Wild Charges: The Afro-Haitian “Charge of the Light Brigade”

Abstract

This essay argues against the historicist tendency to grant interpretive priority to a text's narrowly construed, originary historical context, and in favor of greater attention to historical processes and acts of de- and recontextualization. Taking as my example "The Charge of the Light Brigade," I explore the uses to which this quintessentially topical poem was put in Frederick Douglass' Paper, where it was reprinted and mobilized in African American debates over antislavery violence and the relationship between race and culture. Interesting in their own right, these deployments of "The Light Brigade" shed light on the poem as well, relocating it within Tennyson's oeuvre and making visible its own strategy of deracializing recontextualization.

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