiture and personhood. They championed the power of portraiture to assert and document a sitter’s humanity while also expressing skepticism toward the idea of portraiture as revelatory about the “deep” truths of a sitter’s personhood. Many Black writers toyed with the question of “likeness” in their texts, holding out for what Douglass called “a more perfect likeness.” This chapter makes these arguments through close readings of a series of Douglass speeches about visual culture, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, and Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and their Friends, as well as original archival research on runaway slave advertisements, The North Star, and mid-century newspaper practices.

Troubled Times in Yorubaland

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Southern Baptist ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Black American ◽  
Southwestern Nigeria

This chapter considers Vaughan’s first decade in southwestern Nigeria (1855-67) in the context of West Africa’s major developments: warfare, migration, slave trading, missionary Christianity, and colonialism. During the warfare that convulsed the region for much of the nineteenth century, thousands of captives were exported as slaves to the Americas. Others were rescued by the British Navy and landed at Sierra Leone; some of these, along with ex-slaves from Brazil and Cuba, later returned to Yorubaland. Meanwhile, missionaries from Britain and a few from the United States pushed inland. Though Vaughan had come to Yorubaland as a carpenter for American Southern Baptist missionaries, he was living separately from them when he was taken captive during the brutal Ibadan-Ijaye war. He escaped to Abeokuta, where the African American activist Martin Robeson Delany had recently tried to negotiate a settlement for black American immigrants. Vaughan and the other diasporic Africans in Yorubaland may have hoped to fulfill their dreams of freedom in the land of their ancestors, but they found something more complicated. As this chapter shows, freedom as autonomy meant vulnerability, while freedom as safety or prosperity was best achieved through subordination to strong, autocratic rulers, who profited from slavery themselves.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document