Böcker av Martin R. Delany

Delany's tale of Blake, an escaped slave in the era before the US Civil War brings the harrowing detail of life under slavery and offers a call to action for resistance. New edition with a new introduction in the Foundations of Black Science Fiction series.

Martin R. Delany's Blake (c. 1860) tells the story of Henry Blake's escape from a southern plantation and his travels in the U.S., Canada, Africa, and Cuba on a mission to unite blacks of the Atlantic region in the struggle for freedom. Jerome McGann's edition offers the first correct printing of the work and an authoritative introduction.

Delaney's hero is a West Indian slave who travels throughout the South advocating revolution, and later becomes the general of a black insurrectory fore in Cuba. Blake hopes that, with rebellion in Cuba and the expulsion of all Americans, Cuba's model as a self-governed black state will ultimately precipitate the downfall of slavery in the United States.Focusing on the political and social issues of the 1850s slavery as an institution, Cuba as the prime interest of Southern expansionists, the practicality of militant slave revolution, and the possibilities of collective action Blake is one of the most revealing novels of its period.

With an introduction by Toyin Falola, the Frances Higginbothom Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin, this edition of these two intriguing nineteenth-century documents sheds light on the black nationalism movement in the context of African American history.