Ivy G. Wilson

On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and “The Heroic Slave”

Beginning with a reconsideration of the symbolic ending of “The Heroic Slave,” where Madison Washington and his compatriots find themselves in the Bahamas and not the United States, this article works through Frederick Douglass’s understanding of national affiliation. Taking two specific problems in his imagination—the rhetoric of democracy and transnationalism—I reassess the concept of national affiliation for African Americans when political citizenship is denied. Through its protagonist, Washington, who is thoroughly versed in the vocabulary of United States nationalism, “The Heroic Slave” discloses the incongruence between the rhetoric of nationalism and its materialization as a failure of democratic enactment. The text also intimates Douglass’s increasing recognition of transnationalism as an affective system of imagined belonging based on either a shared belief (in democracy) or racial contingency. By deterritorializing cultural belonging, “The Heroic Slave” depicts the liminal position of African A...

Organic Compacts, Form, and the Cultural Logic of Cohesion; or, Whitman Re-Bound

Walt Whitman’s poetry and poetics have frequently been thought of as “unbound” in both content and form. The first published review of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, Charles A. Dana’s in the New-York Daily Tribune, observed that the poems were “certainly original in their external form,” that they had been “shaped on no pre-existent model out of the author’s own brain.” Other contemporaneous critics noted Whitman’s rupturing of poetic convention: Charles Eliot Norton in 1855 called Leaves of Grass a “very irregular production,” a sentiment reiterated by Henry James in 1865. Some readers may have been willing to accept blank verse, but Whitman’s seeming indulgence in so-called free verse was—and until at least the early twentieth century continued to be—figuratively out of bounds. Early reviews of Leaves of Grass like Dana’s and Norton’s saw the volume as a violation not only of the aesthetic properties of poetry but also as a breach of social decorum. Norton, for example, criticized the poet for employing “words usually banished from polite society . . . with perfect indifference to the effect on the reader’s mind,” adding that it was not a book “to be read aloud to a mixed audience.” This kind of reaction persisted through such critics as T. S. Eliot, who famously announced that he had to ivy g. wilson