Description
Book SynopsisA study of select nineteenth-century African American authors and reformers who mobilized the discourses of cosmopolitanism and restraint to expand the meaning of freedom.
Trade Review“This book speaks softly and carries a big wallop. Through precise readings and meticulous historical research, Stewart demonstrates that there was a common transnational epistemology uniting black reformers. Highly recommended.”
—Kathryn Lofton,author of Consuming Religion
“Exploring a world torn by the foundational fractures forced by the system of slavery and racial control, Stewart uncovers a history of reform that challenges our understanding of place and mobility in African American history. She considers such writers as William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, George Moses Horton, Frances Harper, and Amanda Berry Smith, finding in their works a cosmopolitan determination to reorient American culture from the ground up. Anyone interested in African American literary and cultural history will want to read this important book.”
—John Ernest,author of Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History
“An original, nuanced, and theoretically robust work of scholarship that will quickly prove to be a tremendous addition to our understanding of race, religion, politics, and public life. Stewart critically reads the multiple languages and expressions of freedom as amalgams that form and inform the multiple meanings of the world and human experience. By deeply probing the complex contours of the temperance movement against the backdrop of the Atlantic world, Stewart adds rich texture and offers fresh perspectives on this protean international movement.”
—Corey D. B. Walker,author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America
“In this study Carole Lynn Stewart shows how a group of enslaved, ex-enslaved, or fugitive African American women and men, through international travel, imaginative vision, and intellectual insight, critically expanded the practice and ideal of temperance from an individualistic, inner purity blind to the corruption of a civic order that tolerated slavery and enabled temperance to a serve as the vital basis for both the inward and societal meanings of freedom.”
—Charles H. Long,author of Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion
“Stewart offers readers a theoretically rich, at times dizzying, account of the various ways Black creative writers, evangelists, and political activists connected cosmopolitanism to innovative practices of resistance and liberation.”
—Stefan M. Wheelock American Literary History
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Slave Travels and the Beginnings of a Temperate Cosmopolitanism
1. William Wells Brown and Martin Delany: Civil and Geographic Spaces of Temperate Cosmopolitanism 2. Brown’s Temperate Cosmopolitan “Home”: Creole Civilization and Temperate Manners 3. George Moses Horton’s Freedom: A Temperate Republicanism and a Critical Cosmopolitanism 4. Frances E. W. Harper’s Black Cosmopolitan Creoles: A Temperate Transnationalism 5. “The Quintessence of Sanctifying Grace”: Amanda Smith’s Religious Experience, Freedom, and a Temperate Cosmopolitanism Epilogue: Tempering and Conjuring the Roots of Cosmopolitan Recovery Notes Bibliography
Index
