Rebels of the underground: Media, orality, and the routes of black emancipation

ABSTRACT

Studies of race in communication studies often critique and/or celebrate representations of people of color, but recently scholars have called for studies to “go beyond” representation. Building off the work of Sarah Sharma, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong, this article considers how forms of media, rather than solely content, have racial implications that exceed their representational capabilities. Through an analysis of slave narratives, this article argues that the Underground Railroad was a “media environment” that assisted slave emancipation. This environment celebrated oral forms of mediation and the bodies of certain black runaway slaves to mediate the lines between freedom and bondage.

KEYWORDS:

• Media
• communication
• space
• time
• Underground Railroad

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Sarah Sharma and Atiya Husain for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this essay. He also thanks the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their guidance.

Notes

1. “Harriet Tubman Day,” http://harriettubman.com/index.html, 2013 (accessed December 12, 2014).

2. Dionne Bennett, “Playing ‘Ghetto’: Black Actors, Stereotypes, and Authenticity,” in Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities, eds. Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 215–31; Michael Eric Dyson, The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004); bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1990); George Lipsitz, “The Hip-Hop Hearings: The Hidden History of Deindustrialization,” in The Race and Media Reader, ed. Gilbert Rodman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 294–312; Mark Orbe, “Representations of Race and Reality TV: Watch and Discuss,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 4 (2008): 345–52; Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Indianapolis, IN: Wesleyan Publishing House, 1994) and “Fear of a Black Planet: Rap Music and Black Cultural Politics in the 1990s,” in The Race and Media Reader, ed. Rodman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 120–31; and Eric King Watts, “Border Patrolling and ‘Passing’ in Eminem's 8 Mile,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 3 (2005): 187–206.

3. See Herman Gray, “Race, Media, and the Cultivation of Concern,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, no. 2–3 (2013): 253–58; Gilbert Rodman, “Race … and Other Four Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural Politics of Authenticity,” in The Race and Media Reader, ed. Rodman (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Armond Towns, “The (Racial) Biases of Communication: Rethinking Media and Blackness,” Social Identities 25, no 5 (2015): 478–88.

4. Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); and Sharma, “Taxis as Media: A Temporal Materialist Reading of the Taxi-Cab,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 14, no. 4 (2008): 457–64.

5. Towns, “The (Racial) Biases of Communication.”

6. Blight, Passages; and Katherine McKittrick, “Freedom is a Secret,” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, eds. McKittrick and Clyde Woods (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2008).

7. There are plenty of communication studies scholars and geographers who have made similar claims that geography and communication studies have much overlap. Their work influences my discussion of the Underground Railroad: James Carey, Communication as Culture (New York: Routledge, 2009); Jim Glassman, “Critical Geography II: Articulating Race and Radical Politics,” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 2 (2010): 506–12; Minelle Mahtani, “Toxic Geographies: Absences in Critical Race Thought and Practice in Social and Cultural Geography,” Social & Cultural Geography 14, no. 4 (2014): 359–67; Sharma, “Taxis”; Jonathan Sterne, “Transportation and Communication: Together as You've Always Wanted Them,” in Thinking with James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History, ed. Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006).

8. Sharma, In the Meantime.

9. Sharma, “Taxis.”

10. Ibid., 458.

11. Sharma, “Taxi Cab Publics and the Production of Brown Space after 9/11,” Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (2010): 183–99.

12. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 44.

13. Jennifer Slack and J. Macgregor Wise, Culture and Technology: A Primer (New York: Peter Lang Press, 2015), 157.

14. Sharma, In the Meantime, 80.

15. Slack and Wise, Culture and Technology, 188.

16. Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 33.

17. Ibid., 33.

18. Slack and Wise, Culture and Technology, 188–89.

19. Blight, Passages.

20. William Still, “An Abolitionist in the Underground,” in Slave Narratives of the Underground, eds. Christine Rusdisel and Bob Blaisdell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2014).

21. J. Blaine Hudson, Encyclopedia of the Underground Railroad (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2006).

22. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2003).

23. The dismissal of paper forms of media on the Underground Railroad is reiterated in the work of Paul Gilroy and Katherine McKittrick. However, both authors are less concerned with the alternative forms of media and communication technologies used on the Underground Railroad that this article draws attention to. For more information, see: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); and McKittrick, “Secret.”

24. William Wells Brown, “Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave (Excerpts),” Slave Narratives of the Underground, eds. Rusdisel and Blaisdell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2014), 11, emphasis added.

25. Josiah Henson, “An Autobiography of the Reverend Josiah Henson,” Four Fugitive Slave Narratives, ed. Winks (Reading MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1969), 59.

26. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003), 78.

27. Eber M. Pettit, “Margaret: Born on a Slave Ship,” Slave Narratives of the Underground, eds. Rusdisel and Blaisdell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2014), 167.

28. Benjamin Drew, “The Refugee: A North-Side View of Slavery,” Four Fugitive Slave Narratives, ed. Winks (Reading MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1969), 182–83.

29. Ibid., 15.

30. Josiah Henson, “An Autobiography of the Reverend Josiah Henson,” Four Fugitive Slave Narratives, ed. Winks (Reading MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1969), 81.

31. Sharma, In the Meantime, 10.

32. Douglass, Narrative, 78.

33. Christian Parenti, The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

34. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); and Still, “Abolitionist.”

35. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Press, 1997), 44.

36. Sarah Bradford, “‘Harriet Tubman’: Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People (Excerpts),” Slave Narratives of the Underground, eds. Rusdisel and Blaisdell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2014).

37. Austin Steward, “Austin Steward: Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman,” Four Fugitive Slave Narratives, ed. Robin Winks (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1969), 68.

38. Drew, “The Refugee,” 29.

39. Still, “Abolitionist,” 39.

40. Sharma, In the Meantime, 14.

41. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (New York: Random House Press, 2007), 112.

42. McKittrick, “Secret,” 100.

43. “Aboard the Underground Railroad,” http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/underground/states.htm, 2015 (accessed July 25, 2015); “Underground Railroad Foundation,” http://www.ugrrf.org/tours.html, 1993 (accessed July 25, 2015); and “Underground Railroad (UGRR),” http://www.adventurecycling.org/routes-and-maps/adventure-cycling-route-network/underground-railroad-ugrr/, 2015 (accessed July 25, 2015).

44. “Slavery and the Underground Railroad Tour,” https://www.newyorkpass.com/En/new-york-attractions/tickets/Slavery-and-Underground-Railroad-Tour/, 2015 (accessed July 25, 2015).

45. Ibid.

46. Douglass, Narrative, 89.