Splendid Failures in Blake and The Marrow of Tradition
Humanities
LTWL 190B: Slavery, Race, and the Nation in the US and Cuba
In this seminar paper, I sought to explore the ways in which literature about slavery can be used to tell histories of transAmerican slavery that are not bound to the narratives of failure and paralyzing tragedy. Using W.E.B Du Bois' concept of "splendid failures," this paper looks at how the narration of history and the passage of time can be differently constructed to give voice to the historically silenced, and make room for open-ended futures and possibilities that can emerge out of the lengthy "history of failures" of the nineteenth-century US and Cuba.
