The Black Market
The Black Market
Property, Freedom, and Fugitivity in Antebellum Life
This chapter considers varied forms of political life made possible through the framework of theft. Recognizing that the hemispheric slave trade is a piratical act in the context of the novel, these pages argue that Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass suggest that slaves too should engage in piratical economic behaviors as a response to the illegal commercial activities undergirding the peculiar institution. By exploring the economic impact of enslaved subjects as thieves, Black participation in the market emerges as a strategy that disrupts the proper operations of exchange and doubly creates a “b/Black” market. Illegal trade, in the hands of an enslaved population, is a way for enslaved bodies to stake claims to personhood and, ultimately, freedom. Read alongside the significant historical events of the mid-nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859-1862) frame an interest in the intersections of economic freedom and liberal principles as they come to bear on the enslaved Black subject in the nineteenth century.
Keywords: Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, Blake, or the Huts of America, Fugitives, Fugitivity, Theft, Slavery, Slave narrative
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