| Abstrakt: |
This paper analyzes Martin Delaney's novel Blake; or The Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba (1859, 1861-2) from the point of view of its main character whose quest for liberating black slaves in Antebellum America to form a diasporic African nation oscillates between his responsibility as a revolutionary hero and his duty as a husband. Deprived of his freedom and then of his wife, Blake seems to be finally ready to reclaim them both, and in doing so to reclaim the two physical bodies, his and his wife's, that define him as a revolutionary subject. Read this way, it seems that Delany's idea of revolution is inscribed by the negation of the body, both personal and conjugal, negation that is perceived as an injury whose undoing can only be performed by a revolutionary move needed to restore the humanity of the personal body and the unity of the conjugal one. By conflating the three narratives of the novel, the slave narrative, the domestic narrative and the revolution narrative, Delany shows a possible way that can sustain, move forward, and finally actualize a revolution. In the end, the family reunion narrative collapses into the revolution narrative to prove that the restoration of the domestic means the actualization of the revolution, thus placing marriage at the center of both private and public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
