Southern Enclosure as American Literature

Set against the backdrop of Southern land grabs in the 1830s and again in the 1930s that were meant to sustain the cotton economy, this chapter studies the literary representation of the poor whites who were side-lined by the slave plantation’s expansion and modernization, and who were then remade into a national folk by literary elites. Facilitated by these Southern enclosures, the ambivalent canonization of poor whites as the nation’s folk would have a decisive and determining influence on the constitution—and the racial covenant—of American literature, and not only on its Americaness but also on its literariness. Slavery was the condition of possibility for this literature, but its role, along with that of the enslaved, was silenced. From frontier humor to the New Criticism, this chapter reveals a submerged racial history beneath the canonization of U.S. national literature, which was undertaken in the early twentieth century in U.S. literary criticism, explainingthe roleof New Deal photography, of paper money and paperwork, and modernism in literary style in the constitution of American literature as both discipline and object.

The Spectacle of Free Black Personhood

This chapter examines the aesthetics and politics that inform modes of realism increasingly used to represent Black Americans in the late nineteenth century. Beginning with a trompe l’oeil painting that depicts a Black boy playing soldier (Attention, Company! by artist William Harnett), read alongside sections of Frederick Douglass’ narratives and the mass-reproduced image of Gordon the slave, this chapter also surveys a Brooklyn park that was remade into a cotton plantation as part of the immersive performance called Black America. Each of these texts conjures the “free” Black body as a sensuous object for white consumption. This racialized dynamic is linked to segregation through an analysis of the eponymous protagonist of Mark Twain’s novel Pudd’nhead Wilson and a history of the anonymous subject of Harnett’s painting. Focusing on the logic of realism as it intersects with the ideologies of liberalism and of Jim Crow segregation, this chapter exposes how free black personhood was turned into a form of commodity spectacle.

Cowboys and Slaves

This chapter pans westward to investigate a single novel, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), regarded as the beginning of the Western, an origin story for that national mythology. The Virginian and the Western would seem to have nothing to do with slavery, but as this chapter reveals, slavery supplies the scaffolding for that most American of heroes, the cowboy. This chapter explores the centrality of anti-Blackness in the origins of the Western, engaging with genre theory and Sigmund Freud’s work on jokes. It explains the Western’s appearance against a backdrop of incorporation, finance capitalism, and emerging economic theories of marginalism. Tracing the connections between the frontier economies of the South and the West, and between the slave overseer and the cowboy, it reveals the Western as originating from a fantasy of Black genocide and white supremacy.

Freedom as Accumulation

This chapter reassembles the immediate and concrete history of abolition after 1865, from the counter of the Southern country store to the international trade in cotton, as it sorts out the mechanisms of law and arrangements of political economy that chaperoned the tremendous value incarnated in slaves across the gulf of the Civil War. It explains how citizenship for the formerly enslaved was tethered to the racialization of debt and how the legal relations of formal abolition were actually economic relations of credit. This chapter analyzes the legal history of the Fourteenth Amendment and the interlocking forms of theft it enabled, from Southern sharecropping to New York corporations, from the Freedman’s Bank to the U.S. national debt, showing how liberalism is enmeshed with colonialism. Through a landmark Supreme Court case in 1897, this chapter describes how the personhood of the freed enabled the white accumulation of finance capital through global cotton markets, engaging with the theories of Giovanni Arrighi and world-systems analysis.

Conclusion

The conclusion turns to the trap of the ghetto where Black Americans found themselves caught in the wake of the Great Migration, on the brink of another reformation in U.S. slave racial capitalism. Linking the racial geography of these spaces to the history of slave racial capitalism, it outlines the colonialism inherent in segregation, from zoning laws to slumming to the Bronx “slave markets.” It connects the ghetto to the plantation and to the rise of the prison and mass incarceration, ending with the Watts uprising of 1965 and the call for total abolition.

Introduction

The introduction distinguishes between emancipation and abolition to mount a critique of liberalism. It argues that the slave as a value-form survives within racial capitalism after 1865. Critically examining the usual periodization of U.S. slavery and slavery’s supposed containment within the U.S. South, the introduction posits cultural materialism as the methodology necessary to grasp the enduring vestiges of slavery as a national institution.