Description
Book SynopsisThe period of 1850-1865 consisted of violent struggle and crisis as the United States underwent the prodigious transition from slaveholding to ostensibly ''free'' nation. This volume reframes mid-century African American literature and challenges our current understandings of both African American and American literature. It presents a fluid tradition that includes history, science, politics, economics, space and movement, the visual, and the sonic. Black writing was highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries. Chapters explore how Black literature was being produced and circulated; how and why it marked its relation to other literary and expressive traditions; what geopolitical imaginaries it facilitated through representation; and what technologies, including print, enabled African Americans to pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.
Table of ContentsTimeline; Volume 4: 1850-1865, Introduction, Teresa Zackodnik; Part 1. Black personhood and citizenship in transition: Section introduction, Teresa Zackodnik; 1. Freedom's accounts—the semi-citizenship narrative, Stephen Knadler; 2. Conduct discourse, slave narratives, and Black male self-fashioning on the eve of the Civil war, Erica L. Ball; 3. Picturing Blackness with and against Stowe's lens, Michael A. Chaney; 4. African American periodicals and the transition to visual intercourse, Autumn Womack; Part 2. Generic transitions and textual circulation: Section introduction, Teresa Zackodnik; 5. Overhearing the African American novel, 1850-1865, Hollis Robbins and Mark Sussman; 6. Black romanticism and the lyric as the medium of the conspiracy, Matt Sandler; 7. Black newspapers, novels and the racial geographies of transnationalism, Ben Fagan; 8. Creoles of color, poetry and the periodic press in union occupied New Orleans, Jennifer Gipson; 9. The Haitian and American revolutions and Black historical writing at mid-century, Stephen Gilroy Hall; Part 3. Black geographies in transition: Section introduction, Teresa Zackodnik; 10. Freedom to move, Janaka Bowman-Lewis; 11. Black activism, print culture and literature in Canada 1850-1865, Winfried Siemerling; 12. Antislavery activist networks and transatlantic texts, Barbara McCaskill; 13. Haiti as diasporic crossroads in transnational African American writing, Marlene L. Daut; Bibliography.
