| "Triangulating Race" revises the African American literary tradition through an examination of the native in early African American literature. Recovering these understudied texts and examining them as an archive reveals that the native has been a foundational and recurrent figure in African American literature. The triangulation of Euro-American, Native American, and African American identities enabled African American writers to circumvent the binarism of race in America.;The first chapter uses eighteenth century environmental explanations of human difference to revise current scholarship on the African American captivity narrative. Lucy Terry's "Bars Fight" (1746), Briton Hammon's Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings (1760), and John Marrant's A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings (1785) use the experience of captivity and its resultant triangulation of identities to change the environmental context in which their race is constructed, thereby enabling them to access localized communal belonging.;Chapter two considers the ways African Americans used the figure of the native to define themselves collectively and individually during the 1850s. In the first section, I argue that Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, Martin Delany, and Josiah Henson strategically use American ethnology generally, and the Native American specifically, to develop their respective visions for African Americans' relationship to the United States. The second section reads two autobiographies in which African Americans are adopted into Native American tribes: Okah Tubbee's A Sketch of the Life (1852) and James Beckwourth's Life and Adventures (1856). By centering their identities in native kinship, Tubbee and Beckwourth challenge normative definitions of racial ontology.;Chapter three considers the region as a space that could foster more nuanced, hybrid identity. Albery Allson Whitman's The Rape of Florida (1884) and Pauline Hopkins' Winona (1905) portray Afro-Native communities that cultivate identities rooted in shared culture rather than genealogy. In contrast, Nat Love's Life and Adventures (1907) portrays the west as a region where African Americans can transcend race in opposition to greater national threats. In all three texts, the region is overcome by a national movement, and as such, they critique U.S. imperialism at the turn of the century. |
