Scenes of Speculation: Abolition and the Movement Literatures of Black North America, 1783-1876

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attempts to create re-settlement projects for free Africans in the Americas reveal how rhetorics of debt and investment were integrated into anti- slavery discourse from the beginnings of the United States. However, these re-settlement efforts have often been studied through the framework of nation-building and statecraft rather than from the vantage of common print and manuscript cultures of early African America. In Scenes of Speculation: Abolition and the Movement Literatures of Black North America, 1783-1876, I build a literary geography of early African American letters that focuses on how Black people wrote themselves into the narrative of U.S. expansion by asserting their right to be American as a right to own land, build credit, and hold property. My project re-casts Black nineteenth-century print and manuscript cultures as forms of “movement literature” that are always mapping their relation to abolition as a “for-us, by-us” activist project that measures its value in freedom. Ultimately I argue that by looking at early African American literature, we can track an enduring critique of American settler state that asserts that the right to remain in one’s adopted homelands and Black cultural sovereignty are fundamentally related forms of self-possession. I analyze how Black abolitionists leveraged property, landholding, and debt to further radical dreams of liberated futures, marking their belief that such investments would generate future value in the form of freedom rather than money. Across my dissertation I model an approach to early African American literature that tracks how free and enslaved Black people asserted their right to American citizenship by insisting that they had a substantive relationship with the land of the Americas itself. In my chapters I analyze genres varying from personal correspondence, petitions, poetry, novels, memoirs, speeches, periodicals, advertisements, portraiture, annual reports, ledgers, and journals. Over the dissertation I visit how locations such as Liberia, England, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Sierra Leone, and Cherokee Nation factor into Black visions of hemispheric anti-slavery movements.

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