Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 64-10, Section: A, page: 3731.

Directors: Paul Gilroy; Joseph Roach.

This dissertation revisits the 'amalgamation' controversy that was occasioned by the emergence of immediatist abolitionism. I tell this story from the perspective of some black men and women who participated in abolitionism, a point of view not always highlighted in discussions of 'amalgamation,' and later, 'miscegenation.' I position such gendered discourses squarely in the field of political culture and interpret them as ideological attempts to naturalize the categories of race and gender in order to legitimate slavery and white supremacy. That is, I do not take the discourse of amalgamation to refer solely or even principally to sex, marriage, and/or childbearing across color lines. Rather, I understand this discourse to be a way of imagining political order---its tensions, fragilities, and possible virtues---through the lens of the racially---marked body, whose desires and actions come to stand, metonymically, for the body politic of the nation. At the same time as the discourse of 'amalgamation' regulated social inclusion and exclusion by policing sexuality, I argue, it also refigured the utopian and transcendent impulse within U.S. political culture. This intervention yoked the religious philosophy of radical abolitionism---in particular the rhetoric of 'one blood'---to the baser instincts of the body, which thus came to serve as the limit against which a radical and emancipatory politics would beat in vain.

I frame my discussion of black abolitionist political culture within and against the above constraints. Rather than suppose that black abolitionists treated amalgamation as a red herring issue, I argue that some of them engaged quite directly with the problematic of amalgamation. In particular, I consider seriously the impulse to abolish race, gender, and nation as a valid mode of black political action, one that now forms what I call an 'uncommon memory.' Considering the political performances of Crispus Attucks, William Cooper Nell, Mary Webb, Edmonia Lewis, William G. Allen, Frederick Douglass, William J. Wilson, and James McCune Smith, I explore the tensions and ambiguities inherent in the utopian impulse to overcome the limitations of the body through the emancipatory cadences of the voice.