Metalinguistic Analysis in the Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1808–1823

This essay returns to an understudied archive within early Black sermonic and oratory culture: a set of commemorations delivered between 1808 and 1823 by abolitionists, clergymen, and other community leaders at Black churches and philanthropic organizations in New York and Philadelphia to remember the United States Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which went into effect on January 1, 1808. I argue that this genre interrogates dominant language and narratorial practices through a form of theoretical investigation called metalinguistic analysis. Metalinguistics is a transdisciplinary branch of linguistics that investigates how language relates to cognition and cultural behaviors. Their metalinguistic analyses expertly elaborate how dominant political, theological, scientific, and economic discourses are operationalized in service of Western greed, theft, plunder, and enslavement. To avoid reproducing these social ills, the January 1 orators suggest emotional sobriety, honesty, humility, temperance in food and drink, industry, a peaceful deportment, and obedience to the laws of God and nation as written. Their prescriptions have been traditionally understood as an early example of uplift discourse, a term that emerged in the late nineteenth century. But I suggest that when read in the context of their metalinguistic analyses, these behaviors are revolutionary practices that resist the avarice, dishonesty, vainglory, gluttony, and lust that initiated and propelled the trade in Black flesh.