Taken From the French

Looking to transnational black print culture and emigration, Adam Lewis’ paper, “Taken From the French”: Global Text-Networks of Black Abolitionist Literature” considers black emigration and maroon communities as... [ view full abstract ]

Looking to transnational black print culture and emigration, Adam Lewis’ paper, “Taken From the French”: Global Text-Networks of Black Abolitionist Literature” considers black emigration and maroon communities as overlapping “climates” of radical abolition by focusing on the Provincial Freeman, a Toronto newspaper founded and edited by Mary Ann Shadd, a free black woman from Delaware.  While scholars have explored Shadd’s radical abolitionist and gender politics by focusing primarily on her outspoken editorial voice, no one has addressed the one novel she serialized in the newspaper, a narrative of fugitivity and slave rebellion entitled The Maroons.  Originally published in Paris in 1844 as Les Marrons, the novel was written by Louis-Timagène Houat, a freeman of color from the French Indian Ocean colony of Bourbon (now Réunion).  Houat wrote Les Marrons to advocate for the abolition of slavery in Bourbon while at the same time affirming the colony’s relationship with France. Since Martin Delany was one of the Freeman’s regular readers, Lewis argues that The Maroons provided him with a narrative blueprint for Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859, 1860-61), his own novel of fugitivity and insurrection. Taken together, these papers track the itineraries of both texts and people, rendering what Paul Gilroy once called the “fractal patterns of cultural and political exchange” within the fraught transnational project of articulating freedom from within the material context of slavery.