Asking in 1829, “what is the use of living, when in fact I am dead,” David Walker cut to the heart of the question haunting nineteenth-century U.S. literature: how do the socially dead speak? His “demon-like production,” an incendiary political pamphlet entitled ‘Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World’, responds by reconstructing Cartesian skepticism about the existence of the external world. Though potentially bloody, God’s incipient justice, unlike the world itself, exceeds doubt. As one who thinks and writes while “in fact” dead, Walker’s reality is not separate from, but intertwined with, the speculative and the fantastical. Thus the possibility of the world’s non-existence is not tragic, but utopian, as it opens the doors of possibility for another world where Black lives matter. In this speculative reworking of the Cartesian cogito, we might class Walker as the first Afrofuturist, whose dreamworld of radical justice superseded the bloody, expropriative, avaricious 1820s U.S. that his senses revealed.

Bio:
Erin E. Forbes has written on plant poetics, the penitentiary, crime periodicals, maroonage, and the Spiritualist movement, with essays published in ‘ESQ’, ‘J19’, ‘The Eighteenth Century’, ‘Modern Philology’, ‘Poe Studies’ and elsewhere. Forbes is currently completing a book, The Criminal’s Genius: Aesthetic Agency in American Literature, which locates genius on the plantation, in the swamp, and behind bars. Her new project, ‘Reading the Nineteenth Century in Black, White and Green’, explores race and environment in across the long nineteenth century.