POLITICS OF FULLFILMENT POLITICS OF TRANSFIGURATION (see Gilroy)

1688: Pennsylvania Quakers petition 1734: “Great Awakening” 1740: South Carolina outlaws teaching slaves to write 1773: Phyllis Wheatley, Poems 1776: Declaration of Independence

1810: Saartije Baartman (“the Hottentot Venus”), a young woman who suffered from steatopygia, is forced to leave Africa and travels to London (blackness associated to hypersexuality)

Is this image traditional or subversive?

1807: slave-trade is abolished 1820: American Colonization Society 1821: African Grove theatre 1829: 3-day race riot breaks out in Cincinnati 1831: Nat Turner leads slave uprising in Virginia

1839: U.S. State Department rejects passport application by Philadelphia black man 1845: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself 1849: Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery and begins work with Underground Railroad 1850: Fugitive Slave Act is strengthened 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

1859: Last U.S. slave ship lands in Alabama 1863-1865: American Civil War 1863: Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln 1865: Slavery outlawed by 13th Amendment “black codes” issued

1865: “40 acres and a mule” are promised for compensation to freed African American slaves after the Civil war 1868: Congress passes 14th Amendment 1865: the Ku Klux Klan is created in Tennessee 1890: Moses Fleetwood Walker plays baseball for Toledo Blue Stockings as one of the first black major leaguers 1894: Bessie Smith is born in Texas

1903: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk “ It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”

1903: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk “In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”