Dan Ruprecht
History 209S
Week 4 Reading Responses
On Waldstreicher
A
successful confidence man—or woman—must be able to manipulate his audience’s
expectations and assumptions in order to take advantage of them and accomplish
his own goal. David Waldstreicher’s “Reading the Runaways” asks us to consider
escaped slaves of the late-colonial period in the mid-Atlantic as such
con-artists, playing in the era’s racial and economic ambiguities to pass as
free. These typically educated, always well-spoken runaways constituted a part
of the “racially mixed alternative public,” evolving alongside Benjamin
Franklin’s upper-class republic cosmopolitanism. Waldstreicher’s paper takes runaway
advertisements, placed in the burgeoning newspapers of America by chagrined slave-owners
looking to find and reclaim their lost property, as the first slave narratives
and explores how their rhetoric exemplifies the “profitable contradictions of
the mid-Atlantic labor system.”
Waldstreicher’s
primary goal is to show how the runaway advertisements can be read by
historians for (at least) two purposes: to examine how the men and women who
escaped bondage were able to refashion their identities (the “con-artists”),
and to further explore how the press bolstered the status quo of the master
class, even while incidentally exposing the discrepancy between a slave’s
ability, skills, and education against his representation in the ads (the “contradictions”).
To prove the former,
Waldstreicher concentrates on three key attributes of identity: dress,
language, and abilities, all of which successful runaways were adept in camouflaging.
A runaway slave did not need to pass as white in the late-colonial period, but
only as free, and the advertisements explain to the historian exactly how the
escapees could accomplish this. The long catalogs of clothing stolen from
masters in runaway ads is a testament to the escapees ability to recreate
himself as a different character in a time when it was likely most people owned
one or two outfits. Thus it was necessary to the master class, who desired “to
identify unfree laborers as phenotypically different” to capitalize on supposed
“racial” qualities to identify their labor, be it skin color or hairstyles. Hairstyles
could be changed, however, (and wigs worn) as easily as names could be
fabricated, so advertisers tried to identify their property by skills and
quality or style of speech. In this topic, Waldstreicher’s two goals align: in
self-fashioning, the quick-witted escaped slave could work inside of expected
racial and class roles in order to hide or pass as someone else.
The obvious difficulty of
studying a runaway advertisement as a slave narrative is their author, the master.
We must understand their goals and assumptions to learn about the men and women
of whom they wrote. Waldstreicher focuses on how slave owners took to moralism to
recapture their slaves, quick to point out how a slave’s proclivity to
dishonesty (a necessary tactic for the con-artist), purported religion (even of
those slaves who acted as ministers), as well as tendency to run away were
moral failings. Masters who scornfully noted in their advertisements that their
escaped “property” was liable to take on false names, quick to invent plausible
stories, and ready to pose as pious or high class were thereby simultaneously
affirming their slaves agency and intellect while attempting to portray these
qualities as villainous.
On Chauncey
George
Chauncey takes pre-War New York City as the prototypical gay community and
wrote to disprove the three myths embodied by the metaphor of “the closet”:
isolation, invisibility, and internalization. In exploring the gay world—or worlds—of
New York City between 1890—1940, he deconstructs the expectations that we have
of gay life before the collective political movements to come later in the
twentieth century, or, as he says, before the “decline of the fair and the rise
of the closet.” The closet metaphor itself is an anachronism that distorts our
understanding of the gay world before the 1960’s, clouding our vision of the
extensive and vibrant gay communities that lived and worked all over the
country, at least up until the 1930’s (when “the state built a closet… and
forced gay people to hide in it”). He particularly wants to fight against the
popular linear narrative that all change is progressive, moving towards freedom
for gay peoples, by showing how tolerance of gay people changed in the twentieth
century, as well as problematizing the fighting against the hetero/homosexual
binarism that is currently the norm by explaining how sexual and gender
identity related to one another—in other words, “queerness” was as much about “effeminacy”
as homosexuality.
In
exploring the definition of “homosexual,” Chauncey launches into an exploration
of the etymology of the slang attached to the gay world, then as well as now. Thus
“queer” is made distinct from “gay,” just as “flaming faggot” from “fairy.” The
unstated historical premise is that an understanding of the words’ original uses
and users—how those outside of the gay world spoke about those in it, the
differences between African-American gay vernacular and white American—is necessary
to understand both the historical context and what the words have come to mean.
Put simply, the author assumes that he must start by defining his terms,
especially because much of the slang has carried over to contemporary use but
changed in definition.
Chauncey
locates himself inside a rather modern tradition of historians reworking our
understanding of hidden communities, like the gay world in American history. His
references to other contemporary historians of sexuality in the introduction are
meant to show a growing corpus of scholarship on homosexuality in America, both
contextualizing his own work in the new tradition and showing the next
historians ought to apply themselves.
The
second chapter of his book is concerned with separating the notions of cultural
gender and anatomical sex to get at what goes into the identity of a fairy. Again,
Chauncey’s presumption is that to define fairy and bisexual as used in the gay
world is the first (and perhaps most important) step to understanding the gay
world.
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