Sally McKee. The Exile’s Song

What is the nature of exile? How do the exiled balance the pain of loss with the unfamiliarity of the new? Such questions lie at the heart of The Exile’s Song, Sally McKee’s marvelous exploration into the life of the composer Edmond Dédé, a francophone free man of color from New Orleans who migrated to France in 1855 and wrote orchestral music in Bordeaux for thirty-six years. In self-exile from the racism of his native country, Dédé became “the only dark-skinned man of African descent who achieved professional recognition in nineteenth-century France” (178). Despite gaining the recognition he probably never could have achieved in the United States, he quickly fell into oblivion thereafter, requiring an exceptional effort from McKee to recuperate his story. The Exile’s Song joins recent works such as Lisa A. Lindsay’s Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa (2017), Mary Frances Berry’s We Are Who We Say We Are: A Black Family’s Search for Home across the Atlantic World (2014), and Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard’s Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (2012) in retracing the travels of African-descended individuals, or multiple generations of an African-descended family, between some combination of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. In almost every instance, given a lack of memoirs, journals, or major collections of letters, historians must work from archival fragments—census, probate, and parish records, bills of sale, perhaps an occasional newspaper article or a mention in a white person’s diary. Blurring the lines between biography and microhistory, such an approach necessarily relies on thick description of larger contexts and on informed speculation about the subject’s elusive inner world. Nonetheless, McKee’s work reaffirms historians’ ability to track the documentary fingerprints left by forgotten black people in their search for freedom and opportunity throughout the Atlantic World, and to shape these distant echoes into coherent narratives.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Atlantic World · Cartography · Emancipation · Fell · Genealogy · Geography · Historiography · Memoir · Middle Passage · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Theology · Thou · White (mutation) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies