Date: Fri, 15 Dec 1995 12:24:32 -0800
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re:  William Blake and Africans


Chris, I agree fully with your analysis, both in this post and in
the previous one.  I was trying to take "the worst case scenario"
and explain it.  People get so worked up about Eurocentrism and
the like, they go nuts.  It's not a big deal with me.  In actual
fact, Blake's many comments about Jews (the worst of which were in
his then unpublished notebooks) are far more egregious than any
possible innocent ignorance he may have had about anyone else.
And on the question of agency, the black African slave becomes the
leader in the building of Jerusalem!

Blake's connection to anti-slavery literature is more than
theoretical.  As a professional engraver, he illustrated Stedman's
account of the treatment of Negroes in Surinam (or some such),
which included drawings of methods of torture, such as hanging
young ladies on hooks through their ribs.  Stedman had fallen in
love with a slave girl and described all the horrors, but did not
reject the institution of slavery to the 100%, or so I recall.
Some commentators have suggested that Blake somewhere criticizes
Stedman's hesitation to fully break with authoritarian thinking in
spite of his sympathies.  Sometimes one of Blake's diagrams will
be used in contemporary accounts of slavery without attribution.

I shall have to find out the proper way to subscribe to
blake-AT-albion.com.  I don't remember at this point.

I haven't heard anyone complain about Blake on race before.
Naturally, many have whined about Blake's alleged sexism, but
they've been remarkably unsubtle, failing to analyze both the
pro-feminist together with the anti-woman aspects of Blake's
cosmology.  Some people (esp. middle-class purveyors of identity
politics) like their victim groups pure and innocent and blameless
for their own faults and complicity in the system, and so if you
point out that the oppressed are as rotten as the oppressors they
don't like you.

Except for some remarks about hook-nosed Jews, Blake comes off
remarkably advanced in every sphere for his time.  That is because
he goes to the very root of the logic of domination and sees how
everything fits together from top to bottom.  How many people can
do this now?  I have ignored the race-gender-class industry that
has popped up in the past 15 years, because I learned everything I
needed to know about it by reading Blake before the age of 20.

"Is this thy soft family love / Thy cruel patriarchal pride /
Planting thy family alone / Destroying all the world beside?"


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