“Greater Still in Death”: Race, Martyrology, and the Reanimation of Juan Placido

• R. J. Boutelle ^[1]
  1. [1] Florida Atlantic University

     Florida Atlantic University

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: American literature: A journal of literary history, criticism and bibliography, ISSN 0002-9831, Vol. 90, Nº 3, 2018, págs. 461-493
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This article details how John Greenleaf Whittier accidentally assumed two different Cuban poets of color (Juan Francisco Manzano and Plácido) were one and the same person, resulting in an unwittingly combinatory sketch of “Juan Placido.” The resulting syncretic personage in Whittier’s “The Black Man” (1845) became a cause célèbre for abolitionists. I argue that to effectively persuade his white Northern audience, Whittier rewrote his source texts into the sentimental registers of moral suasion and culturally decontextualized Juan Placido, transforming the “Cuban martyr poet” into a transnational race man. In the essay’s second half, I demonstrate how Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859, 1861–62) readapted Whittier’s account to appeal to black radical abolitionists. By literarily resurrecting Juan Placido as an active revolutionary in the serial novel’s plot, Delany articulated not only a sophisticated theory of diasporic collaboration but also meditated on the stakes of fighting for black liberation by repeatedly employing accounts of black martyrdom.