Reviewed by:

• Blake, or, The Huts of America by Martin Robison Delany
• Charlette Caldwell (bio)

Seen here is one of several large commemorative prints that marked the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment on Feb 3, 1870. The amendment declared that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This print depicts a celebratory parade held in Baltimore on May 19, 1870. Many prominent figures and scenes relating to the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment are portrayed as vignettes framing the parade. To the right are busts of distinguished Black men of the time: Martin Robinson Delany, Frederick Douglass, and Hiram R. Revels. On the left are busts of late Pennsylvania representative and champion of Black suffrage, Thaddeus Stevens, Maryland representative Henry Winter Davis, and the author of the Wade-Davis Bill and Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-pga-02178 DLC.

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Martin Robison Delany (1812–1885) was a writer, physician, activist, soldier, and Black emigrationist. Delany’s Blake, or, The Huts of America was one of the first novels written by a Black author. It offers a radical revolutionary rhetoric in a time of national and political tension over the immorality of slavery. Separated into two parts, Blake is the story of an enslaved Black man named Henry Holland, or Henry Blake, who escapes from a plantation in Mississippi when his wife is sold after refusing the sexual advances of the plantation owner. Part one follows Henry around the continental United States in his quest to galvanize other enslaved laborers into rising against their White masters. In part two, Henry journeys to Cuba attempting to spark an uprising amongst the enslaved. Henry finds his wife in Cuba and the uprisings commence before the original manuscript ends without a satisfactory ending. The extended obscurity of Blake until its rediscovery in the mid-twentieth century can be directed to its serial publication in only two periodicals and the interruption of the publication at the advent of the American Civil War.¹ However, some scholars speculate that Delany may have purposely left Blake incomplete, adding more complexity to its revolutionary form. Throughout Blake’s nonlinear narrative—in part two, the reader learns that Henry was born free but was captured and sold into slavery after boarding a military ship in his youth—Delany’s Black nationalism comes to the fore as elements of Pan-Africanism and Black diaspora interlace and overlap, as the characters move temporally and geographically through the story.

Blake falls in line with the legacy of Black Americans investigating and critiquing the Black “self,” which ran counter to and parallel with Whiteness in the United States. The “self” in Blake is supported by a Black consciousness that self-emancipates through action. The selection of this text is important as it demonstrates early fiction work of a Black author in the nineteenth century. The contemporary issues that Delany addresses in his novel are those shared by many at the time and this perspective adds another layer to cultural production of Black American culture.² In its radical themes, Blake is reminiscent of elements of Afrofuturism: while it does not technically lean on the technological incorporation that is key in Afrofuturism, Blake does imagine different futures and homes through the Black American experience. These imaginations [End Page 39] of alternative Black futures (and pasts) are also present in fictional texts produced by figures such as Du Bois, who published science fiction stories such as “The Comet” and “The Princess Steel.” “The Comet” tells the story of a Black man and a White woman as the sole survivors after a comet destroys New York and racial entanglements of the time, while “The Princess Steel” plays on White prejudices in the form of an imagined Medieval past occupied by figures with Black skin. Blake functions as a pioneering text in this genre as a fictional, imagined...

审核人：

• 布莱克，或者，马丁·罗宾逊·德拉尼 (Martin Robison Delany) 的美国小屋
• 夏莱特·考德威尔（生平）

此处展示的是标志着 1870 年 2 月 3 日第十五修正案颁布的几幅大型纪念版画之一。该修正案宣布投票权“不得因种族原因被美国或任何州拒绝或剥夺” 、颜色或以前的奴役条件。” 这幅版画描绘了 1870 年 5 月 19 日在巴尔的摩举行的庆祝游行。许多与第十五修正案的颁布有关的著名人物和场景被描绘成游行的小插曲。右边是当时杰出黑人的半身像：马丁·罗宾逊·德拉尼、弗雷德里克·道格拉斯和海勒姆·R·雷弗斯。左边是已故宾夕法尼亚州代表和黑人选举权的拥护者撒迪厄斯史蒂文斯，马里兰州代表亨利温特戴维斯的半身像，韦德-戴维斯法案的作者和马萨诸塞州参议员查尔斯·萨姆纳。美国国会图书馆，LC-DIG-pga-02178 DLC。

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马丁·罗宾逊·德拉尼 (Martin Robison Delany)（1812-1885 年）是一位作家、医生、活动家、军人和黑人移民者。德拉尼的《布莱克》或《美国小屋》是黑人作家最早创作的小说之一。在奴隶制不道德的国家和政治紧张时期，它提供了激进的革命言论。分为两部分，布雷克是一个名叫亨利·霍兰德或亨利·布莱克的被奴役黑人的故事，他在拒绝种植园主的性挑逗后将妻子卖掉后逃离了密西西比州的一个种植园。第一部分跟随亨利走遍美国大陆，寻求激励其他被奴役的劳工起来反抗他们的白人主人。在第二部分中，亨利前往古巴，试图在被奴役者中引发起义。亨利在古巴找到了他的妻子，起义在原稿没有圆满结束之前就开始了。布莱克在 20 世纪中叶被重新发现之前一直默默无闻，这可以归因于它仅在两本期刊上连续出版，以及在美国内战来临时出版中断。¹ 然而，一些学者推测德拉尼可能故意让布莱克不完整，为其革命形式增加了更多复杂性。在整个布莱克的非线性叙事中——在第二部分中，读者了解到亨利生来自由，但在他年轻时登上一艘军舰后被俘虏并卖为奴隶——德拉尼的黑人民族主义作为泛非主义和黑人的元素脱颖而出随着故事中人物在时间和地理上的移动，侨民交织和重叠。

布莱克符合美国黑人调查和批评黑人“自我”的传统，这与美国的白人身份背道而驰。布莱克的“自我”得到了通过行动自我解放的黑人意识的支持。这篇文章的选择很重要，因为它展示了 19 世纪一位黑人作家的早期小说作品。德拉尼在他的小说中解决的当代问题是当时许多人所共有的，这种观点为美国黑人文化的文化生产增添了另一层。² 在其激进的主题中，布莱克让人想起非洲未来主义的元素：虽然它在技术上并不依赖于非洲未来主义的关键技术整合，但布莱克确实通过美国黑人的经历想象了不同的未来和家园。这些对另类黑人未来（和过去）的想象 [End Page 39] 也出现在杜波依斯等人物创作的虚构文本中，杜波依斯发表了科幻小说，如“彗星”和“钢铁公主”。“彗星”讲述了彗星摧毁纽约后唯一幸存的黑人和白人妇女的故事以及当时的种族纠葛，而“钢铁公主”则以想象中的中世纪过去的形式对白人的偏见进行了处理被黑皮肤的人物占据。布莱克作为这一类型的开创性文本，作为虚构的、想象的……