The Racial Economy of Perception: Reading Black Sociality in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article investigates a central problem for literary aesthetics in the nineteenth century: why literature won't directly represent Black revolution. It argues that in Blake; or, The Huts of America, Martin Delany thinks through the structural impossibility of conceptualizing a specifically Black sociality by continually refusing to depict Black revolution at the level of the plot. Instead, Blake ties together Black labor with revolution to suggest that within the context of the system of capital in the nineteenth century, Black labor's central role in the world economy renders the social nature of Black revolution similarly imperceptible. Blake reproduces this imperceptibility and unthinkability through its structure. The book, which is famously incomplete, ends just as a violent revolution is about to erupt in Cuba. Whether the final chapters were lost or never written in the first place, this article tracks how this same anticlimactic and nonrepresentational narrative mode is repeated throughout the novel. It suggests that these conspicuous absences serve as formal literary interventions that point toward the impossibility of thinking, sensing, and thereby representing a specifically Black sociality. The article explores how Delany adopts the literary technique of withholding used in the slave narrative to actively play with the formal and generic bounds of the novel and the slave narrative alike. By adopting this familiar technique, Delany asks what role the novel has within the African American literary tradition and what role fiction can play in interrogating the limits of a mode of political thought hemmed in by a racialized political economy.

Toward the beginning of Martin Delany's Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859, 1861–62), Judge Ballard arrives in Natchez, Mississippi, to meet with Major Armsted and Colonel Franks to discuss his intention to buy both a plantation and an interest in the Merchantman—a Baltimore clipper that later in the novel is refitted as a slave ship and renamed the Vulture. As might be expected in a meeting between northerners and southerners, the conversation quickly turns to Ballard's views on slavery, even though Ballard, a northern judge, is already an enslaver and owner of a cotton plantation in Cuba and, in the fictional world of the novel, had a hand in the ruling that upheld the Fugitive Slave Law. Having been asked his opinion of the relatively fluid racial and class boundaries in Cuba, Ballard expresses utter disgust: “I cannot for a moment tolerate it! One of the hateful customs of the place is that you must exchange civilities with whomsoever solicits it, consequently, the most stupid and ugly negro you meet in the street may ask for a ‘light’ from your cigar” (Delany 64). Ballard's disgust at what looks like a greater level of social equality as compared to the US quickly becomes something much more physical, more visceral. Ballard says that while in Cuba he will “invariably comply with the request” to use his cigar to light a Black person's, he nevertheless will “as invariably” throw his cigar away, “[b]ecause they are certain to take hold of it with their black fingers!” (64). Any semblance of equality between Black and white people is abhorrent to Ballard. But physical contact—the sight of “black fingers” touching his cigar—is revolting.

In certain respects, playing out in these pages is a familiar trope of antislavery writing. The northern white, Ballard, proves to possess a much more intense prejudice against people of color than the southern enslaver, Armsted, who is accustomed to being around enslaved people of color more regularly. Accordingly, Armsted is quick to point out the deep contradiction in Ballard's reaction: “You northerners are a great deal more fastidious about negros than we of the south. . . . Did ever it occur to you that black fingers made that cigar, before it entered your white lips!” (64). Armsted draws attention to a certain white blindness—an inability to perceive what is otherwise obvious, or at least readily apparent. “Does that surprise you Judge?” Armsted continues, “I'm sure the victuals you eat is cooked by black hands, the bread kneaded and made by black hands, and the sugar and molasses you use, all pass through black hands, or rather the hands of negroes pass through them” (64). Black hands, Armsted reminds Ballard, touch nearly everything that white people consume—a fact that Ballard knows, but which ultimately does not register for him: “Well, Major,” Ballard replies, “truly there are some things we are obliged to swallow, and I suppose these are among them” (64).

Just as Ballard swallows bread, sugar, and molasses, he is also “obliged to swallow” the fact that the products he consumes every day are the products of Black labor; if the thought of Black hands touching his cigar disgusts him, then the notion of “the hands of negroes pass[ing] through” his sugar and molasses “with arms full length immersed” would be beyond tolerance (64). Labor, and Black labor in particular, does not register for Ballard. Through this pun on “obliged to swallow,” Delany suggests that white consumption depends on the disavowal of the centrality of Black labor and an almost structural refusal of the ability to perceive it; or, as Jeffory A. Clymer puts it, “whites' habitual blindness to the crucial roles people of color have historically played in the Western Hemisphere's economy” (721). This blindness is not based in physical perceptive ability, for it is clear that Ballard understands that Black labor is all around him, and his reply indicates that he knows very well that his food is produced by Black hands. Nevertheless, if he wants to eat, he simply has to accept this fact. As a property-owning capitalist whose money has been made through his investments in the slave system, Ballard has a deep knowledge of this process of production—indeed, he has seen it with his own eyes; nevertheless, it refuses to register with him. Perception—what registers and what does not—has a structure. And that structure is determined by a particular intertwinement of race and economics.¹

I call this moment in which Ballard is unable to perceive the Black labor that is everywhere around him a moment of imperception: imperception describes the process by which certain objects or events refuse to register intellectually, even when they are otherwise perceptible by the senses. This moment of imperception is spurred by the influence of a racialized political economy on the senses. In Blake, Delany seeks to understand how race and economics structure perception by investigating how this confluence of forces renders not just Black labor but Black sociality imperceptible. For Delany, the senses are not mere conveyors of empirical data; rather, they are a product of definite social and historical conditioning. Delany therefore takes up a position not unlike that of Karl Marx, who writes in the 1844 Manuscripts: “The development of the five senses is a labor of the whole previous history of the world” (Economic 309). Marx, who was at work in precisely the same period as Delany, is interested in how the relations of capital make it impossible to sense the inherently social element of the commodity: labor. Delany adds to this concern the impossibility of both sensing and thinking a Black sociality that is grounded in labor, but which also extends to the social nature of Black revolution—an impossibility that provides the basis for a specifically Black politics.

In this essay I argue that Delany in Blake renders through literary form the imperceptibility of Black social life in the nineteenth century by focusing on the erasure of the shared social nature of both labor and revolution. While Blake is ostensibly a novel about Black revolution, the text never brings that revolution into direct representation. Much like Herman Melville in his better-known “Benito Cereno” (1855), the anesthetic rendering of Black revolution is central to the structure of Blake: the organizing principle of Delany's serialized novel, I suggest, is the repeated refusal to depict revolution at the level of the plot. These refusals occur at three key moments in the novel that correspond to three key locations in the world of the Black Atlantic: the southern US, the Middle Passage, and Cuba. Thus, just as these three sites played important roles in the world of Atlantic slavery, these three refusals to depict revolution represent important structural elements for the form of Delany's novel. As I will show, the tools of labor are essential to these nonrepresentational scenes of revolution. Delany therefore formalizes a conceptual social link between labor and revolution that remains fundamentally imperceptible to the white sensorium. As I will argue, these absences teach the reader to read for the structural limits to a sensorium conditioned by history—a sensorium for which Black labor, revolution, and sociality as such all remain imperceptible. Both Delany's and Melville's texts point toward a set of fundamental questions for literary aesthetics in the nineteenth century: Why won't literature directly represent Black revolution? What are the political stakes of the literary representation or nonrepresentation of Black sociality? I turn to Marx's writing on the political economy of sensory perception to consider how, when Black life is so closely tied to labor and production, it becomes just as impossible to perceive and to think as the social nature of the commodity form. Ultimately, this essay argues that the point of Blake is not to directly represent Black labor or revolution, but rather to demonstrate how the structures of capital render imperceptible to the white sensorium the shared social nature of both—an interaction that Blake makes legible and cognizable through literary form.

Revolution and the Novel

Blake's plot is admittedly dizzying, not least because of its transnational and global scope. The novel is divided into two parts; part 1 focuses mostly on the protagonist, Henry Blake, and his travels throughout the southern US. While traveling the South, Henry works to plan and incite a general insurrection by secretly visiting plantations and discussing the need for revolution with enslaved people. Part 1 ends with Henry helping a group of fugitive slaves escape to Canada, all of whom marry and become property owners across the border.² Although the revolution in the US never happens, the reader does get evidence that Henry kills multiple white overseers while also encouraging others to engage in these types of individual acts of rebellion.

While part 1 involves both the southern and northern US and even extends into Canada, part 2 becomes much more transnational in scope, which has solidified the importance of Blake for critics such as Paul Gilroy, who writes that Delany brings “the black Atlantic to life” (5). The majority of part 2 is set in Cuba, where Henry similarly works to organize a revolution with the help of a Cuban poet, Plácido.³ A significant section of part 2 follows Henry on the Vulture—the refitted slave ship with which the narrative opens—as sailing master across the Atlantic to Africa. After collecting a cargo of enslaved Africans from the western coast of the continent, the narrative follows the Vulture back through the Middle Passage and finally to Cuba. Henry had intended to commandeer the Vulture while traversing the Middle Passage by inciting an insurrection among the enslaved people on board to enlist the Vulture in the larger revolution to come in Cuba. However, while the insurrection on board the ship almost happens, it never quite comes to pass. The Vulture plotline and Henry's plan to rescue his wife, who has been sold down to Cuba, both structure the narrative as a whole and provide a level of coherence between the two parts of the novel. The ending of part 2 involves a large political gathering of people of color in Cuba to plan for a general insurrection on the island and for a future state in which slavery would be outlawed. Rising tensions on the island between the white upper class and people of color close out the novel, which cuts off seemingly just before the revolution can occur.

Blake is therefore quite an odd novel. Although it is explicitly about the fomenting of a revolution of enslaved people, that revolution is never represented in its pages. Indeed, this strangeness is compounded by the fact that Delany is known and remembered for his embrace of revolutionary violence and Black nationalism—especially in contrast to the more tempered and republican-minded Frederick Douglass, with whom he coedited the North Star, founded in 1847.⁴ This leaves us with something of a dilemma: if Delany was such a strong supporter of radical Black violence, why does his only novel shy away from direct representations of it?

The question of whether Blake should have represented revolution has divided critics since the novel began to gain popularity in the 1970s. Critics such as Carla L. Peterson have argued that, by not depicting revolution at the level of the plot, Delany shows “great difficulty in conceptualizing the mechanisms of revolution, even in fictional form, and achieving narrative closure”; this, she continues, points to “irreconcilable contradictions within Delany's black nationalist capitalist ideology” (576). Connecting Delany's political convictions with the supposed aesthetic failures of Blake, the absence of a fictional representation of revolution becomes evidence of the novel's failure as both a document of radical political thought and as a literary and aesthetic object—a point that has been echoed by a long line of scholars.⁵ This tradition reaches its apogee with Jean Fagan Yellin, who argues that Blake does not succeed as a novel because of its “clumsy style” that causes the “book to lose coherence” (199). Yellin suggests that Blake should be understood as “a vigorous montage of black life at midcentury” or “a revolutionary handbook outlining the organization of a guerrilla army of black liberationists” (199). Blake, in other words, is not literature; it is a how-to guide for Black revolutionaries. But if Blake were a handbook, it would fail spectacularly—it never tells its reader how to organize a revolution, nor does it even show a revolution in process.

Delany's supposed inability to represent revolution ties in with a similar line of criticism that questions whether or not Blake should be read as a novel, at least in part because of its complicated publication history. Blake was serialized in two separate runs, first in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, and then in the Weekly Anglo-African from 1861 to 1862. While Blake was supposed to have a total of eighty chapters, only seventy-four are extant. We do not know if the remaining chapters are merely missing, destroyed, or were never written or printed; nevertheless, this leads Robert S. Levine to conclude, “Given the novel's multiple and conflicting sources, purposes, and audiences, and also its truncated ending, we need to be wary of efforts to develop a ‘coherent’ formalist reading of it” (179).⁶ In other words, because Blake is not quite the well-wrought urn that is required to stand up to formal analysis, Levine suggests that treating Blake as a novel is an inherently flawed project, even if it can still be understood as an interesting historical artifact. This neglect runs deep in the criticism of Blake, and Levine was certainly not the first nor the last to express this sentiment; other critics such as John Ernest have recently maintained that the historical knowledge that Blake provides can easily be detached from its form as a novel.⁷

Ultimately, the issue I take up here is not over the proper or improper use of historical context or whether or not using Delany's novel as a window into the past is a valid critical approach. Rather, I point toward the inextricability of the form of Delany's text as a literary object from the archive of knowledge with which it engages. The missing final chapters of the novel—while an intriguing historical quirk—key the reader in to an absence of revolutionary violence throughout the text. This absence, I argue, suggests that Delany was a subtler thinker and a better novelist than previously thought. Conjuring one of the other most important works on the relation between race and perception in the nineteenth century—Melville's “Benito Cereno”—Blake's intensive focus on perception has led others such as Eric Sundquist to argue convincingly that Delany wrote Blake “from Babo's point of view” (189).⁸Blake finds its natural counterpart in “Benito Cereno,” a story that similarly forces the reader to experience in narrative form what it is like to be unable to sense, recognize, and think the possibility of slave revolt, even when the signs of it are everywhere to be found. Both texts, Sundquist suggests, represent an important meditation on the relation between sensory perception, race, and revolution in the nineteenth century; together, “Benito Cereno” and Blake show that the linkages between sensory perception and cognition are ultimately malleable and are perhaps determined by the intertwinement of race and economic interest.

I therefore take up Sundquist's provocative invitation to think Blake and “Benito Cereno” as interwoven texts that find one of their most central points of relation in the issue of sensory perception: specifically, how their use of literary form intimates a relation between Black revolution and sensory perception (184). A more recent trend in Blake scholarship—spurred in part by Jerome McGann's 2017 corrected edition of Blake (the first time the book has been reprinted since Floyd J. Miller's 1970 Beacon Press edition)—has reinvigorated study of the novel. Scholars such as Sharada Balachandran Orihuela and Britt Rusert have pointed toward the interconnectedness of Blake's politics with economics (see Rusert 158; Orihuela, “Black Market” 295). Other critics such as Sean Gerrity have focused on the aesthetic dimensions of the text, seeing past the mere lack of a revolution in Blake and instead proposing a more formal analysis of how that absence opens up new avenues for understanding the relations between narrative and the novel's political convictions.⁹ Perhaps, then, the expectation that a revolution must take place at the level of the plot in Blake is a product of past critics' own stunted idea of how literature and aesthetics should relate to politics—an idea that both Delany and Melville were actively working to figure out in complex formal ways in the nineteenth century.

The Limits to Perception

I argue that the formal decision not to represent revolution or revolutionary action at the level of the plot gives Blake its coherence and its import; this is precisely the element that other critics describe as the novel's flaw, both politically and aesthetically. This nonrepresentation mirrors a structural inability to sense and make sense of the shared social aspect of Black labor and revolution, which I call here imperception. At the beginning of Blake, the reader is forced to experience imperception: the reader is excluded from the discussions of revolution that Henry has with various enslaved people as he travels around the South.¹⁰ At the moment Henry first begins to share his plans for “a general insurrection of the slaves in every state, and the successful overthrow of slavery!” (Delany 40), the text falls silent:

For the moment, the secrets are quite literally illegible. And at the same time as the characters in the novel come to an understanding, the narrative emphasizes the exclusion of the reader: nothing has been made clear to us other than the conspicuous absence of some crucial piece of information.

These early pages of Blake dramatize how readers might not be able to perceive that which is directly in front of them—something that has been seen as a bug, rather than a feature, of the book. Recontextualizing Blake within African American literary history helps make sense of these seemingly bizarre moments. As Orihuela writes, the withholding of information in the novel “recalls the numerous slave narratives of the period” wherein information was intentionally left out—typically regarding the methods people used to escape from slavery—which suggests that Blake “was formally conversant with the works circulating in this period” (“Black Revolution” 82).¹¹ Perhaps the most famous example of just such an omission comes at the climax of Frederick Douglass's Narrative, where in two short sentences Douglass tells his reader that he successfully escaped from slavery, while leaving out nearly all the specifics: “[O]n the third day of September, 1838, I left my chains, and succeeded in reaching New York without the slightest interruption of any kind. How I did so,—what means I adopted,—what direction I travelled, and by what mode of conveyance,—I must leave unexplained” (89). As John Stauffer explains, “truth-telling was Douglass's most powerful weapon in fighting slavery,” which makes the exclusion of the specifics of his escape all the more notable (xv). As Douglass himself writes of his escape in his Narrative, “I deeply regret the necessity that impels me to suppress any thing of importance connected with my experience in slavery. It would afford me great pleasure indeed . . . were I at liberty to gratify a curiosity, which I know exists in the minds of many, by an accurate statement of all the facts pertaining to my most fortunate escape” (84). Douglass's omission is therefore tactical: it serves a direct political purpose, namely, to ensure that his Narrative does not “run the hazard of closing the slightest avenue by which a brother slave might clear himself of the chains and fetters of slavery” (85). Through this conscious omission, Douglass withholds from the reader the drama of the escape—a drama that others such as Henry Box Brown would exploit, much to Douglass's chagrin.¹²

Delany's decision to omit the plans for Blake's revolution from the text of Blake therefore feels structurally very similar to Douglass's omission. In both cases, the texts draw attention to the fact that the reader is missing a key piece of information, which Delany reinforces through Charles's response—“what fools we was that we didn't know it long ago!”—effectively implying that the reader too is a fool for being unaware of something so simple (Delany 41). Douglass's Narrative adheres to a similar structure, where Douglass spends the first couple of pages of chapter 11 parsing the ethics of making such knowledge public, which leads him to refer to the Underground Railroad as the “upper-ground railroad”: the open discussion of which contributes nothing toward “enlightening the slave” and instead only works “towards enlightening the master” (85). Delany, of course, would have been familiar with Douglass's Narrative both because of the book's near-immediate popularity and because of Delany's close personal and professional relationship with Douglass.¹³ By effectively citing Douglass and the form of the slave narrative through the inclusion of the literary technique of the conspicuous withholding of information from the reader, Delany places Blake squarely within the African American literary tradition.

But when Delany carries over this tradition from the nonfiction genre of the slave narrative to the fictional world of the novel, he also asks his reader to reflect on the literary effect of that technique. This early scene in Blake corresponds quite closely to the coordinates of the slave narrative. For the moment, the reader cannot read Blake's plans for revolution; withheld from the reader are the social and political networks that would constitute the basis of a Black sociality through the act of revolution. But Delany's return to the technique of withholding throughout the novel suggests that he is working to transform that technique into something beyond its original tactical purpose, which gives us reason to reflect on larger issues of how the novel form can be used to interrogate the political, economic, and historical determination of perception itself. Put simply, Delany's use of the technique makes his readers conscious of being excluded, but, unlike Douglass, Delany does not tell us why. What if, Delany asks, this is the way perception works? What if those networks, those plans for revolution, and the material for a Black sociality were abundantly obvious, but nevertheless could remain imperceptible? How might the form of the novel offer up to its readers this historically specific mode of perception—a mode of perception that is determined by the political and economic limits of thinking Black sociality? Indeed, through Delany's adoption of the technique of withholding into fiction, Blake begins to look more like a focused meditation on how the form of the novel itself can be made to reflect on the relation between Black revolution and perception in a period dominated by the claim to truth held by the more popular genre of the slave narrative.¹⁴

Delany further develops the technique of withholding throughout the novel by building on this first scene of imperception. If in its early pages Blake necessarily makes the notion of Black sociality imperceptible to the reader through this technique, later sections extend that inability to think and perceive Black sociality to a specific character. Part 2 of the novel features a scene involving George Royer, one of the white American investors in the Vulture, who is unable to perceive an insurrection of enslaved people taking place right in front of his eyes. Instead of experiencing imperception, the reader watches someone else experience it; instead of the plans for revolution being withheld from the reader, an actual revolt is rendered incomprehensible to a character within the book. Chapter 54, “Storm during Middle Passage,” takes place on board the Vulture, which is captained by Royer. The Vulture has taken aboard a cargo of now-enslaved people from Western Africa and is about a day's sail out from Cuba—toward the end of the journey through the Middle Passage. As they approach Cuba, however, the captured Africans, led by a man named Mendi, break free of their bonds during a violent storm and arm themselves with billhooks and sugar knives they find in the hold of the ship. As they prepare to take over the ship, these tools of agricultural labor are repurposed as the tools of revolution: both billhooks and sugar knives would have been used to harvest sugar, and, as the Vulture is a slave ship destined for Cuba, there is nothing out of the ordinary about having such tools on board.¹⁵

The ability to perceive this threat is not universal, however. While Spencer—one of the white American sailors on board the ship—is aware of the danger that the armed enslaved people pose, the weaponization of the tools and the violent threat of an impending insurrection remain conspicuously imperceptible to Royer:

Royer's profound misunderstanding is compounded by his confusion of the thunderstorm above with the storm of insurrection below. Even direct, sensory proof of the insurrection does not clarify the situation or make the impending revolutionary violence perceptible:

Instead of a group of enslaved people on the verge of insurrection, Royer only notices that they have begun to eat the food in the ship's hold. The tools of agricultural slave labor that had been taken up for the overthrow of that system have, for Royer, become tools for consumption. In essence, then, Royer only ascribes to enslaved people the capacity to fulfill their most basic needs—aligning them with mere consumption—as opposed to having to avow the more dangerous notion of their drive for freedom. He cannot see, in short, what is right in front of his eyes. He can only see what his senses are prepared to see, which decidedly does not include the possibility of Black social and political action. Slave insurrection, for Royer, is both unthinkable and imperceptible.

Indeed, this final chapter in the Vulture section of the novel ends without a successful or even attempted insurrection. By once again withholding and refusing to represent revolutionary violence, Delany reinscribes Royer's inability to perceive revolution at the level of the plot. At the close of the scene, the thunderstorm dissipates along with the insurrection, and neither event is explained: “Suddenly the winds changed, the clouds began to disperse, the thunder and lightning ceased to be seen and heard” (238). In a similar passive voice, we read: “The hatches being secured it was conceded that were it known that the slaves had been rebellious their value would be much depreciated, if not their sale prevented” (238). The narration's simple “suddenly” emphasizes Delany's refusal to write out at the level of the plot the abrupt change in the course of the narrative. This refusal is further emphasized by how Delany ties together his use of the passive voice with sensory perception: “the thunder and lightning ceased to be seen and heard” marks a limit to sensory perception in natural events that mirrors the quiet dissipation of the insurrection that Royer never began to perceive in the first place.

The development of the narrative of the text and the return to the technique of omission seen earlier act as, following Jacques Rancière, policing agents. Rancière writes that “police interventions in public spaces consist . . . before all else, in recalling the obviousness of what there is, or rather of what there is not, and [the police's] slogan is ‘Move along! There's nothing to see here!’” (37). By passing over and repressing the logical, violent outcome of the situation on board the Vulture, the narrative points toward the sensorially normalized violence of continued enslavement by drawing attention to the fact that there is something to be seen here. As readers, what we see is a blindness induced by Royer's own inability to see. For Royer, seeing is impossible because what is there to be seen is unthinkable; the narrative comes to mirror Royer's imperceptive incapacity to see and make sense of the inherent social and political expression that constitutes Black insurrection.

By leading the scene up to the point of a revolt that he refuses to represent, and by offering up Royer's clearly limited ability to conceptualize and thus see an expression of Black sociality, Delany challenges his readers' notions of what role the novel form can play in making legible the sensorial and perceptual limitations to imagining just such a Black sociality. Here I follow Kevin Quashie, who argues that “the imperative to represent” Black resistance “creeps into the consciousness of the black subject, especially the artist” (4). This drive to represent, Quashie tells us, is closely tied to the “determination to see blackness only through a social public lens” (4). By cutting the scene on the Vulture short, Delany resists this “imperative to represent” while also considering the politics of representation in a context where Black sociality remains fundamentally unthinkable and imperceptible to the white sensorium.¹⁶ This scene, then, moves a few steps beyond the earlier scene of the secret on the plantation. In both scenes, the reader is made aware that an important moment has been withheld from them. But whereas on the plantation the plans for revolution were simply omitted, on the Vulture the text itself seems to reach the limit of what it can represent by drawing an equivalence between the white sensorium's inability to make sense of an expression of Black sociality and the text's own refusal to depict revolution.

In the scenes on board the Vulture, the reader becomes witness to the erasure of Black revolution through these formal decisions of the text, as Delany wades deep into questions of how and why Black revolution has been discredited not only in the social register but on a sensory level as well. Andy Doolen writes that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “slave resistance was unintelligible to white observers even when contrary events seemed to subvert their views” because the notion of enslaved people as properly political persons was still unthinkable (170). Similarly, Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued that anything like an organized political movement of enslaved people “was still part of the unthinkable” (85). Direct evidence of Black political organizing and revolutionary violence refused to register within Western society, most notably, perhaps, in the case of the Haitian Revolution. Trouillot calls the various ways in which revolutionary events such as the Haitian Revolution have been erased and discredited “formulas of silence” (96): how the Haitian Revolution, the “most radical political revolution” of the “Age of Revolutions,” has been relegated to the “historical backburner” and has become a “non-event” (98). With the Vulture, Delany works to figure out how and why an act of slave resistance could become just such a “non-event,” as the revolt never even gains the status of an event in Royer's mind and as the narrative whisks away the pages and chapters of buildup that come before it.

Indeed, the Haitian Revolution provides an important frame for how to understand these formal decisions Delany makes in Blake. As Marlene L. Daut notes, “Haiti was omnipresent in Delany's life” and “nearly every edition of the Weekly Anglo-African contains several articles or news reports from Haiti” (83).¹⁷ And even though Haiti is rarely mentioned directly in the novel, Delany himself published a number of articles on Haitian emigration in the Weekly Anglo-African that ran concurrently with Blake (see Chiles 337–38). The narrative form of the novel, however, allows Delany to explore how and why events like the Haitian Revolution fade from memory or never even become events to begin with. What Delany demonstrates is how the erasure of Black revolutionary history is as much a function of the structure of the sensorium as it is an ideological project. By reflecting this dynamic through literary form, Blake makes this process legible to its reader. While not quite the writing of an alternate Black revolutionary history, Blake makes legible the structures that caused that history to be never written in the first place.

The Insensible Sociality of the Commodity

The policing away of the insurrection on board the Vulture at the level of narrative form represents a significantly different strategy than Melville would pursue in “Benito Cereno.” Melville's story, which is also about how white sensory perception reaches its limits at Black revolution, similarly takes place under the sign of the Haitian Revolution, as the ship on which the insurrection had taken place before the start of the narrative is called the San Dominick. As in Blake, slave rebellion and the expression of a Black sociality are necessarily absent from “Benito Cereno” at the level of the plot, just as much as the story is thematically about the impossibility of perceiving the ongoing rebellion, which remains imperceptible to the protagonist, the narrator, and the reader alike. But here the two texts begin to diverge. Blake recoils from breaking out into a representation of revolt. In “Benito Cereno,” Melville—not without a certain level of ironic distance—allows for the rebellion on board the San Dominick to be explained in terms of legal truth at the end of the text. That is, Blake gives us no depiction of revolution and provides no explanation; “Benito Cereno” does.

The achievement of “Benito Cereno” is how the text implicates the reader in the structures of thought that cannot account for a revolutionary expression of Black sociality, even though, as the reader learns at the end of the text, the signs had been there all along. Melville's deferral of an explanation finds its counterpart in Captain Amasa Delano's deferred understanding of the situation on board the San Dominick, which occurs after he leaves the ship and after both Don Benito and Babo jump overboard into Delano's departing boat: “That moment, across the long-benighted mind of Captain Delano, a flash of revelation swept, illuminating in unanticipated clearness his host's whole mysterious demeanor, with every enigmatic event of the day, as well as the entire past voyage of the San Dominick” (Melville 99). In Delano's “flash of revelation,” the fog and the haze with which the story opens—“Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come”—are finally swept away, allowing him to see clearly that all had merely been a masquerade that had only temporarily blinded him from the truth (46).

There are a number of striking similarities between Delano and Royer that have important implications for how the two texts ultimately render the role of sensory perception in relation to Black insurrection. Neither Delano nor Royer can imagine a world in which enslaved people of color might fight for their freedom; as Carrie Hyde puts it, the “disruptive image of the slave as a political agent” or as a social agent causes both characters to disregard and fail to perceive the direct information their senses deliver to them (50). However, unlike for Delano in “Benito Cereno,” for Royer the fog does not clear in such dramatic fashion; Delany makes legible the structural forces at the center of this racial anesthetic by holding both the revolt and the lack of a revolt in an ultimately unresolved tension. Blake, in other words, does the opposite of “Benito Cereno”: the former raises imperception to the level of the narrative itself, while the latter resolves the central imperceptive tension of the text through Delano's sudden revelation.

Both texts nevertheless point toward an indisposition of the white sensorium to be able to process Black revolution because of its sociality. The white sensorium is in a certain sense unprepared to see people of color as political beings, which makes revolutionary violence incomprehensible and imperceptible. This inability to perceive people of color as political beings is also an inability to make sense of Black participation in or as central to the social sphere. And while insurrection is undoubtedly social, that sociality does not register for many of the white people we've tracked so far in both Blake and “Benito Cereno.” Perhaps, then, people of color do not register as social beings capable of political action because Black humanity and Black personhood in the nineteenth century are so deeply tied to labor and exploitation. While Armsted, to return to the opening of this essay, couldn't stand to come into physical proximity with people of color, he could nevertheless metaphorically look the other way and willfully fail to perceive the role that Black labor plays in nearly every commodity he consumes. Black labor and Black laborers are central to the commodity form in the nineteenth century—a form that mediates the social world while also structurally disavowing and concealing the insensible social element of labor that has gone into it.

This inability to sensorially register the social element of the commodity form is just what Marx was at pains to describe throughout his oeuvre. For Marx, human labor and the process of production constitute the social and fundamentally universal aspect of the commodity—something that capital nevertheless ceaselessly hides and conceals.¹⁸ As he writes in the first volume of Capital (1867), “Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labour-power, leave this noisy sphere”—Marx is here talking about the sphere of the market and of commodity exchange—“where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business’” (279–80). For Marx, one of the central problems with capital is the way in which production and human labor—from the worker's role in production to the dead labor congealed in the form of the commodity—is always hidden, concealed, or disavowed. And while as a product of human labor the commodity form is inherently social, it never appears as such.

For Marx, it is impossible to perceive the commodity as social because capital has trained the senses to function in historically specific ways. It is impossible to perceive the commodity as social, in other words, because the sensorium has not been trained to sense the social nature of the commodity. Rather than there being something like a natural way of seeing, sensing, or perceiving, Marx suggests instead, in the 1844 Manuscripts, that all modes of perception are learned. The senses, in other words, are a product of history; what we sense and how we sense are both the result of a long historical development as opposed to some mere biological function. “The development of the five senses is a labor of the whole previous history of the world,” said Marx in 1844. The corollary of this is that the senses can continue to be developed further and in different ways. They can even be trained to sense the social: “[A]s music alone awakens man's musical sense and the most beautiful music has no meaning for the unmusical ear,” Marx writes, “for this reason the senses of social man differ from those of the unsocial” (Economic 309). The senses, in other words, have historically been developed to be profoundly antisocial, as unable to sense production and human labor as they are to sense revolution. Just as Marx's unmusical ear would register sound but not music, Royer's unsocial eye registers something—it's just not revolution.

The scene on the Vulture therefore suggests that the imperceptibility of an expression of Black sociality is perhaps owing to the central role of enslaved labor to the form of the commodity in the nineteenth century. As Immanuel Wallerstein writes, “The plantation was the original factory” (1202).¹⁹ Indeed, Nikhil Pal Singh challenges us to think through the way in which “slavery and the slave trade” are fundamental “to the form of capitalism” itself, as opposed to being merely casually linked to its rise (41). The imperceptibility of the social under capital is therefore in a deep, reciprocal relation with the social death that inheres in chattel slavery: a social death that is linked to the primary role of imperceptible Black labor within the constitution of the commodity form in the nineteenth century. In the episode on the Vulture, Delany makes legible the effects of a sensorium developed under capital, while articulating the economic foundations of the mode of sensory perception that makes Black revolution and Black sociality both insensible and unthinkable. From Royer's perspective, the political and social aims of the enslaved people on the ship are unthinkable not merely because of an ideological or racial disavowal but because of a more fundamental inability to think enslaved people of color as social beings engaged in socially directed work.

Labor and the value arising from it are imperceptible because, within the form of the commodity, labor represents a social relation as opposed to something like a physical quality. This social relation, as Marx writes, is “suprasensible” (Capital 165): “Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values. . . . We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp [unfaßbar] it as a thing possessing value. However, let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character as values is therefore purely social” (138–39). Human labor and the value it produces represent the primary social aspect of both the commodity form—which mediates the social sphere—and capital alike. But this social core to the commodity is not physical, like the sharpness of a blade or the sturdiness of a table. As Marx explains, it has “absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations arising out of this” (165). Nor is it something that can be sensed. Even as we search for it, it remains unfaßbar, incomprehensible or insensible—both impossible to sense and impossible to make sense of. Value is instead the imperceptible expression of a social relation; it is its fugitive aspect. “Twist and turn” all we like, we can never quite grasp it.

Black labor stands at the center of the imperceptibility of the social relation that contradictorily mediates the social sphere under capital in the nineteenth century. Delany transforms this perceptual and political problematic into an issue for the novel form to think through and sort out. Black labor and revolution, Delany suggests, so thoroughly define and form the contradictory rendering of sociality under capital that they too become impossible to both conceive of and to sense. Blake demonstrates how this suprasensibility that is endemic to capital encompasses the particular intertwinement of Black personhood with labor and capital in the nineteenth-century world of transnational Atlantic slavery. In so doing, Delany acknowledges this always-contested status of enslaved people in the nineteenth century; as Jeannine Marie DeLombard argues, “race slavery involved the profitable exploitation of recognized black humanity” as opposed to an outright denial of the humanity of the enslaved (502). DeLombard further argues that “we need to direct our attention” not toward the concept of a Black humanity, which the system of slavery was happy to acknowledge, “but of the person,” precisely because “legal persons . . . are varying bundles of rights and duties, powers and obligations” as opposed to “a particular bundle of fluids and tissues,” as is the case with the human (494–95). Personhood, in other words, points outward toward the larger social sphere in which the human is embedded.

Because Black personhood is so closely tied to the value-generating function of labor in the nineteenth century, the expression of Black sociality becomes impossible to visualize, to perceive, and ultimately to represent. The double vision that the reader experiences in the scene on the Vulture—the vanishing of the insurrection through the narrative combined with the exhibition of Royer's complete inability to perceive that insurrection in the first place—speaks to how Black personhood remains impossible to conceive of because of how it is bound up with and lays the foundation for the imperceptible nature of labor under capital. To think the sociality of Blackness is to articulate the unrepresentable, suprasensible quality of the value-generating function of labor that underwrites the perceptibility of Black social and political life.

“Great Eaters as We Know Ourselves to Be”

By the end of Blake, it becomes clear that the goal of the novel has not been to depict Black labor or revolution, but instead to articulate how sensory perception under capital is structured in such a way as to make the representation of the social nature of either impossible. After establishing that Black sociality is imperceptible through the earlier scenes on the plantation and on the Vulture, Delany in the closing scenes of the novel articulates how this imperceptibility could serve as the foundation for a specifically Black politics. In the closing pages of the book, a third and final plan for revolution is drawn up that actively exploits the white imperceptive inability to make sense of the social aspect of a revolution led by the enslaved as laborers.

The final sections of the book directly invert the secretive meeting on the plantation at the novel's opening. Chapter 60, “Great Gathering at Madame Cordora's,” concerns a large meeting in Havana, the purpose of which is to plan for a general insurrection in Cuba and to discuss the implementation of a new government. The meeting is attended by Henry, the Cuban poet Plácido, and a number of other figures, all of whom are granted military titles such as “Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Emancipation” or civil titles such as “Director of Civil Government” and “Minister of Foreign Affairs”—a sign of the new organization of social life to come (258). Importantly, the reader bears witness to the events of the evening and is exposed to discussions of both military and political tactics. This section of the book therefore marks a significant difference from the first meeting that Henry held on the plantation in the US, as the reader is finally included in and granted explicit access to an organizational meeting. Indeed, the narration marks this shift in perspective at the beginning of the chapter: “But a peep in at this unsuspected gathering would give an idea of its designs and general character” (250). Where the earlier discussion on the plantation fell into silence, here the narrative enters the meeting house.

A number of ideas are discussed at Madame Cordora's, although a significant portion of the chapter focuses on Gofer Gondolier, a newly introduced character. Gondolier is a laboring cook who creates a plan to arm Havana's people of color with large chef's knives. Understandably, other characters in the novel are doubtful that such a plan could be carried out. Pedro Castina, one of the higher-ranking officers in attendance at the meeting, asks Gondolier how he plans to keep the mass production of such conspicuous weapons concealed:

Gondolier ends here on a note of deep irony, exploiting the white presumption that Black people are “great eaters” to conceal in plain sight the means for violent revolutionary action. Gondolier's plan taps into the same mode of white imperception that had led Royer to believe that the enslaved people in the hold of the Vulture were only “after something to eat or drink” (237). Even though the knives in the plan are clearly visible and perceptible by the senses, they will refuse to register with the white sensorium precisely because, to white eyes, the knives only confirm the perception that Black people are voracious eaters.²⁰

More fundamentally, the chef's knives are just as much the tools of enslaved labor as are the billhooks that we saw earlier on the Vulture, and potentially just as dangerous. As knives are instruments of labor, what Gondolier proposes is an active exploitation of the imperceptible social quality of labor. If Mendi and the other enslaved people on board the Vulture had their insurrection disregarded, Gondolier here suggests that this white inability to sense and make sense of Black labor and revolution can similarly be used as a tool. Just as Royer could only see consumption at the moment of the production of an insurrection, Gondolier knows that the weapons for revolution will appear as instruments of consumption to white eyes because of the structural disavowal of the inherent social nature of labor and production. In a sense, then, we have come full circle. Judge Ballard's pun on being “obliged to swallow” the reality of Black food production has actively become a violent threat in the guise of the chef's knife by the end of the novel—a reappropriation of the structures of white imperception that form the basis of a radical Black politics.

The novel closes before Gondolier's plan can be enacted, withholding from the reader the “flash of revelation” that characterized Melville's formal decisions in “Benito Cereno.” Throughout the novel, Delany allows his reader to see a little more in each scene. But because of Blake's unfinished nature, the ending points not toward an ultimate reveal but toward the impossibility of visualizing and conceptualizing Black freedom and Black sociality in the nineteenth century. The open-endedness of the novel proposes a bold political vision: that Black freedom finds its conclusion not at the abolition of slavery or in legal equality but beyond the limits of capital itself. This would be a freedom that, as Rinaldo Walcott has suggested, “would require global reordering, rethinking, and remaking” (5). The novel's unfinished nature asks us to reimagine where politics meets the limits of representation. As a profoundly antirepresentational novel, Blake, in its stunted conclusion, continues the imperceptive trend that we have tracked throughout the text and challenges us to read what is insensible in the world of nineteenth-century transatlantic slavery: Black freedom and the abolition of slavery as the abolition of capital itself. The social, political, and aesthetic project of Blake, we might say, begins where the ability to sense ends.

Notes

Works Cited