Delany’s Comet
Delany’s Comet
Blake; or, The Huts of America and the Science Fictions of Slavery
Turning to the publication of Martin Delany’s serial novel, Blake; or the Huts of America, in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, this chapter argues that black experiments with natural science helped to produce early works of black speculative fiction. This chapter casts Blake as a work of proto–science fiction that challenged the impoverished conception of the human found in both racial science and mainstream abolitionism. It is especially interested in a cosmic and existential model of fugitivity that Delany develops in both Blake and in his writings on astronomy in the Anglo-African.
Keywords: Martin Delany, speculative fiction, slavery, Blake, astronomy, racial science, Anglo-African, African American literature, fugitivity, abolitionism
NYU Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
