SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

(the general definition of revolutionary nationalism’s aims) is through the creation of their own
self-sufficient communities.
Other critics who trace the complicated early history and methodology of Black
Nationalisms in America include Dexter B. Gordon. 5 His book Black Identity: Rhetoric,
Ideology, and Nineteenth Century Black Nationalism is invaluable to scholars interested in this
series of movements, particularly because of his insights into nationalist methods and tropes. For
instance, Gordon discusses how texts by black nationalists attempted to unify black peoples in
America through “rhetorical myth” (83). In each chapter that follows, one aspect of the fictional
communities that I discuss is their dependence on narrative in maintaining their communal ties;
these characters attempt to maintain separatist spaces through community-specific narrative
histories. Gordon also raises the question of whether or not groups seeking autonomy can
succeed without aid from and contact with the dominant community (104); Gordon here touches
on one trope of the texts that I study herein—how a community attempts to separate while still
operating within the confines of the United States’ borders.
Another important concept that Gordon traces in his work is, in a term he attributes to
Kwame Anthony Appiah, the “rhetoric of descent” (qtd. in Gordon 116). According to Gordon,
“ancestry is proffered as the connection linking Africans, blacks, and the collectivity presented in
the discourse [championing Black Nationalism]. This claim problematically assumes that shared
African ancestry somehow links African Americans in unique ways, fostering, for example,
common political aims” (116-17). Gordon is describing how the term was used by nineteenth
century black nationalists, but many of the fictional communities that I am examining employ a
similar rhetoric and/or make comparable assumptions. This device may be particularly prevalent
in geographically centralized communities; the purely imagined ones represented in my primary
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