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Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature . Judith Madera. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. ix+300.

2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/688023

1545-6951

Robert S. Levine,

American Environmental and Regional History

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewBlack Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Judith Madera. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. ix+300.Robert S. LevineRobert S. LevineUniversity of Maryland Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJudith Madera’s large claim in her insightful and sometimes revelatory book is that African American fiction during the period 1849–1900 is “starkly geographic” (8). By this she means that African American writers regularly explore the processes that contribute to the making of a place (whether a slave plantation in Virginia or the neighborhoods of Boston), and that they attempt to reclaim and refashion geographic places through narrative acts of deterritorialization (for this concept she draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari). Place, as Madera makes clear, is often something of an actor or leading character in African American novels of the period. In the five chapters of her study, Madera examines African American fiction in transnational and hemispheric contexts, but the large achievement of the book lies in its intranational approach to African American writers’ geographical imaginations.The clear hero of Madera’s study is the black nationalist Martin R. Delany (1812–85), who wrote about blacks in all regions of the United States even as he urged African Americans at various times in his career to emigrate to Central America or Africa. In such key works as The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), “Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent” (1854), and Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859, 1861–62), Delany addressed US expansionism, the challenge of creating black community in the United States and abroad, the treatment of Native Americans, and the impact of slavery on the social landscape, even in free black communities. Paying especially close attention to Blake, his two-part serialized novel, Madera devotes a chapter to each part and puts those parts in dialogue not with each other but with competing forms of geographical representations of the period. Thus she reads Blake’s first part in relation to the little-known (but truly fascinating) The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth: Mountaineer, Scout and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians (1856) and in a subsequent chapter reads the novel’s second part in relation to popular maps of the period. In the discussion of Delany and the black explorer Beckwourth, Madera develops what she terms a “processual view of territory” (74), showing how in both works “territory—very much like empire—gets made through narrative projections into physical space” (72). But there are key differences between the two writers. Beckwourth is mainly committed to extending national space and making money, and thus can seem to be exploiting the Crow Indians who he claims made him a chief. By contrast, Delany in the first part of his novel presents the slave rebel, Blake, in constant motion, interacting with various black communities, learning from the Chicksaw and Choctaw Indians about how to develop a counternation within a nation, and unsettling the space of the southern plantation as he moves across the South. Madera sees Delany doing something very different, though complementary, in the second part of his novel: presenting a cartographic vision of Cuba as a place for African American oppositional initiatives. Madera develops this argument by reading Blake in relation to popular maps of the period in which the United States is positioned as dominating over and even controlling the Caribbean. In the second part of Blake, then, Delany develops what Madera terms a “novelistic counter-map” (144) in which blacks work to end slavery in Cuba while contesting US claims on the Caribbean. Madera nicely terms these efforts “a cogent rewiring of the American axis established in dominant maps” (145).Early in her book Madera states, “Geographical knowledge is produced through narrative” (6). If there is a weakness in this study, it is that Madera doesn’t completely follow through on that claim. In the two Delany chapters, Madera shows how Delany deploys narrative to imaginatively unfix and refashion settled geographic places, but the other chapters could use more discussion of how narrative works to create places and then engage readers in those places. In the overall book, there is much theorizing about the geographical but relatively little about the narratological. In a chapter on Pauline Hopkins’s novel Contending Forces (1900), for example, Madera discusses how crucial the local (Boston) is to the novel’s larger national and transnational themes. She rightly insists that “Hopkins brings readers into the texture of black Beacon Hill” (167). But instead of showing how Hopkins does this in her melodramatic novel, Madera assumes what at times seems like the role of a tour guide, describing various places that are crucial to the novel—Boston’s South End, St. Paul’s Baptist Church—by providing information available in historical studies. Madera does something similar in her otherwise excellent chapter on William Wells Brown when she provides historical backgrounds on three of the main settings of Brown’s novel Clotel (1853)—Richmond, Vicksburg, and Natchez. In both cases, more could have been said about how Hopkins and Brown use narrative to draw readers into their novels’ respective geographies. This is not to say that Madera cannot be engaging on narratological issues, even with these authors. She is very good on what she terms “panic cartographies” (26) in Brown, those moments in Clotel that describe “spaces of dissimilitude, straining against their form” (26). She is also quite good on black churches and boardinghouses as organizing spaces of Contending Forces. And in one of the best chapters in the study, Madera—through close readings of key stories from Dunbar-Nelson’s relatively neglected collections of short fiction about Creoles in New Orleans—Violets and Other Tales (1895) and The Goodness of St. Roque (1899)—offers a revisionary way of thinking about black regionalism in terms of process, conflict, and tensions between the local and transnational.Finally, it is worth saying that this book on African American literary geographies is also a superb guide to recent work on nationalism, transnationalism, geography, and social space. Madera has read widely in critical theory, and she works with and against the best theoretical writers on the key topics of her study to develop exciting new interpretive perspectives. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 3February 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/688023HistoryPublished online December 13, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.