Blake; Or, the Huts of America: A Corrected Edition

By Martin R. Delany

Book Overview

Martin R. Delany's Blake (1859, 1861-1862) is one of the most important African American--and indeed American--works of fiction of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of Henry Blake's escape from a southern plantation and his subsequent travels across the United States, into Canada, and to Africa and Cuba. His mission is to unite the black populations of the American Atlantic regions, both free and slave, in the struggle for freedom, whether through insurrection or through emigration and the creation of an independent black state. Blake is a rhetorical masterpiece, all the more strange and mysterious for remaining incomplete, breaking off before its final scene.

This edition of Blake, prepared by textual scholar Jerome McGann, offers the first correct printing of the work in book form. It establishes an accurate text, supplies contextual notes and commentaries, and presents an authoritative account of the work's composition and publication history. In a lively introduction, McGann argues that Delany employs the resources of fiction to develop a critical account of the interconnected structure of racist power as it operated throughout the American Atlantic. He likens Blake to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, in its willful determination to transform a living and terrible present.

Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition will be used in undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of African American fiction, on the history of the American novel, and on black cultural studies. General readers will welcome as well the first reliable edition of Delany's fiction.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674088727
• ISBN13: 9780674088726
• Release Date: February 2017
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Who's this clown on the cover?

Good book,to bad he never finished it.

The Prophet

One commentor argued that Delany was misinformed about Cuba and that he later dropped his concept of African American separatism. Neither of these are necessarily true. Delany used Placido as a leader of Cuban rebellion not because he actually was, but because Delany was trying to create hope in African Americans that there was a Pan African world fighting for liberation. Also, Delany's joining of the army during the Civil War is not necessarily reflective of droping his belief that there was no hope for Africans in the Americas. He simply joined the military because he was dedicated to freeing the Africans FIRST, with the hope that later they can create their own state. Delany was a Garvey before his time. Unfortunately he is written off by European Americans and those that wish to please them as a "militant" or a "radical". What's militant or radical about fighting for freedom? His idea that separatism was better was not about reverse racial prejudice, he just believed (as did many judges in Plessy Vs Ferguson) that Africans had to liberate themselves and build together before they could be equals. In fact his belief is resonate today; though there are African Americans who are successful, the vast majority remain in ghettos. Yes, Delany's message was never about reverse racial prejudice, but about creating an African society that was not the foot stool of a European one.

One of the most important African American texts ever

When Martin Delany wrote this book, he was along with his sometime collaborator Frederick Douglass, one of the two most prominent African American leaders in the country, and like Douglass his reputation extended beyond the United States to England and other parts of Europe. Unlike Douglass, Delany was even known in West Africa from which he recently returned where he had negotiated with AFrican leaders about with his economic and political plans. Indeed, in the months while Blake was published as a serial in the Anglo-African newspaper, Delany toured the US lecturing on Africa wearing African robes! Delany's book is one in a series of texts written by African American authors in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Despite Stowe's assistance to this project by writing small poems introducing it,one of the sub texts of Blake is to show the difference between the realities of Slavery and the picture Stowe painted in Uncle Tom. Indeed, Daleny's hero Henry Blake is placed in the exact same place time and position as Uncle Tom, but instead of heroically suffering and dying and inspiring while refusing to physically resist slavery, Henry Blake runs away from slavery to organize an international revolution against slavery. (To be fair, Stowe admits in Uncle Tom's Cabin her book made slavery seem nicer than it really was because she believed slavery was so awful that the white Northern readers she targeted would be too disgusted to read a book that accurately described it. Moreover, by the time Delany wrote Blake, Stowe's views had become more militant. She had written Dred, a book whose Black hero leads a slave revolt.) Blake reflects the deep pessimism of the period, ironically only a few years before the end of slavery. In fact, though he was born free and had no fear of the fugitive slave laws, Delany had left the United States and moved to Chatham, Ontario by the time he wrote Blake, so despairing he was of the future of Black men. Delany urged Black people to leave the United States and proposed building an independent Black nation in Central America that could be a base for liberation of the slaves in all of the Americas. This task is taken upon in fictional guise by Henry Blake the hero of this novel. He escapes and goes on a travel through the slave and free states of the US, in a round based on the travels in Uncle Tom, on an itnerary that had become standard for books about slavery in this period. Blake's conclusion is that the slaves and even well-off freed blacks lack the leadership, culture, or education to lead a revolt of their own. The solution to this problem is found by Blake when Blake reveals that he is actually Henricus Blaccus, a distinguished, cultured Afro-Cuban captured into American Slavery. He leaves the US for Cuba and rejoins a company of similarly well off, cultured, and artistic Afro-Cubans conspiring to overthrow slavery and Spanish rule and make Cuba into a base for African