POLITICS OF FULLFILMENT
POLITICS OF TRANSFIGURATION
(see Gilroy)
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1688: Pennsylvania Quakers petition
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1734: “Great Awakening”
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1740: South Carolina outlaws teaching slaves
to write
1773: Phyllis Wheatley, Poems
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1776: Declaration of Independence
•
•
1810: Saartije
Baartman (“the
Hottentot Venus”), a
young woman who
suffered from
steatopygia, is
forced to leave
Africa and travels to
London
(blackness
associated to
hypersexuality)
Is this image traditional or subversive?

1807: slave-trade is abolished
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1820: American Colonization Society
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1821: African Grove theatre
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1829: 3-day race riot breaks out in Cincinnati
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1831: Nat Turner leads slave uprising in Virginia
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1839: U.S. State Department rejects passport
application by Philadelphia black man
1845: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,
Written by Himself
1849: Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery
and begins work with Underground Railroad
1850: Fugitive Slave Act is strengthened
1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's
Cabin

1859: Last U.S. slave ship lands in Alabama

1863-1865: American Civil War

1863: Emancipation Proclamation by President
Lincoln

1865: Slavery outlawed by 13th Amendment

“black codes” issued

1865: “40 acres and a mule” are promised for
compensation to freed African American slaves
after the Civil war

1868: Congress passes 14th Amendment

1865: the Ku Klux Klan is created in Tennessee

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1890: Moses Fleetwood Walker plays baseball
for Toledo Blue Stockings as one of the first
black major leaguers
1894: Bessie Smith is born in Texas
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
1903: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls
of Black Folk
“ It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this
sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,
of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in
amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged
strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of
the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to
attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a
better and truer self.”
1903: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls
of Black Folk

“In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.
He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to
teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul
in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood
has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it
possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without
being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the
doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”