something. This “meaning” had been named and deployed by scholars from at least the moment, in the eighteenth century, when other and sometimes the same scholars investigated both the natural history and the inalienable rights of man—that is to say, human freedom.
One supposes that if Africans all had three eyes, or one ear, the significance of that difference from the small but conquering European invaders would also have been found to have “meaning.” In any case, the subjective nature of ascribing value and meaning to color cannot be questioned this late in the twentieth century. The point for this discussion is the alliance of “visually rendered ideas with linguistic utterances.” And this leads into the social and political nature of received knowledge as it is revealed in American literature.
Knowledge, however mundane and utilitarian, creates linguistic images and cultural practices. Responding to culture—clarifying, explicating, valorizing, translating, transforming, critiquing—is what artists everywhere do, and this is especially true of writers involved in the development of a literature at the founding of a new nation. Whatever their personal and formally “political” responses to the “problem” inherent in the contradiction of a free republic deeply committed to a slave population, nineteenth-century writers were mindful of the presence of these blacks. More importantly, they addressed, in more or less passionate ways, their views on that difficult presence.
Awareness of this slave population did not confine itself to the personal encounters writers may have had. The publication of slave narratives was a nineteenth-century publication boom. The discussion of slavery and freedom filled the press, as well as the campaigns and policies of political parties and elected government. One would have to have been isolated indeed to be unaware of the most explosive issue in the nation. How could one speak of profit, economy, labor, progress, suffragism, Christianity, the frontier, the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands, education, transportation (freight and passengers), neighborhoods, quarters, the military—practically anything a country concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse, at the heart of definition, the presence of Africans and their descendants?
It was not possible. And it did not happen. What did happen, frequently, was an effort to talk about these things with a vocabulary designed to disguise the subject. This did not always succeed, and in the work of many writers disguise was never intended. But the consequence was a master narrative that spoke for the African and his descendants, or of him. The legislator’s narrative could not coexist with a response from the Africanistic persona.
Whatever popularity the slave narratives had—and they inspired abolitionists and converted anti-abolitionists—the slaves’ own narrative, while freeing the narrator in many ways, did not destroy the master narrative. That latter narrative could accommodate many shifts, could make any number of adjustments to keep itself intact. Silence from and about the subject was the order of the day. Some of the silences were broken and some maintained by authors who lived with and within the policing narrative. I am interested in the strategies for maintaining the silence and for breaking it. How did the founding writers of young America engage, imagine, employ, and create an Africanistic presence and persona? In what ways do these strategies explicate American literature? How does excavating these pathways lead to fresher and more profound analyses of what they contain and how they contain it?
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Let me take one example: a major American novel that is both an example and a critique of romance as a genre. If we supplement our reading of Huckleberry Finn, expand it, move beyond its clutch of sentimental nostrums about lighting out to the territory, river gods, and the fundamental innocence of Americanness; if we incorporate into our reading the novel’s combative critique of antebellum America, thus shedding much light on the problems created by traditional readings too shy to linger over the implications of the Africanistic presence at its center, it seems to be another, somehow fuller novel. We understand that at a certain level, the critique of class and race is there, although disguised or enhanced through a combination of humor, adventure, and the naïve.
Twain’s readers are free to dismiss the novel’s combative, contestatory qualities and focus on its celebration of savvy innocence, while voicing polite embarrassment at the symptomatic racial attitude it espouses. Early criticism, those reappraisals in the fifties that led to the canonization of Huckleberry Finn as a great novel, missed or dismissed the social quarrel because the work appears to