Kissing David Walker

David Walker’s 1830 pamphlet Appeal to the Colored Citizen of the World provides an ideal climate for revolutionary change--creating a textually queer, polyamorous relationship of expanded affinities between Walker and his... [ view full abstract ]

David Walker’s 1830 pamphlet Appeal to the Colored Citizen of the World provides an ideal climate for revolutionary change--creating a textually queer, polyamorous relationship of expanded affinities between Walker and his readers.  Joining bibliographic studies and queer theory, I argue that the relation between author and reader, as well as between text and body, is queered through a process of methexis—an aesthetic form in Greek theater in which the audience shares, participates, and improvises parts of the performance. Walker begins his Appeal in just this tradition, instructing readers to perform the text aloud for those who can’t read. The Appealcan thus be understood as methetic in that Walker and his readers are engaged in a project of sharing, participation, and augmentation, which creates erotic proximity not unlike Kathryn Bond Stockton’s articulation of “kissing the text.” In Walker’s case, however, the penetrative possibilities run in both directions:  readers reach in, changing what they find there through individual acts of reading, but Walker also reaches out, in particular through the controlled and eroticized typographical design of his text, which we might call “typographic jizz”—using, for example, a proliferation of exclamation points throughout the text which mark the crescendos and climactic moments for the reader/performer helping to create an erotic, polyamorous, homopoetics of expanded affinities.