ABSTRACT
Framing island space as one of the black freedom struggle’s pivotal formal topographies, this article maps an abolitionist archipelago, or a chain of freedom-oriented islands repeating through space, time, and writing. As the first section outlines, the island of Hispaniola, upon which Haiti established itself by means of black revolution, emerged as a generative insular site within the abolitionist project. Nineteenth-century contestations surrounding abolitionism constructed Haiti as a social laboratory, with proliferating versions of Haiti’s island-based experiment in black nationality advanced as arguments for and against the cause of black freedom on the American continent. Largely constituted by competing representations of Haiti’s insular experiment, this portion of the abolitionist archipelago had important ramifications even after North American slavery came to an end. As the article’s second section outlines, these ramifications become especially apparent in writer Richard Wright’s repeated reliance on island space to theorize black hope for liberation from slavery’s enduring legacies. Linking itself to abolitionism’s nineteenth-century island chain, Wright’s archipelago emerges in his reflective and expressive writings, ranging from 12 Million Black Voices (1941) to The Color Curtain (1956) to “Five Episodes” (1963), the latter of which is the posthumously published portion of Wright’s still unpublished novel “Island of Hallucinations.” Wright emerges as a master deployer and deconstructor of the insular form’s abolitionist legacies. In mapping Wright’s islands and nineteenth-century abolitionism’s islands as subsets of (to borrow a term from Antonio Benítez-Rojo) a larger “meta-archipelago,” this article introduces an increased geoformal attentiveness to what generally has been the geoculturally oriented project of tracing the dreams of freedom that have animated diasporic struggles against slavery and its legacies.
