Description
Book SynopsisThrough readings of slave narratives, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, newspaper editorials, and government documents including texts by Frederick Douglass and freed West Indian slave Mary Prince, Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo explicates the growing interrelatedness of people of African descent through the Americas in the nineteenth century.
Trade Review"
Black Cosmopolitanism seeks to tell a story about the complex hemispheric context in which multiple public discourses of blackness emerged in the work of black intellectuals, writing and publishing throughout a nineteenth century shaped by the cataclysmic impact of the Haitian revolution . . . [The book reflects] the richness of new pathways in a hemispheric American studies, moving outward to explore philosophies of race and histories of racial identity that traveled back and forth between colonial and imperial worlds." *
American Literature *
"
Black Cosmopolitanism presents a strong, innovative case for looking back in order to look forward. . . .Nwankwo's book highlights its relevance to a varied cross section of disciplines that include, but are not limited to, African-American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Afro-Hispanic Literature, and History of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries." *
Journal of Haitian Studies *
Table of ContentsPT. 1. THE MAKING OF A RACE (MAN)
1. The view from above: Placido through the eyes of the Cuban colonial government and white abolitionists
2. The view from next door: Placido through black abolitionists' eyes
PT. 2. BOTH (RACE) AND (NATION)?
3. On being black and Cuban: race, nation, and romanticism in the poetry of Placido
4. "We intend to stay here": the international shadows in Frederick Douglass's representations of African American community
5. "More a Haitian than an American": Frederick Douglass and the black world beyond the United States
PT. 3. NEGATING NATION, REJECTING RACE
6. A slave's cosmopolitanism: Mary Prince, a West Indian slave, and the geography of identity
7. Disidentification as identity: Juan Francisco Manzano and the flight from blackness
