African American Literature in Transition, 1850–1865: Volume 4, 1850–1865

This volume reframes mid-century African American literature as highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries.

Teresa Zackodnik (Edited by)

9781108427487, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 May 2021

414 pages
23.5 x 16.2 x 2.8 cm, 0.71 kg

The 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.

Timeline
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.

Subject Areas: Black & Asian studies [JFSL3], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]