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Grant Shreve, The Exodus of Martin Delany, American Literary History, Volume 29, Issue 3, Fall 2017, Pages 449–473, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajx019
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Abstract
This essay recovers the political theology of black emigrationism in Martin Delany’s sole novel, Blake; or, the Huts of America (1859–62). It begins by examining the problems of legitimation plaguing the novel’s eponymous hero when he plots a nationwide slave rebellion in the antebellum US and presents himself as a black Moses. The novel’s reappropriation of the Exodus story in the context of a Protestantized slave rebellion, I argue, opens a theopolitical abyss that requires Blake to abandon his rebellion and stage an exodus into Cuba, where Delany develops what I term his Canaan politics, which complicate and extend familiar accounts of black Exodus politics. In this new Canaan, Blake devises a shared public religion that reimagines the establishment of state religion as a practical political and theological act necessary to inoculate a new society against hypostatized racial hierarchies. The essay concludes with a reconsideration of Delany’s other major work from this period, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, examining how it nuances and extends his Canaan politics by emphasizing the practical and bodily dimensions of emigration.