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GILROY: NEITHER BLACK NOR ATLANTIC

political and economic characteristics. Yet as Moses points out convincingly,
it is impossible to understand Delany and the Pan Africanists of this
period without understanding that they lived in the shadow of the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 leading
up to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 in the United States. This
was the period which Moses characterizes as ‘Classical Black
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Nationalism’ – from 1850–1862. The central point to understand when
reading these writers is the fact that they lived and wrote during the pre-
Civil War period when the bourgeois North seemed to be evading a clash
with the slaveholding South.
This was a period of political maneuvering when it seemed that the
struggles to abolish slavery would be defeated and the political and eco-
nomic interests of the semi-capitalist slave-holding plantocracy of the
South would prevail, because of the pusillanimity of the Northern bour-
geoisie. It was the pessimism induced by this period, as Moses points out
at length, that explains the revived interest in Liberia among black nation-
alists of the period and their attraction to the idea of the establishment of
a black nation in Africa or anywhere, in spite of the fact that such projects
had always been associated with the denial of the rights of free persons of
color and the deportation projects of the pro-slavery American
Colonization Society. Gilroy does observe, in relation to the later shift in
Delany’s position away from emigrationism to what Gilroy dubs ‘patrio-
tism’ – that ‘the civil war was the catalyst’. But a firm grasp of the pre-
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cise specifics of the historical context is not presented as central to the
analysis of Delany’s life and work. On the contrary, ‘presentism’ prevails.
For example, in a long quotation, Delany is excoriated for his mid-
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nineteenth-century Victorian patriarchal beliefs about the family. This,
of course, is an easy ahistorical point to score from the standpoint of late
twentieth-century feminism. In fact, it is certainly possible to read Delany’s
ideas in favor of the education of women in the nineteenth century in
precisely opposite terms – as in keeping with the most advanced views of
his time. This kind of ‘presentism’ also leads to speculations in a psycho-
analytical vein about Delany’s ideas, all of which are unsupported by any
further evidence. The following is a typical passage:

Campbell saw Africa as his motherland while Delany, even when he
referred to Africa with the female pronoun, persisted in calling the continent
the fatherland. I want to suggest that this obstinacy expresses something
profound and characteristic about Delany’s sense of the relationship
between nationality, citizenship, masculinity. He was probably the first black
thinker to make the argument that the integrity of the race is primarily the
integrity of its male household and secondarily the integrity of the families

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