The Afro-Indigenous Frontier Romance

Recent scholarship on historical interactions and cultural exchange between Black and Native communities in the nineteenth century poses a significant challenge to logics of civilizational progress that have long defined our... [ view full abstract ]

Recent scholarship on historical interactions and cultural exchange between Black and Native communities in the nineteenth century poses a significant challenge to logics of civilizational progress that have long defined our sense of the period. One of richest literary documents of Afro-Indigenous culture has proven difficult to assimilate to any simple oppositional framing of civilization and barbarism: Albery Allson Whitman’s The Rape of Florida (1884). This epic poem comprises a fictional account of the Seminole Wars, following a Black fugitive as he escapes slavery to Florida, becomes romantically involved with a Seminole woman, and ultimately collaborates in the Seminoles’ fight against the U.S. military. Whitman has long been given short shrift in literary histories for his poems’ supposedly “derivative” borrowing from a complex array of Euro-American sources, especially Walter Scott and Lord Byron. In this paper, I suggest that by taking Afro-Indigenous collaboration and Seminole ethnogenesis as subjects, Whitman fundamentally transforms the organizing narrative logic of nineteenth century "American Civilization": the “romance” of the escape in the wilderness. I argue that Whitman uses the richly encoded and ironic nostalgia of Romantic poetry to return to scenes of Jacksonian Indian Removal in dissent from the closing of the frontier and the dismantling of the Reconstruction. Whitman’s work represents a form of multi-ethnic, non-white utopianism within extreme historical constraints. He negotiates the complex promise of Black relations to the land and offers an alternate Black nationalism in a moment of consolidation for U.S. empire. I close by setting the nonce-civilizing ambitions of Whitman's epic mode against the rise of dialect writing and vaudeville, with those two cultural forms differently performative instantiations of Black life.