ABSTRACT
In 'An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question' Thomas Carlyle was provocatively ungracious and rigid in his stereotyping of West Indian blacks as lazy pumpkin-eating Quashees. As the New England Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier declared in 1854 after he read the 'Occasional Discourse', Carlyle 'vituperates the poor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to a Mississippi slave driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle on the banks of the Potomac. The example of the black American writer and fugitive slave William Wells Brown illustrates the complexity of their response. Carlyle reinvests 'cheque words' with value in the 'Nigger Question' by using dramatic, hyperbolic, and metaphorical devices that resemble black performance style. Black performance art informs the structure as well as the style of Carlyle's 'Occasional Discourse'.
