Page 61 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

over which they preside. The model he proposed aligned the power of the
male head of household in the private sphere with the noble status of the
soldier-citizen which complemented it in the public realm. Delany’s appeal
today is that of the supreme patriarch. 28

No evidence is offered to support the assertion that late twentieth-century
interest in Delany is due to his alleged patriarchalism. Nor is any evi-
dence offered for the pronouncement that ‘Delany can now be recog-
nized as the progenitor of black Atlantic patriarchy.’ This psychoanalytic
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approach leads to a narrowing of the significance of Delany and, a fortiori,
of the struggles of black people in that period for a better life. It is certainly
not how Delany is treated in the work of other scholars. 30 More impor-
tantly, such an approach obscures just what is distinctive in Delany’s
writings – his typically (bourgeois) mid-nineteenth-century emphasis on
the importance of the establishment of a strong black nation–state. This
same outlook also shows itself in his commitment to economic develop-
ment for black people in America and also to the development of Africa.
This was undoubtedly progressive for its time. One only has to consider
the positive development of African-American life during the period of
Black Reconstruction and the disastrous deracination which followed its
destruction, as well as the current economic crisis in African-America
and in Africa, to appreciate the prescience of Delany’s ideas.
Gilroy also presents an analysis of Delany’s novel Blake; or, the Huts
of America, first published in 1859 and contrasts it with the far better
known and influential political and ethnographic work of Delany such as
Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of the Races or of The Condition,
Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
(1852). Moses’ analysis of these works make it clear that Delany was very
much a black nationalist of his particular era and presents Delany as pre-
cisely the type of black nationalist that Gilroy says he was not. 31 But
Blake is important for Gilroy’s argument because he uses it to argue that
‘the version of black solidarity Blake advances is explicitly anti-ethnic
and opposes narrow African American exceptionalism in the name of a
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truly pan-African diaspora sensibility’. But this again is another case of
Gilroy reading his own notions into Delany. For, taking into account his
work as a whole including Blake and, especially the Principia, it is clear
that Delany derives his sense of Africanity and his rationale for a black
nation–state broadly in the familiar romantic nationalist Volksgeist terms,
characteristic of nineteenth-century German, Polish or Italian nationalism.
In this respect, as in all these cases, including the Zionist case, national
consciousness is not at all thought to have arisen from and to express a

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