Reimagined and Transformed: Martin Delany and the Rhetoric of Genre
Creators: Calloway, David L
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

<p>In this dissertation, I examine the major texts of nineteenth-century African American abolitionist Martin Delany to show how he transforms literary genres to develop his arguments for emigration and the uplift of African Americans in the United States. By doing so, I argue first that Delany is better understood as a rhetorician rather than a literary writer because his texts present extended arguments aimed at persuading readers to take action and these arguments often take precedence over the artistic merits of an ostensibly literary genre. Secondly, I argue that, for Delany, any genre is fluid, and he adapts or transforms them at will to frame his message to have an impact on his intended audience. I suggest that Delany’s works have been largely misclassified and call on us to rethink his contributions to nineteenth-century African American literature and rhetoric. <br>
In chapter one, I examine The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States in order to argue that Delany has written a jeremiad, the genre that laments the moral failings of society and traditionally calls on the audience to move closer to God to redress these failings. However, Delany revises this traditional genre into a text that laments the oppressed condition of free Black Americans and calls for them to take concrete action to escape this oppression by emigrating from the United States. In chapter two, I analyze Blake, or the Huts of America, which scholars have classified as a novel, and argue that the text is better described as a didactic narrative that presents the main character as a model to enslaved Black Americans for an alternative way of thinking and acting during the waning days of antebellum America. In the third chapter, I discuss the Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, arguing first, that Delany writes a business report (not a missionary or travel narrative) and second, that he transforms this genre to achieve two distinct goals—first, to fulfill the duty of documenting the viability of the Niger Valley as a destination for emigration assigned to him by the Cleveland Commission, and second, to convince African Americans readers that emigrating to Africa can offer them the best way to achieve freedom and prosperity. In the fourth chapter, I examine Delany’s final text, Principia of Ethnology: The Origins of Race and Color, in order to argue that Delany transforms the treatise, a genre that traditionally relies upon scientific evidence, into a text that blends faith-based and scientific evidence to argue for a single origin of creation, and in so doing he refutes the prevalent views of his day that African Americans were genetically inferior to white Americans. <br>
This comprehensive re-examination of Delany’s work uses the lens of traditional genres reimagined and transformed to call for us to rethink the importance of this work not only within the canons of nineteenth-century African American literature and rhetoric but also its contributions to genre theory. </p>