The Martyr of Alabama and the Bronze Titan of Cuba: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper on the Limits of Black Transnationalism

RJ Boutelle"The Martyr of Alabama and the Bronze Titan of Cuba: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper on the Limits of Black Transnationalism"The title poem of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s collection The Martyr of Alabama and... [ view full abstract ]

RJ Boutelle

"The Martyr of Alabama and the Bronze Titan of Cuba: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper on the Limits of Black Transnationalism"

The title poem of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s collection The Martyr of Alabama and Other Poems (c.1896) is an elegy that adapts a widely circulated news story about the lynching of a young Black man in Alabama; one of the final poems, entitled “Maceo,” is an elegy honoring Antonio Maceo, and mulato Lieutenant General of the Cuban Army during the War of Independence (1895-1898). Harper’s pairing draws attention to these deaths’ capacities to narrate the struggle for Black liberation in both locales, individually and collectively. These poems reveal the idiosyncratic anti-Black racism of the USAmerican South and colonial Cuba as highly local structures stemming from the same transnational ideology (white supremacy). Black liberation, she argues, therefore requires both national and transnational approaches. Harper’s invocation of Maceo’s death, however, also underscores the limits of Afro USAmericans romanticizing Maceo and Cuban independence in the face of lynchings like that of Thompson. Situated in the intratextual context of Martyr and in the public context of Black discourses on Cuba, “Maceo” serves less as a paean for the General and more as a meta-commentary on the limits of Afro USAmericans apotheosizing a foreign figure as a race martyr as a solution to anti-Black domestic terrorism.