Link to the original event here.
Thinking through the intertwined histories of racialisation and criminalisation, Erin Forbes (University of Bristol) turned her attention to the genre of eighteenth-century gallows literature, focusing specifically on the origins of the concept of criminal genius, which, she demonstrated, took root in the lived experiences of disenfranchised people. Using a methodology that she terms “corpus convicti,” designed to decouple humanity—particularly the humanity of criminalised persons—and its literary representations from excessive individualism characteristic of liberalist societies, Forbes located agency, power and, most pertinently, genius outside of the individual, instead finding it at the juncture between person and text, between the convict and the print culture generated by and around their crime.
Forbes analysed the public address and personal correspondence of one eighteenth-century convict in particular, Abraham Johnstone, a free Black man who, in 1797, was tried and executed for a murder he most likely did not commit. Leaning into rather than away from the conventions of gallows literature, which tended to dehumanise criminals and invest them with excessive animality, Johnstone, Forbes argued, was able to use “the law’s scaffold” to imagine alternative versions of human sociality for those who were forced to dwell outside of the purview of legality and full-fledged citizenship. Using key passages from Johnstone’s “Address,” Forbes tracked his deliberate inversion of the genre’s tropes, which he employed not in service of defending Black humanity but in order to criminalise those who sought to cast Black life out of the realm of the human. Thus, Forbes argued, Johnstone responds to the law’s violence by exposing its internal contradictions, which he achieves by demonstratively employing its inconsistencies to criminalise whiteness.
Forbes concluded her talk by discussing the philosophy of communal living and mutual interdependence that emerges across Johnstone’s “Address” and is further supported by the fusion of spiritual and material acts of care both represented and enacted by the letters he sent to his wife Sally, care that persists beyond death. His epistolary confessions of love for his spouse are accompanied by a bequest to her of his treasured possession, his white hat, which, Forbes argued, was intended to serve as a stand-in for his absent body. In this way, Johnstone transfigured the beliefs he articulates in his “Address” into concrete action, urging everyone who followed his deadly encounter with the law across various textual media to do the same.
Expanding on Forbes’ discussion on letter-writing, focusing in particular on this textual practice’s unique positioning between the realms of the private and the public, Bridget Bennett (University of Leeds) gave a talk on the largely forgotten, yet highly significant contextual details surrounding the publication of Thomas H. Jones’ narrative of enslavement. Remarking on the monumentality of the chance train encounter between Thomas H. Jones, a self-emancipated Black man, and Wilson Armistead, a Yorkshire merchant and abolitionist, on 15 July 1850, Bennett discussed the latter’s serialised travelogue about his trip to the US (Reminiscences of a Visit to the United States, in the Summer of 1850 (1850-2)), which contains what used to be the only UK edition of Jones’ narrative at the time.
Due to editorial limitations, Armistead elected not to publish the letters exchanged between Jones and his second wife Rynar alongside his narrative, which, Bennett argued, resulted in the edition’s upholding of a traditional abolitionist vision of heroic Black masculinity characteristic of the genre. In her discussion, Bennett challenged this clichéd “self-first” presentation of Black manhood by turning her attention to the very letters that Armistead chose to omit from his travelogue almost two centuries prior to our contemporary moment.
Bennett posited that by virtue of being located in the interstices between the private and the public, the act of exchanging letters, in which Jones extensively engaged, permitted him to seize freedom even whilst being or having his family deeply entrenched within the context of enslavement. Bennett emphasised the practical role that letters played in Jones’ navigation through slavery and his self-establishment as a free man in the North. For instance, he used correspondence as a tactical means to search for his first wife and children from whom he had been separated whilst still enslaved as well as a quasi-legal tool to announce a dissolution of their union after he had failed to locate her for years.
Letters were likewise strategically adopted by Thomas H. Jones and his second wife Rynar to communicate their mutual devotion to each other, despite being governed by several levels of constraint: not only did epistolary conventions delimit the scope of what types of information could be communicated and how, the pair knew that their letters, as Bennett elucidated, were never meant for each other’s eyes only. Initially subject to thorough scrutiny under the watchful gaze of enslavers, the spouses’ exchanges later appeared in print, drawing in an even greater number of spectators.
Safety concerns among other considerations dictated that the letters must contain strategic misdirection and suppress potentially dangerous information, leading the husband and wife to conceive of their private letters as always already public and incorporate that caution into their writing. And yet, Bennett argued, factual falsehood in no way diminished the authenticity of the couple’s deep devotion to one another with which they imbued each of their letters. This is why Bennett suggested that Jones and his wife engaged in what she calls “public intimacies”: in the same way that their loving family was forged within and despite the dehumanising context of slavery, the couple’s love letters emerged both under and despite the constant surveillance, external scrutiny, and tremendous constraint.
The interaction between the two speakers generated an insightful dialogue into the possibility for literary meaning to be reinvigorated in the conventional formalities that are reused from letter to letter. The horrors to which Black individuals were subjected throughout most of US history, be it criminalisation or enslavement, which made access to literacy alone a challenge, meant that much of Black writing was produced both in extreme circumstances and under heavy constraint. As a result, even a standard proclamation of love was capable of acquiring a deeper meaning, be it because it was uttered from the gallows or penned under the enslaver’s suspicious eye.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Anna Shmatenko (9 septembre 2024). Report // Erin Forbes (University of Bristol) & Bridget Bennett (University of Leeds), “African American Letters,” 30 April 2024. A19. Consulté le 13 mai 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/129ln