Oratory, embodiment, and US citizenship in Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio.

As one shapes a prose style, one shapes a self.--John Stark, "Rhetoric, Literacy, and Citizenship"

By the close of the nineteenth century African Americans had, in theory, achieved the rights of citizenship. The official language of the federal government asserted the equality of blacks, and African American men secured the right to vote. In actuality, however, as has been noted, the 1890s formed the nadir of US race relations; approximately 200 black men were lynched per year, and the turn of the century witnessed race riots in New York, New Orleans, and Atlanta. A continuing racist ideology that constructed blacks as degenerate, criminal, and inferior paved the way for the systematic stripping away of the rights and protections ostensibly guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1875 Civil Rights Act. The passage of Jim Crow laws, the refusal of many trade unions to admit black members, the revision of state constitutions in the South to eliminate virtually all African American voting rights, and social practice in the North and South belied the federal government's guarantee of full citizenship and effectively denied African Americans any means of achieving social, political, or economic equity. By 1901 William Dunning could declare in the Atlantic Monthly that "the undoing of Reconstruction is nearing completion" (448). (1) The dire social and political conditions for black Americans at this historical moment prompted the employment of various strategies for regaining the rights of citizenship.

African American writer Sutton E. Griggs's 1899 novel Imperium in Imperio uses the strategy of developing language to create, recreate, and sustain spaces of democratic political participation in the United States. In this text, language itself functions as an important arena for political practice. The novel focuses on the use of oratory as a fundamental means of securing and exercising political rights, and showcases characters who employ republican oratorical traditions to participate in the political processes and institutions of the United States. Such characters engage in dialogue with members of the institutional elite, such as university presidents, newspaper editors, and government officials, in the attempt to forge potential points of entry into the nation. Griggs repeatedly describes the protagonists' eloquent declamations and their rhetoric is marked by a faith in the linear progress of history and an adulation of the Anglo-Saxon heritage. Mastery of oratory thus functions as a linguistic marker of one's fitness for citizenship and one's subscription to the republican ideals of "Americanness." The characters in the text initially assume that through a disembodied space of language they can literally disembody themselves and transcend race and racism, engaging with Anglo American citizens in a rarefied realm of speech and oratory, free from the bodily markers that marginalize them in a white, racist society. What they ultimately discover, however, is precisely the difficulty (if not impossibility) and the pitfalls of such transcendence of embodiment as Griggs calls into question the viability of linguistic homogeneity as a foundation for a non-hierarchical, egalitarian society. Part of the reason Imperium is such a powerful text to examine through the lens of oratory and political agency is the multiple and often contradictory readings it invites, and its ultimate problematizing of the traditional link between mastery of speech and political agency that the novel reinforces at the outset but complicates as the work continues.

Griggs was a prolific writer, an admired orator, and a prominent Baptist minister, pastoring churches in Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia. Generally dismissed by literary critics as unsophisticated and unrealistic, Griggs's novels nonetheless illuminate the historical struggle of African Americans to realize the rights of citizenship and represent an exaggerated warning to whites of the bloody consequences of continued racism. Imperium in Imperio is the first of five novels that Griggs wrote between 1899 and 1908 and, according to several critics, the most militant of his fictional narratives, although black nationalist sentiments also are present in such later works as Unfettered (1902) and The Hindered Hand (1905). (2) Imperium in Imperio traces the lives of two friends: Belton Piedmont, a poor, dark-skinned African American, and Bernard Belgrave, a wealthy, light-skinned man of mixed-race ancestry whose race identity is black. Both are intelligent, eager students who develop a passion for classical rhetoric at an early age. Much of the text, in fact, focuses either on instances of speech-making or conversations in which the speaker profoundly impacts the life of the listener and, most importantly for this study, the listener's views on how to realize the rights of citizenship. Both men graduate from high school at the top of their class, competing against each other in an oratory contest at graduation. After graduation Belton attends college in the South, and Bernard attends college in the North, financed by his white father, a powerful state senator. Both continue to use language and oratory as a means of effecting social change: Belton establishes a black newspaper to agitate for African American equality, and Bernard becomes a lawyer, ultimately arguing before the Supreme Court. Although Bernard's faith in the power of language to secure African Americans' citizenship rights disintegrates as the novel progresses, at the beginning of the work this faith is shared by both protagonists, with important implications for the ways they conceive of political agency and resistance. Although the men remain dedicated to securing for African Americans the rights promised them in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, they begin to pursue different means of achieving this goal. Belton maintains a faith in the power of language and chooses to exercise that power from within the white value system while Bernard espouses race separatism and militant revolution. Bernard recognizes the limits of formal, codified legal equality, and the text ultimately challenges any conceptualization of freedom and liberty that is not founded on blacks' access to economic power and equal political rights. (3)

The different ideologies of the protagonists are symbolized by the names of the locales with which they are associated. Belton attends Stowe University in the South, and it is here that the institution's President, Dr. Lovejoy, teaches Belton the value of working with whites and existing institutions to reform them from within. Lovejoy urges Belton to make it "a cardinal principle of his life ... to allow God to avenge all his wrongs" (77). Belton's experiences at Stowe University contribute to the development of his vehemently nonmilitant, nonviolent stance. He is committed to rhetorical persuasion and appealing to the minds of the whites, rather than fomenting violent revolt, as the means of creating and sustaining democracy.

Bernard, in contrast, finds his peers and partners in argument at the "Hotel Douglass," "a colored hotel at which the colored leaders would often congregate" (95). Although readers are not privy to any of the exchanges that transpire at the hotel, Bernard learns from them not the value of nonviolent revolt but the need for a more militant stance, which he pursues. The choice of a hotel calls forth images of a cosmopolitan way station and site of exchange, through which travelers pass for various periods of time; offering, discussing, and absorbing theories; and moving on. The Hotel Douglass is a hotbed of debate and has a greater potential for radical discourse than the curriculum of Stowe University, a potential that is reflected in the political program Bernard advocates near the end of the novel. The University and Hotel function as spaces that enable critiques of dominant systems and lead the protagonists on (ultimately divergent) paths for effecting social and political change. It is within these spaces, arenas distinct from the public spheres of dominant culture, that African American discussions and critiques of white culture emerge.

Griggs's symbolic naming of each site endows them with distinct meanings and potentials. The University is a locale where the dialogues and debates emphasize a language of Christian endurance reminiscent of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a discourse that Belton hopes will convince whites to accept black Americans as fellow citizens. The Hotel, in contrast, is a locale where, reflecting Douglass's break with leaders of the American Anti-Slavery Society earlier in the century, moral suasion is supplanted by more direct political action, a place where "words" are supplanted by "deeds" and militant activism. The University and the Hotel become respective emblems of the doctrines with which Stowe and Douglass were most commonly associated throughout the nineteenth century: moral suasion on the one hand and potentially violent black political agency on the other. Such dichotomization of the programs for black leadership persisted throughout the nineteenth century and beyond as leaders again had to determine whether accommodationist strategies, militant political activism, or some combination of the two would be most efficacious in securing the freedoms threatened by the rollback of African American civil rights achieved during Reconstruction. (4)

The divergent programs of Belton and Bernard clash in the novel's closing scenes, which culminate in the revelation and ultimate destruction of the Imperium, a secret, all-black Congress of which both Belton and Bernard are members. The Imperium in Imperio, literally a state within a state, is "another government, complete in every detail, exercising the sovereign right of life and death over its subjects" (190), "a compact government exercising all the functions of a nation" (194). The Imperium has its own judiciary for settling intragroup disputes, maintains an army, elects one representative to its unicameral Congress for every 50,000 "citizens," passes laws and debates legislation, and follows a Constitution modeled after that of the United States. On the surface, the institution seems to represent an alternative site of freedom set in opposition to the official Congress of the United States and a corrective to racist state power. Located at Thomas Jefferson College, the "Capitol of (its) Government" (196), the Imperium seems to be the site where the democratic rhetoric of the Founding Fathers could be realized. As I discuss below, however, closer examination of the Imperium reveals it to be not an oasis of freedom and liberty but itself the site of a disturbing coercion and violence that seriously compromises the possibility of an alternate vision in which a democratic ethics can be achieved and maintained.

The Imperium, established at the time of the American Revolution to address the needs and protect the rights of African Americans, is modeled after the US Congress, and debates legislation concurrently with that official institution. The primary conflict at the close of the novel explores whether African Americans should work with whites and the dominant order to secure their rights or whether they should sever the connection, seceding from the nation if necessary, and found a new state dedicated to ensuring sociopolitical equality for blacks. Stated another way, the conflict asks two antithetical questions: should the protagonists rely on the mastery of republican oratory as a way of proving their fitness for inclusion in existing US society? Or should they deploy their oratorical skills to persuade fellow blacks to form a new sociopolitical organization, one that does not valorize Anglo-Saxon traditions and the "colorless" medium of language but instead recognizes African American rights to equity and self-determination as well as the existence but not the hierarchical ordering of racial difference?

At the beginning of the novel both Belton and Bernard use language as a space that intersects or, perhaps more precisely, overlaps with the national space. The protagonists attempt to incorporate themselves into the space of the nation through their individual mastery of language and oratory. They demonstrate this mastery, the basis of a "rhetorical citizenship" of sorts, in official or institutional practices such as high school commencement exercises, US Supreme Court arguments, and US Congressional debates, and therefore in spaces fundamental to a democratic system--schools, the legislature, public lectures and gatherings, and so on. Belton and Bernard try to find a space for themselves in the nation through membership in an idealized speech community--a homogeneous association within which a shared and theoretically undistorted communication takes place among participants through the ostensibly transparent and "colorless" medium of language. Ironically, given the novel's preoccupation with language and the power of oratory, the actual speeches, courtroom arguments, and debates of the characters are not transcribed in the text. Rather, the narrator informs the reader of the articulateness and eloquence of the characters, noting that rhetoric was their preferred area of study (28) and that "their reputation as brilliant students and eloquent speakers had spread over the whole surrounding country" (29). The narrator remarks that Belton's "fame as an orator was great indeed" (73), while Bernard possessed a "bewitching eloquence" (100), such as "had not been heard since the days of Daniel Webster" (160) and that swept "all before it such as does the whirlwind and the hurricane" (85).

The absence of the protagonists' words in Imperium merits attention. The vast majority of the grand and moving speeches of the protagonists are absent from the text. The only speeches included occur at the end of the work, at a meeting of the all-black Congress. The fact that the oratorical powers of the two men are described by the narrator instead of demonstrated by example suggests both that African American oratory can only be "heard" in an all-black setting and that transcription can only ineffectively capture the power and emotion of public delivery. In support of this second notion, of the speeches that the protagonists make to the Imperium at the close of the novel, the narrator relates, "We can give you his words but not his speech.... Words can portray the form of a speech, but the spirit, the life, are missing and we turn away disappointed" (205). The lack of the many speeches that are mentioned, however, undermines the novel's valorization of oratory and suggests that the power of language may be more effective in theory than in practice. For despite the narrator's determination to convince the reader of the powers of these "oratorical gladiators" (32), very little direct proof is offered. The absence of tangible examples of captivating and persuasive oratory makes it all the easier to accept, by the close of the work, the limitations of language to effect political and social change and the idea that the pen may need to be supplemented by other means to ensure equity.

National Belonging and Black Intellectualism

In many ways Belton and Bernard embody the turn-of-the-century ideal of the New Negro, a class of black intellectuals that the Cleveland Gazette noted in 1895 had "arisen since the war, with education, refinement, and money" (Gates 136). The New Negroes sought to suppress the past and cut ties with the "Old Negro" of slavery days in order to showcase the educated, refined, self-sufficient black. As the narrator of Imperium notes, "The cringing, fawning, sniffling, cowardly negro which slavery left, had disappeared, and a new Negro, self-respecting, fearless, and determined in the assertion of his rights was at hand ... the passing of one and the ushering in of another great era in the history of the colored people of the United States" was occur ring (62). The New Negro, like Bernard at the beginning of the novel and Belton throughout, believed that "to speak proper was to be proper--would ensure one's rights, along with the security of property" and that it was "the precise structure and resonance of the black voice by which the very face of the race would be known and fundamentally reconstructed" (Gates 136, 143). The logic of the novel ultimately suggests, however, that this desire to improve the social condition of turn-of-the-century African Americans by ignoring the past is problematic and that the erasure of the racial sell by denying the memory of enslavement or by focusing solely on blacks' metaphysical, intellectual capabilities, is unworkable and will not effect the desired social, economic, or political equity. This text thus invites readers to triangulate language, race, and history, and suggests that until the intimate and constitutive links between ideology and literacy are acknowledged, attempts to establish and pursue democratic forms of discourse and political action will be compromised.

Griggs was writing in a historical moment when a number of late 19th-century African American leaders, while not necessarily advocating a willed forgetting of slavery, did champion the development of the intellectual capabilities of African Americans and their inclusion in institutions of higher education as the best means of effecting social and political change. One of the most prominent and influential proponents of this theory was Alexander Crummell, an Episcopal minister who founded the American Negro Academy (ANA) in 1878. According to his inaugural address as first President of the organization, the ANA was founded in order to "stimulat[e] and foster ... the genius of the race" and to effect "the civilization of the Negro race in the United States, by the scientific processes of literature, art, and philosophy, through the agency of the cultured men of this same Negro race" (Crummell 3). Like the New Negroes, the members of the ANA believed that race problems could be mitigated by black intellectual activity and that it was the responsibility of an educated elite to "both guide the opinions and habits of the crude masses" (Crummell 6). Limited to 40 members, the Academy admitted only a few, highly educated individuals; its ranks included Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Francis J. Grimke. Due to the exclusivity of its membership and a lack of support from Booker T. Washington, however, the ANA had only a modest influence on the masses: it disbanded in 1924 (Berry 599).

In addition to Crummell and Du Bois, one of the ANA's most influential founding members was William S. Scarborough, a vocal supporter of higher education for African Americans and the need to encourage "Negro genius." Scarborough graduated in 1875 from the classical department of Oberlin College, filled the Chair of Latin and Greek at Wilberforce University in Ohio for several decades, and published essays on classical subjects as well as contemporary race relations. Although Scarborough praised the work of Booker T. Washington, he denied that "all the race must run mad over industrial education ... we would be sorry to see the abandonment of one iota of effort toward higher education for the Negro" ("Booker" 273-74). In his 1902 essay "The Negro and Higher Learning," Scarborough noted that the establishment of "two systems of civilization" through the persistence of racial prejudice and segregation, "would but create an imperium in imperio" and result in revolution (349). Scarborough valorized the development of the black mind and the importance of education, maintaining that "the future of the race depends largely upon its intellectual advancement" and that "the negro race has been, and will be, measured by the heights reached by its most scholarly and intellectual men" (351-52). He also wrote that higher education is the tool that "will round (the Negro) out in his manhood and citizenship.... It will tend to incite to morality, honesty, sobriety, and industry, by training the intellect, the emotions, and the will to obey the mandates of that highest of monitors--conscience" (355). Thus, Scarborough and his compeers advocated a very specific kind of education, one that sought to cultivate the "civilized virtues" and a democratic ethics reminiscent of that promulgated by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, a conduct book of sorts for shaping one's self into an American citizen. The protagonists of Griggs's novel discover, however, that because of their race they will never be quite cultivated enough to be included in the nation state, and the text delivers a profound critique of the traditional American connection between mastery of language and political personhood.

Even before Scarborough black leaders praised the use of oratory and the mind as the appropriate means to achieve political equality and prove one's manhood and good character. In 1852, for example, William G. Allen, African American professor of Rhetoric at Central College in New York, delivered a lecture in which he prefigured the views of the New Negro and asserted the importance of oratory and language as a gauge of character and, specifically, one's fitness for citizenship. Allen stated that "the consummate orator is thinker, speaker, and righteous man combined. The world has seen but few such; but wherever, and whenever seen, they have represented the 'highest style of man'--the most perfect specimens" (Calloway-Thomas 315). Further, he urged the members of his audience, "as ye cultivate the oratorical, do it diligently, and with purpose; remembering that it is by the exercise of this weapon, perhaps more than any other, that America is to be made a free land, not in name only, but in deed and truth" (Calloway-Thomas 335). Oratory is thus invested with revolutionary potential; it is objectified and emblematized specifically as a race weapon. The American Revolution, whose course was arrested before the ideals of liberty and equality were fully realized, will be resumed and the weapon of choice for a number of African Americans will be neither the musket nor the sword but the rarefied realm of language: the ostensibly democratic space of oratory and republican rhetoric.

The dehumanization that often resulted from an emphasis on physicality and the body for black Americans explains in part why many African American leaders emphasized the mind and the intellect and downplayed the role of the body in signaling one's "manhood" and strength of character. Instead of highlighting the most palpable site of difference--the black body, male or female--the characters in Imperium, especially Belton, return to a republican idea of mastery and manhood based on articulateness, rationality, and self-control. (5) I return below to this emphasis on the significance of gender in Grigg's character development. Here, let me conclude this section by noting that the novel thus emerged from a sociohistorical context that lauded the development of black intellectualism, encouraged a focus on the mental over the corporeal, and considered such valorization an effective means of achieving the rights of citizenship for African Americans. Imperium in Imperio evaluates the promises and pitfalls of such perspectives and interrogates the traditional democratic link between voice and political personhood. For clarity I first analyze the long history in the United States of equating oratory with fitness for citizenship and the protagonists' faith in language as a means of securing and exercising political rights. I then examine both the factors that lead to Bernard's disillusionment with the powers of language and the consequences of that disillusionment as well as the factors effecting Belton's continued reliance on his faith in speech and language.

Mastery of Language and Fitness for Citizenship in the United States

Belton's and Bernard's initial attempts to assert their citizenship or "Americanness" through language and dialogue are understandable, given the salience of language for democratic practice. It is through verbal articulation that citizens most often participate in national, democratic processes and institutions. Language and communication are vital to any form of representative government and, theoretically at least, the citizen's ability to articulate herself or himself clearly and concisely is a democrat's most valuable asset.

Belton's and Bernard's discursive practices have the potential to secure their inclusion in the nation because the effect of their oratory is constituted not only by the words and linguistic forms they use but also by the power relations and social and institutional forces that allow these utterances to come into being and to be meaningful. Their words gain meaning and power because the classical rhetorical forms in which they are delivered are understandable to white society and hearken back to the speech-making and moving declamations of the Founding Fathers. Moreover, their words assume power and import because the institutional settings in which they generally are uttered (the courtroom, the classroom, and the congressional hall) are invested with cultural and political authority.

Much traditional US history not only extols the rhetorical powers of the Founding Fathers but also records the purported inability of various marginalized groups, such as blacks and white women, to master and wield language and oratorical skills. Such putative inability divests their physical being of the potential for political agency in the United States. Witness Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) as an example of this equation of verbal articulation and fitness for inclusion in a republican state. Jefferson maintains that Native Americans, but not African Americans, had the potential to be incorporated into the United States. He supports this assertion with his "empirical observation" of Native Americans' sublime oratorical skills and African Americans' lack of such skills. According to Jefferson, Native Americans forbid

   all compulsion, they are to be led to
   duty and to enterprize [sic] by personal
   influence and persuasion. Hence eloquence
   in council, bravery and address
   in war, become the foundations of all
   consequence with them ... (they)
   astonish you with strokes of the most
   sublime oratory; such as prove their
   reason and sentiment strong, their
   imagination glowing and elevated. But
   never yet could I find that a black had
   uttered a thought above the level of
   plain narration ... his imagination is
   wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly
   from every restraint of reason
   and taste, and, in the course of its
   vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as
   incoherent and eccentric, as is the
   course of a meteor through the sky
   (897, 903-04).

Jefferson explicitly links speech and oratory with fitness for participation in the US nation. (6) In his schema, one's speech directly and transparently reflects one's intellect and character. His triangulation of language, mind, and body is significant, and has influenced for centuries debates on which peoples should be included in the body politic. Those, like Jefferson's Native Americans, who are eloquent and persuasive possess profound and discerning intellects, minds that will not be swayed by demagogues or prone to irrational thoughts. According to Jefferson, African Americans display no such systematic, reasoned speech. He maintains that the digressions and incoherence he ascribes to the narratives of African Americans reveal unsound, unpredictable, and thereby untrustworthy minds.

Such minds and thoughts, whether rational or irrational, must be embodied, and Jefferson used his evaluation of the oratorical powers of different peoples to determine whether those human bodies would be constructive or destructive components of the national body. To the republican tradition, the irrational, digressive, and excessive inherently threaten a democratic sociopolitical system based on the ability to restrain and govern one's self. Even more dramatically, Jefferson asserts that the intellectual capabilities demonstrated by language use do not differ merely in degree, some individuals being more sublime and eloquent while others are less so. These intellectual capacities also point to a difference in kind and underscore his theory that Native Americans, controlled in their language, minds, and bodies, are "formed in the mind as well as in body, on the same module with the 'Homo sapiens Europaeus'" (897). Their biology, their physical bodies, do not ultimately threaten the homogeneity of US national culture. African Americans, however, excessive and markedly out of control in their language, minds, and bodies, "evince the real distinctions which nature has made" and do not reflect merely a difference in "condition" (902). Belonging to a completely different species in this schema, African Americans could never be incorporated into the nation without introducing a fundamentally different and, in Jefferson's view, threatening and disruptive element into American society. This Linnaean categorization of peoples demonstrates that one's very humanity--one's biological or scientific status as a human being--as well as one's political agency were conceived of and defined by one's ability to articulate in precise and socially determined ways. Written over a century after Jefferson's text, Imperium continues to explore the tradition of linking self-restraint, rational discourse, and the ability to govern one's self necessary for a democratic society. (7)

In an initial valorization of voice, speech, and republican oratorical traditions, the narrator of Imperium associates verbal articulation with the mind and soul, and very deliberately splits it off from physicality and the black body. Such lauding of the space of the mind and stigmatizing of the body, often associating physicality with disease, wounding, and putrefaction, suggest that not "race" and skin color, but education and intelligence, befit one for citizenship. Physicality is overinterpreted and not to be trusted as the gauge of the merit of an individual, as we see with Belton's son, who is born white and then metamorphoses to black, "until he became a shade darker than his father" (256). The black body is what the white characters usually fixate on and misread, projecting onto it their own stereotypes and desires and thereby forming an inaccurate image. Griggs offers his readers several instances of such misreading of the black body: as Belton crosses campus one dark night, the teachers at Stowe University read the star-student first as black rapist and then as chicken thief; white men read a disguised Belton as a black woman designed for their sexual pleasure; and, in perhaps the most egregious misreading, the racist physician Dr. Zakeland reads the injured Belton's inert black body as dead, a corpse available for his scientific experimentation.

It is significant that all of Imperium's instances of whites misreading the black body occur with Belton and none with Bernard. This imbalance may be because the dark-skinned Belton is figuratively more distanced from and inscrutable to whites than Bernard. Another factor, however, is the related issue of Bernard's class and genealogy. A wealthy mulatto, Bernard has a white patrimony intimately related to the US political system that confers citizenship and protection; his grandfather was a governor and his father an influential state senator. While still clearly an outsider, Bernard's particular class status and genealogy enable his more successful negotiation of white culture. In contrast, the impoverished Belton finds it much harder to ignore his physicality than does the obscenely rich Bernard, who "owns two millions of dollars through (his) mother" and at the death of his father "shall have eight millions more" (90). Readers must recognize the importance of the intersection of race and class and consider the role of economics, and not just formal legal equality, in securing liberty.

Other characters' misreadings of Belton demonstrate the inability or unwillingness of the white gaze to comprehend and incorporate the black body. An entity unreadable to whites, the black body poses a stumbling block to assimilation into the white political system and interferes with the idealized, illusory speech community in which dialogue is undistorted and exchanged in good faith.

Consequently, to interject themselves into this political system, Belton and Bernard deemphasize the body that serves as a barrier to political inclusion and rely on speech and the intellect. By doing so they attempt to erase the one most glaring, ineradicable difference between whites and blacks--physicality--and, through their oratory, supplant it with a focus on the soul and the mind--something markedly noncolored and non-racialized as they construct it.

In the realm of the novel, the prospect of participating in national institutions through the use of abstract, republican oratory is available only to male characters, as discussed in the preceding section. Given the double bind of race and gender, disembodiment would have been virtually impossible for the primary female characters. Just as the American Negro Academy was an organization founded by and composed of black men, and republican oratory was a markedly male tradition, it is the men in Imperium who debate race politics and use their mastery of language to foist themselves into national institutions and apparatuses.

In contrast, the primary female characters demonstrate that antiblack sentiment prevents the fulfillment of a conventional romance plot and threatens not only individual black lives but the formation of black families. Belton and Bernard both embark on love relationships that end tragically, destroyed directly or indirectly by racialized tension and blacks' and whites' inability to coexist peacefully. Belton marries Antoinette Nermal, a fellow teacher at a "colored school" in Richmond, Virginia (113). Both Antoinette and Belton are dark skinned, yet the child Antoinette bears is white. Broken-hearted and disconsolate, Belton leaves his wife after he erroneously concludes that his inability to secure a job and support his family in a racist society "tempted her to ruin" (137). He curses "the flag which he had loved so dearly, which had floated proudly and undisturbed, while color prejudice, upheld by it, sent, as he thought, cruel want with drawn sword to stab his family honor to death" (138). Their child, however, darkens as he grows older, and his eventual resemblance to Belton redeems Antoinette in the eyes of her community. Bernard's relationship with Viola is similarly tragic. A dark-skinned woman, Viola believes that amalgamation will enervate and ultimately destroy the black race. She thus is torn between her love for the light-skinned Bernard on one hand, and, on the other, her determination to maintain the purity of her oppressed race. Viola's spurious notions of racial difference and determination to "separat[e] the white and colored races" ultimately lead her to suicide (175).

Rather than acting as political agents or potential members of the republican speech community, as their male counterparts do, the female characters illustrate that antiblack sentiment and notions of inherent racial difference threaten the black family and compromise the black male protagonists' right to the pursuit of happiness. The removal of romance plots also facilitates the development of Belton and Bernard as political agents and reinforces the notion of black resistance as a primarily male enterprise. Their domestic lives unfulfilled, Belton and Bernard freely and entirely devote themselves to their political programs. After Belton leaves his wife, the narrator remarks that "Belton had now lost all hope of personal happiness in this life, and as he grew more and more composed he found himself better prepared than ever to give his life wholly to the righting of the wrongs of his people" (138). Even the utopian possibilities of romantic narrative do not allow for the prospect of racial integration; instead, the failure of such plots serves the development of the political consciousness of Griggs's male protagonists.

If deemphasizing the body in order to focus on the mind seems out of the question for Antoinette and Viola, it proves equally difficult for Belton and Bernard. Despite their attempts to dissociate themselves from their bodies, the male characters ultimately recognize that the repression of physicality is impossible; the body keeps intruding, particularly in the case of the dark-skinned Belton. The insistent return of the black body is evinced early in the text after Belton delivers his high school graduation address. Despite his superior intellect and his impeccable declamation on, of all subjects, "The Contribution of the Anglo-Saxon to the Cause of Human Liberty," Belton's blackness intrudes and causes him to lose the oratory contest. The white judges remark, "'That black nigger has beat the yellow one all to pieces this time, but we don't like to see nigger blood triumph over any Anglo-Saxon blood. Ain't there any loophole where we can give it to Bernard anyhow?'" (35). The fact that the body cannot be erased, that the stigma that blackness carried in turn-of-the-century United States would be omnipotent despite one's intelligence and education, is perhaps what Bernard understands when he advocates separatism in the second half of the novel: "'I know the Anglo-Saxon race. He will never admit you to equality with him'" (253)--as well as what Belton dies never fully comprehending.

Imperium thus suggests the fracturing of the homogeneous speech community of republican oratory and the persistence of force relations, duplicity, and discrimination in the public sphere and the US nation. For what is of critical significance is that these characters, through their faith in oratory and the intellect and their near eclipse of physicality and the black body, attempt to create a kind of "colorless" (read whitened) or disembodied self. What the text ultimately demonstrates, however, is the problem that results when two sign systems--the visual versus the aural--clash, and the sociopolitical reality that 19th-century whites generally chose to valorize the visual over the aural. In other words, a profound disjunction occurs when the dominant culture sees "its" words and republican oratorical traditions issuing from a black face. The mimicry or imitation of white oratory is so close to the original that it becomes threatening and disturbing to the white elite. This disjunction is critical because what the white population registers when Griggs's eloquent orators take the podium is not a colorless or disembodied voice but a pure black body, as demonstrated by the white judges' refusal to award Belton first prize in the high school graduation oratory competition despite his superior performance.

The Black Body and the Body Politic

Several of Griggs's most complex images of physicality, however, do not focus on the individual body but involve the US nation. In these descriptions, Griggs portrays the nation torn by civil war in corporeal, bloody terms: "horrid War, in frenzied joy, yet waved his bloody sword over the nation's head, and sought with eager eagle eyes every drop of clotted gore over which he might exult" (38), and

   The world is like a wounded animal
   that has run a long way and now lies
   stretched upon the ground, blood oozing
   forth from gasping wounds and
   pains darting through its entire frame.
   The huntsman, who comes along to
   secure and drink the feverish milk of
   this animal that is all but a rotting carcass,
   seriously endangers his own well
   being. So, young men, do not look
   upon this dying, decaying world to
   feed and support you. You must feed
   and support it. (65)

In these descriptions of the post-Civil War United States, Griggs explodes the myth of the prosperous, healthy land of opportunity; readers are left with rotting, bloody pieces that must somehow be put back together. Through personification and embodied descriptions Griggs conjures images of the "old" nation under the system of slavery as a warped and decaying body politic: a nation very much dependent on and haunted by the abused and bloody bodies of slaves whose labor undergirded the national socioeconomic order. The implication is that the health and welfare of the nation depend upon the health and welfare of its (black) citizens. Abuse of African Americans led to the corruption and decay of the national body. Conversely, the economic and social well being of the African American community, represented by the well being of the protagonists, will help to ensure the welfare of the nation. Since the former national order, one that allowed the ownership and exploitation of human beings, is now itself a rotting corpse that cannot be resurrected, an alternative system must be developed. As Griggs imagines it, the new, post-Civil War United States indeed will be something quite different: a nation that will valorize the intelligence, industriousness, and articulateness of its citizens, white and black, instead of focusing on skin color and corporeal differences. The novel thus offers the reader two competing images of the nation: that of an infected, corrupted body associated with the past and systems of slavery and that of a harmonious, purportedly egalitarian body of speakers associated with the present and the future. The more desirable choice is clear.

Griggs calls upon the traditional mind/body split in Imperium in Imperio in order to undo the binary oppositions of blackness/whiteness, labor/intellect, and physicality/spirituality, and to destabilize conventional notions of blackness. He argues that the mind and speech are powerful tools that whites generally deny that blacks possess. He challenges the Anglo-Saxon's traditional assertion that "in this great 'battle for bread,' [blacks] must supply the brute force while I supply the brain. If you attempt to use your brain I will kill you; and before I will stoop so low as to use my own physical power to earn my daily bread I will kill myself" (211). Although Imperium argues for the destabilization of these traditional binary oppositions, Griggs posits that a danger exists in the way that characters seek to destabilize them: that is, through the denial or repression of black physicality and materiality.

Griggs is not blind to the pitfalls of such attempted elision of the (black) body; he recognizes that the mind and intellect may be insufficient tools to guarantee one's rights of citizenship. He writes, "In the whole of [Belton's] school life, he had never encountered a student who could surpass him in intellectual ability; and yet, here he was with all his conceded worth, unable to find a place to earn his daily bread, all because of the color of his skin" (135). This passage echoes the powerful assertion Griggs makes a few pages earlier when he writes that Belton

   possessed a first class college education,
   but that was all.... It is true that
   there were positions around by the
   thousands which he could fill, but his
   color debarred him ... the color of his
   skin shut the doors so tight that he
   could not even peep in. The white people
   would not employ him in these
   positions, and the colored people did
   not have any enterprises in which they
   could employ him. (129)

Despite its initial representations of the power of oratory and the mind to secure African Americans the rights due them, Imperium reveals a deep, post-Reconstruction anxiety about the efficacy of such means. Griggs's novel ultimately complicates the traditional association between speech and political being evinced in US history and fiction, suggesting instead that material, economic considerations (that is, ways for blacks to "earn their daily bread") are crucial to African Americans striving to realize their rights. Citizenship and political participation require the ability to earn and accumulate money in a capitalist system. The novel prompts a reexamination of what constitutes freedom by suggesting that liberty is neither a legal right nor an absence of formal impediments, but an economic and material issue relating to access to capital and one's ability to exercise the rights inscribed within the law. It emphasizes that issues of economic inequality must be addressed in order to eradicate social and political inequalities, and it challenges the notion that as blacks assimilated to middle-class standards and achieved "moral respectability," either prejudice would diminish, or literacy would enable one to escape antiblack prejudice.

Significantly, while the protagonists' valorization of intellectualism over materiality does not enable them to achieve democratic political participation in the dominant institutions and the official Congress of the nation, neither does such participation manifest itself in the "alternative" rival congress of the Imperium. In the Imperium, debate and oratory do not lead to the realization of democratic practice, nor is a consensus intended to foster the good of the people ever achieved or maintained. What in fact results are forms of coercion that parallel the more covert oppression occurring in the official institutions of the nation. At the least, the Imperium's explicit coercion is an exaggerated manifestation of the force relations that often occur under the auspices of achieving consensus, which suggests the more disturbing notion that violence and coercion are simultaneously and paradoxically constitutive of and masked by the consensus building central to democratic practice.

When Belton dissents from the Imperium's plan to go to war with whites, his speech to his comrades convinces them that such a plan is foolish, dangerous, and unnecessary. Instead of respecting the working of the public sphere, however, and allowing the soundest argument to prevail Bernard, the president of the Imperium, colludes with several elite members of the organization and manipulates them into supporting his bellicose plans. The next day Belton's victory is overturned. In a perverse, extreme desire for unity and consensus, the bylaws of the Imperium stipulate that anyone who dissents from the majority's vote must be executed as a traitor. (8) Thus, even those individuals portrayed as most liberty-loving, the ones working most assiduously to foster democratic practice, are complicit in a disturbing tyranny and oppression. We see here the fulfillment of Alexis de Tocqueville's prediction that democracy in the United States would not lead to greater freedom and original thought, but to a tyranny of the majority opinion and an oppressive univocality. The coercion extant in the Imperium forces readers to confront not only the limits of republican oratory and ethics within a racist context, but also the paradoxical nature of consensus building itself and the potentially conflicting impulses of union and coercion that manifest themselves in the enactment of democratic practice anywhere.

The coercion pervading the Imperium leads to the institution's downfall and suggests that such impulses towards forced consensus contain the potential to destroy the very institutions they mean to bolster. Unable to bear the death of Belton and afraid of what an increasingly maniacal Bernard has been able to convince the members to promote, Beryl Trout, Secretary of State of the Imperium, reveals the existence of the secret Congress and thereby ensures its destruction by the US government. The Imperium's inability to succeed where its rival institution has failed--its inability to foster freedom and maximize democratic practice--is of critical significance for it suggests that it is not simply the racism of the individuals who establish and perpetuate the dominant institutions, but also the principles or structure of the institutions themselves that contribute to the oppressive and undemocratic practices enacted in and by them.

Once Belton and Bernard recognize that the rights of citizenship may not be realized through the appropriation and manipulation of republican oratorical traditions, they shift from an emphasis on the space of language as the site of democratic practice to a more material, geographical basis for the construction of a democratic society in which African Americans can participate. They explore the idea of annexing part of the US territory for African Americans' residence and prosperity. They suggest constructing a parallel state in the southwest portion of the United States as a territory in which blacks can realize the rights promised them in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, rights never enforced nor ensured. Thus, the novel moves from a reliance on a highly abstract spatialization of language to an appropriation of real space, that is, to territory.

The idea of forming a black state within the United States had historical precedent. As historian Alfred A. Moss, Jr., notes, "by the mid-1880s blacks of all classes, in the North as well as the South, were coming to feel that the intense and implacable hostility of whites left them no alternative but to accept a separate existence apart from the larger American community" (10). As early as 1866 Sojourner Truth encouraged freed blacks to migrate West and petitioned Congress to set aside land for this purpose. In the 1870s thousands of blacks migrated from the Southern states to Kansas, known for its available land and fertile soil, to better their economic and political conditions. (9) While African American migrants advocated moving West to a state that might recognize their rights to citizenship, some activists espoused the establishment of a totally distinct black sovereignty. The idea of a nation within a nation, a concept increasingly common in the late nineteenth century, sometimes referred merely to the fact that the population of African Americans was growing larger than that of some independent nations, but often referred more specifically to the notion that blacks were forming a distinct nationality: "[Black Americans] felt that segregation had stimulated a sense of common interest and solidarity so that Negroes were developing what amounted to a feeling of Negro nationality, comparable to the 'racial consciousness' appearing among the peoples of Southern Europe" (Meier 271). In the late 1890s, Bishop Lucius H. Holsey of the African Methodist Episcopal Church proposed that the federal government establish a separate state in which African Americans could enjoy the rights and protections of full citizenship. He suggested that the state be carved out of the Indian Territory, New Mexico, or some other section of the public domain in the West, which of course would be problematic, as increased power and equity for African Americans would come at the expense of the Native Americans. In this territory, whites would be ineligible for citizenship except through interracial marriage, and only whites on official government business could reside within its borders. Holsey justified this black state on the grounds that "two distinct peoples can never live together in the South in peace, when one is Anglo-Saxon and the other Negro, unless the Negro, as a race or en masse, lives in the submerged realm of serfdom and slavery" (Bacote 49). Such historical movements engaged in precisely the kinds of debates that Griggs thematizes. The reconciliation or coexistence envisioned by Belton in the novel was questioned by many African Americans who were agitating at the time Griggs was writing his novels. In the vision outlined by Holsey above, even an imperium in imperio, a nation within a nation, was untenable. As a consequence of the failure of the metaphorical space of language to effect social and political change, a number of African Americans promoted explicit, territorial segregation and sovereignty in order to secure a material space in which to work out their future.

While Bernard advocates the establishment of a separate black state through immediate and violent annexation, Belton, true to his indoctrination by his mentor Dr. Lovejoy, espouses trying to work within the dominant system, informing the "Anglo-Saxon ... (that) the genius of his institutions has taken hold of our very souls ... we must change the conception which the Anglo-Saxon has formed of our character.... Before we make a forward move, let us pull the veil from before the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon that he may see the New Negro standing before him humbly, but firmly demanding every right granted him by his maker and wrested from him by man" (242, 244). At the close of the text Belton still believes that he can transform the white gaze, changing the way dominant society sees the black body. His metaphor of removing a "veil" from the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon suggests that it is not African Americans who must be reformed but white reading practices, and that such a change will be revelatory and profound. According to Belton's plan, if after four years of trying to "impress the Anglo-Saxon" (245) African Americans still cannot secure the rights due them, then and only then should they emigrate to Texas and there "[work] out our destiny as a separate and distinct race in the United States of America" (244).

Belton's proposal contains a naive yet intriguing relationship between space and national affiliation; he poses two intranational entities, one black and one white. Both would be under the control of the federal government, but each would function as a separate, racially-based state. Bernard, in contrast, seeks to secede from US national control, to build for the black "an empire of his own" (252) with help from foreign nations (in 1899, presumably Spain). Belton argues that Bernard's plan is treasonous and that the "Imperium was organized to secure our rights within the United States.... I shall never fight to restrict the territory in which [the flag] is to float" (252-53). The physical, material space of the nation is critical to Belton, and the contracting of such space or the invitation of a foreign other, even if to secure democratic practice, is unacceptable to him. His loyalties are not to the democratic principles themselves but to the state and its institutions, which he believes are the legitimate embodiment of those principles.

Despite his deferred annexation plan, which he presents as an unlikely last resort, Belton maintains a deep faith in the power of language. Even after the insufficiency of the appropriation of republican oratory by African Americans becomes clear, he advocates another form of communicative action--writing--as a means of securing the rights of citizenship. He hopes to incite a nonviolent revolt through the use of the pen: "there is a weapon mightier than [the sword and ballot]. ... I speak of the pen" (246), "It would be the crowning glory of even this marvelous age; it would be the grandest contribution ever made to the cause of human civilization ... if every Negro, away from the land of his nativity, can by means of the pen, force an acknowledgment of equality from the proud lips of the fierce, all conquering Anglo-Saxon" (246-47). Belton's shift from oral to written communication suggests a continued unwillingness or inability to see the gap between the nation's ideals and the dominant culture's prerogative to resist enacting those ideals. For although the novel has demonstrated the illusory nature of a space of oratory in which disembodied, "colorless" individuals may participate in the debate and dialogue necessary for a democracy, in the end Belton offers the potentially more disembodied space of written language, which can be disseminated in a more anonymous format, as a substitute for the idealized space of oratory. The lack of an immediate black physical presence in written language, as opposed to oratory or rhetorical performance, allows Belton to shift his strategy and further efface the black body while continuing to deploy language as the primary means of effecting social change. His turn to writing is designed to provide greater access to the imagined community of the nation, and while it seems to suggest a profound, almost perverse, faith in language to secure equality, it paradoxically reveals a great anxiety that language and rational communication, in and of themselves, cannot transcend race. As a result, Belton must work harder and harder to hide his blackness. (10)

In contrast to Belton's faith in the power of language, Bernard's plan of violent revolt recognizes the inadequacy of oratory to secure a point of entry into the nation. The narrator, however, with a post-Civil War perspective on widespread, horrific bloodshed that he is not eager to witness again, portrays such a plan as madness, maniacal and self-serving. He depicts Bernard's advocacy of bloody revolt, not as altruistic or pious, but as self-indulgent, borne "of his own burning desire for glory" (94). Bernard appears as increasingly crazed and out of control, as "wicked," "a maniac," and "a serious menace" (263). Although the pursuit of literacy and rhetorical mastery did not yield the desired result, the logic of the text more and more shuns explicit, militant violence as well, and Griggs uses this aporia, the lack of narrative closure evinced in the impasse between competing models of political activism, to resist a symbolic resolution to an historical circumstance that clearly was not immediately resolvable.

The clashing philosophies of Belton and Bernard represent two different perspectives on race leadership: whether to reform the dominant culture from within or to support a separatist, militant black nationalism. Griggs does not resolve the tension between these two programs within the scope of the novel, and as a result some critics have branded him "ideologically confused," alternatively "militant and challenging" and "conciliatory to the point of servility" (Bone 33). Griggs's supposed inconsistency makes sense, however, when we consider that it reflects an historical ambivalence about the best way to secure African Americans' rights of citizenship. Should blacks support the programs of Stowe or of Douglass? Washington or Du Bois? Belton or Bernard? Griggs does not definitively answer this question in Imperium; instead he lays out several strategies for political action without wholeheartedly endorsing any. Focusing on the link between rhetoric and citizenship, however, offers us a way of understanding the central conflict between dichotomized modes of black leadership and the ending of the novel as something other than mere "ideological confusion." It enables readers to see the conclusion as, first, an exploration of the promises and pitfalls of the traditional American reliance on articulation and mastery of language as indices of political and personal identities, and secondly, a critical examination of the apparent polarization of black leadership--a phenomenon that recurred both before and beyond the career of Sutton E. Griggs.

If in Imperium in Imperio Griggs focuses on the historical ambivalence towards competing models of black leadership instead of advocating a particular program for political action, just a few years later, in his penultimate novel The Hindered Hand, his position becomes more specific. This novel is similar to Imperium in Imperio in several important ways. As in Imperium, in The Hindered Hand two friends, Ensal and Earl, espouse nonviolent and violent revolt, respectively, as the most efficacious means to secure liberty for African Americans. As in the earlier novel, Griggs constructs a potentially confusing alliteration in the names of his protagonists, which suggests that the two individuals are connected in a fundamental way and not completely divergent. Griggs grapples more profoundly with the issue of violent versus nonviolent revolt in this later work and evinces a greater willingness to admit the role of violent resistance in effecting social and political change; there is no martyring of Ensal or demonization of Earl in the text as there is with Belton and Bernard. The Hindered Hand ultimately suggests that the dichotomization of violent and nonviolent means of resistance results in two unsatisfactory strategies for achieving liberty. Rather than supporting either plan for social and political change, the text suggests that such programs should temper each other and be viewed as mutually supportive. The novel suggests that African Americans should work through rhetorical persuasion and earnest efforts to persuade white America of black intelligence and humanity, but also that African Americans should not be reluctant to use more physical, violent means of "communication" if necessary. The narrator of The Hindered Hand explicitly remarks that "Ensal and Earl represented two types in the Negro race, the conservative and the radical. They both stood for the ultimate recognition of the rights of the Negro as an American citizen, but their methods were opposite" (48). When Ensal tells Earl that "our cause is just and we must learn to plead it acceptably. That is our problem," he subscribes to the idea that language and persuasive oratory are the foundation of securing for African Americans the rights of citizenship, and he echoes the character of Belton. Similar to Bernard, however, Earl replies, "This is all very good, Ensal, but it needs a supplement. Charles Sumner's oratory and Mrs. Stowe's affecting portraiture of poor old Uncle Tom were not sufficient of themselves to move the nation. There had to be a John Brown" (161). Recognizing the need for both means of resistance, recognizing that neither strategy in and of itself will assuredly effect social change, is critical to Griggs's representations of the same debate six years earlier in Imperium in Imperio.

Works Cited

Bacote, Clarence A. "Negro Proscriptions, Protests, and Proposed Solutions in Georgia, 1880-1908." Nieman 27-54.

Berry, Mary F. "Black Visions of Educational Improvement." History of Education Quarterly 24.4 (1984): 597-600.

Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965.

Calloway-Thomas, Carolyn. "William G. Allen on 'Orators and Oratory.' " Journal of Black Studies 18.3 (1988): 313-36.

Crummell, Alexander. "Civilization, the Primal Need of the Race." 1897. The American Negro Academy Occasional Papers 1-22. New York: Arno, 1969. 1-7.

Dunning, William. "The Undoing of Reconstruction." Atlantic Monthly 88 (1901): 437-49.

Franklin, John Hope." 'Legal' Disfranchisement of the Negro." Nieman 119-26.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "The Trope of the New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black." Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 129-55.

Gloster, Hugh M. Introduction. Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem. By Sutton E. Griggs. 1899. New York: Arno, 1969. i-vi.

Griggs, Sutton E. Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem. 1899. New York: Arno, 1969.

--. The Hindered Hand: or, the Reign of the Repressionist. 1901. Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1785. Ed. William Peden. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1955.

Kaplan, Amy. "Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Novel of the 1890s ." American Literary History 2.4 (1990): 659-90.

Magnum, Charles S., Jr. The Legal Status of the Negro. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1940.

Meier, August. Negro Thought in America 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1963.

Moses, Wilson J. "Literary Garveyism: The Novels of Reverend Sutton E. Griggs." Phylon 40.3 (1979): 203-16.

Moss, Alfred A., Jr. The American Negro Academy: The Voice of the Talented Tenth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.

Nieman, Donald G., ed. African American Life, 1861-1900: African Americans and Southern Politics from Redemption to Disfranchisement. New York: Garland, 1994.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction. New York: Knopf, 1976.

Price, Richard. "Resistance to Slavery in the Americas: Maroons and their Communities." Indian Historical Review 15.1-2 (1988-89): 71-95.

Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic, 1993.

Scarborough, William S. "Booker T. Washington and His Work." Education 20.5 (1890): 270-76.

--. "The Negro and Higher Learning." The Forum 33 (1902): 349-55.

Stark, John. "Rhetoric, Literacy, and Citizenship." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 16.3 (1986): 135-43.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1974.

Notes

(1.) For more on the history of Jim Crow laws and the Black Codes of various Southern states, see Franklin; Magnum; Woodward; and Dunning.

(2.) Gloster and Bone consider Imperium to be Griggs's most militant work, while Moses reads it as the author's most nationalistic.

(3.) I distinguish between equality and equity. Equality refers to a formal, legal condition; African Americans achieved equality with the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Equity, in contrast, surpasses a codified, statutory equality and refers to a state of meaningful, material, social, political, and economic freedom. People can thus achieve equality without experiencing equity, as was the case for blacks in late-19th-century United States.

(4.) The University and Hotel not only symbolize the ideologies of Stowe and Douglass, respectively, but of course resonate with the political programs of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B Du Bois as well. Belton's experiences at Stowe University lead him in the accommodationist tradition of Washington while Bernard's experiences at the Hotel Douglass lead him in the protest direction of Du Bois. Although there were many similarities in the beliefs of these two black leaders in the 1890s, by the early twentieth century their programs diverged. Washington advocated a more conciliatory approach to the white South and emphasized black economic strength and moral respectability. Du Bois, in contrast, affirmed the importance of suffrage and political rights and the need to engage in emphatic and unceasing protest. Griggs himself presumably supported the protest tradition associated with men like Douglass and Du Bois, as he was a member of Du Bois's Niagara Movement, a group founded in 1905 to protest the abridgement of political and civil rights and the circumscription of economic and educational opportunities for African Americans. Bernard's espousal of protest in Imperium, however, is more strident than that of Du Bois, who did not advocate militant violence, and is informed by the mid-to late-19th-century push to found a separate black state, which I discuss in more detail below.

(5.) Unlike the supporters of the New Negro movement and the American Negro Academy, who advocated an emphasis on education and mental development as primary to (black) citizenship, power, and advancement, dominant white society constructed different markers of cultivation and power. In the late nineteenth century, as Rotundo notes, "the male body moved to the center of men's gender concerns" (222). Advice books and exercise manuals listed physical strength as the basis of male character and a mania for physical culture developed as physical strength became equated with strength of character. As Rotundo states, "older traits of manliness such as independence and reason were ... cast in shadow by more physical 'primitive' qualities" (234). The turn-of-the-century linkage of American manhood and robust physicality stems in part from militant US expansionist policies and plans to extend US political and economic influence abroad. The imperialist urge of the 1890s and the desire to expand international markets found its embodiment in the Spanish-American War (1898), which many Americans viewed "as a chivalric liberation of Cuba and the Philippines from a tyrannical old-world empire [and] ... as a rescue mission for American manhood" (Kaplan 659). In addition to economic advantages, gaining control of Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico offered the United States an opportunity to portray itself as the virile protector and liberator of oppressed and inferior peoples.

(6.) Jefferson writes that African Americans should be colonized and declared "a free and independent people" (902). Although he concedes that they should be free, Jefferson explicitly states that African Americans should not be incorporated into the US nation and should be moved to a separate geographical territory.

(7.) Given Griggs's emphasis on order and restraint, it is important to note that his characters in Imperium in Imperio do not parody or subversively signify on the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, which would be an "excessive" or "uncontrolled" use of language. In this respect, Imperium is very different in its use of republican oratorical traditions from a text like David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, in which Walker appropriates the format of the US Constitution (a preamble and four articles) to excoriate the racism and injustice that African Americans experience in the United States. Walker's appropriation of republican language and his revision of the founding documents foreground issues of race and the black body. The articles explore aspects of US society that have contributed to the oppression of blacks: slavery, ignorance, Christianity, and colonization. In his Appeal Walker uses the discourses of freedom and equality to expose the betrayal of those ideals in the dominant culture's treatment of blacks. In Imperium, however, Belton and Bernard deploy republican rhetoric in order to erase race, to demonstrate the metaphysical and intellectual sameness of African Americans and Anglo Americans, not to foreground how racial difference has been manipulated into a basis for oppression.

(8.) One way of understanding the harsh and extreme need for unanimity in the Imperium that helps to explain the role of violence in the institution is to view it as a postbellum "maroon community." Although slavery was ostensibly over, African Americans systematically increasingly experienced political, economic, and social oppression if not virtual bondage. The Imperium approximates a maroon community in several crucial ways: it is hard to find, on the outskirts of town, secret, well fortified, and threatening to dominant institutions. As Richard Price notes, "Internal dissension of any sort could also pose a fatal threat to a small community at war ... many early maroon communities allowed a great deal of power and authority to accrue to their leaders, and they learnt to live with harsh sanctions on internal dissension"; the "centralization of authority and strong internal discipline" marked most maroon communities (86). The need to establish strong, unchallenged leadership and to eliminate factions within the group explains in part the violence of the institution but does not mitigate either the horror of Bernard's use of coercion and intrigue to garner support for his mission or the violence of Belton's death.

(9.) For more on this topic, see Painter.

(10.) Not all written material functions as an effacement of the body that authors it. Griggs's novel itself, for example, continually represents and thematizes blackness, the stigma it carried in the turn-of-the-century United States, and African American inability to erase physicality. In contrast, Belton's desire to prove sameness, his desire to appease and appeal to the whites, suggests that his writing will discourage race consciousness.

Maria Karafilis is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. Her essays have appeared in journals and volumes including Arizona Quarterly, American Transcendental Quarterly, and Blackwell Publisher's Companion to the American Novel.