Being Political: Martin R. Delany's Blake or the Huts of America

After I finished reading Martin R. Delany’s Blake or The Huts of America, I had the same thought I had when I first read Timothy B. Tyson’s biography of Robert F. Williams, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power. I thought, here is a piece of political contestation I have not encountered before and it is powerful. In Radio Free Dixie, Tyson traces Robert Williams’s struggles to remove the oppressive and violent system set against African-Americans in the South, during the mid-1900s. He demonstrates Williams’s efforts and connections to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and how these two as portrayed in Williams’s life, worked in conjunction with one another and not separately. So what exactly made Delaney’s text so much like Williams’s real struggles? Was it the fact that in Blake, Henry, the protagonist, starts off in the South, then goes North (to Canada), then goes back to the South and eventually travels to Cuba while leading a rebellion? This is probably part of it, as Williams was a civil rights leader who also started out in the South, then travelled north, and in 1961 went to Cuba and broadcasted “Radio Free Dixie.” But reading Andy Doolen’s analysis of Blake helped me understand that, that is not the only reason why I found Delany’s fictional narrative so influential.

In “‘Be Cautious of the Word “Rebel,”’ Doolen shows how Delany’s careful examination of the “pan-African thematics” (156) gave him the tools and ideas to move away from,

the formulaic and political restrictions of abolitionists writing and gave this versatile writer another genre with which to represent the African American experience [and that] No artificial binary between history and fiction can disguise the fact that Delany’s only novel is one of the finest studies available of how slavery corrupted nineteenth-century American language. (Doolen 156)

Here, Doolen explains, that it was Delany’s life experiences and refined studies of the how other abolitionists were writing about freedom and equality that allowed him to create a “transnationalist vision,” which eloquently portrayed the power dynamics of slavery during the 1800s. In addition, Doolen shows how Delany’s visualization of slavery not only captured the power dynamics of the time, but also how U.S. capitalism was highly intertwined in it (165). Delany’s ability to write about slavery from a more nuanced, but also globalized perspective, is what makes his work so similar to Williams’s life. However, I would add that Delany’s vision is also different because it responds to slavery in a political manner.

In Contesting Citizenship, Anne McNevin argues that being political is about creating contestations that allow for a potential change or “transformation” (98). I believe that this is also part of why Delany’s text is so significant, because while it offers many moments of Henry witnessing the violence and horrors of slavery (many re-created from non-fictional accounts), it also permits a new vision for how to overthrow it. The notion of forming a new vision relates to Floyd J. Miller’s response to the fact that readers will never know the actual conclusion of the novel. He writes, “yet the very inconclusiveness of the novel as it now exists—the rebellion in process—is perhaps more relevant today than any ending Delany could possibly have conceived” (XXV).  In other words, the very fact that the texts exists and leaves readers in the building of rebellion is political because it allows us to think about how transformation can occur.

*On a side note, and maybe something we can discuss in class, I am not sure how I feel about the Nwankwo’s use of “cosmopolitan” citizenship, especially when he claims that they can “craft notions of self and community that cross or negate national borders” (584).