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The book examines how James Baldwin’s fiction and nonfiction shaped and responded to key political and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. It is animated by an examination of how external forces molded Baldwin’s personal, political, and psychological development and gave shape to his writing. The book views Baldwin through a cultural-historical lens alongside a more traditional literary critical approach. Crucially, it breaks through the established critical difficulties caused by Baldwin’s geographical, ideological, and artistic multiplicity by analyzing his life and work against the radically transformative politics of his time. The book explores under-researched areas in Baldwin’s life and work—his relationship to the Left, his FBI files, and the significance of Africa in his writing—while also contributing to wider discussions about race, identity, love and sexuality in postwar US culture. In this way, the book contributes to a broader understanding of some key twentieth-century themes—including the Cold War, African American literary history, conflicts between spirituality and organized religion, and transnationalism—but also brings a number of academically isolated disciplines into dialogue with each other. By viewing Baldwin as a subject in flux, rather than trying to fix his life and work into a single paradigm, the project contradicts the accepted critical paradigm that Baldwin’s life and work are too ambiguous to make sense of. It argues that it is precisely by studying Baldwin as an individual and an artist in flux that one begins to uncover the ways in which his work coheres.

This book investigates the shaping influence of the American slave narrative on the Victorian novel in the years between the British Abolition Act and the American Emancipation Proclamation. In a period when few books sold more than five hundred copies, slave narratives sold in the tens of thousands, providing British readers vivid accounts of the violence and privation experienced by American slaves. The book argues that Charlotte Brontë, W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson integrated into their works generic elements of the slave narrative, from the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, to the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, to the ethics of resistance over submission. It contends that Victorian novelists were attempting to access the slave narrative's paradigm of resistance, illuminate the transnational dimension of slavery, and articulate Britain's role in the global community. The slave narrative becomes part of the textual network of the English novel, making visible how black literary, as well as economic, production contributed to English culture.

This book explores the development of the Christian Recorder during and just after the American Civil War. As a study of the official African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper (a periodical of national reach and scope among free African Americans), this book is thus at once a massive recovery effort of a publication by African Americans for African Americans, a consideration of the nexus of African Americanist inquiry and print culture studies, and an intervention in the study of literatures of the Civil War, faith communities, and periodicals. The book pairs a longitudinal sense of the Recorder’s ideological, political, and aesthetic development with the fullest account available of how the physical paper moved from composition to real, traceable subscribers. It builds from this cultural and material history of a key early Black newspaper to recover and analyze diverse and often unknown texts published in the Recorder including letters, poems, and a serialized novel—texts that were crucial to the development of African American literature, African American history, and African American culture and that challenge our senses of genre, authorship, and community. This book offers a case study for understanding how African Americans inserted themselves in an often-hostile American print culture in the midst of the most complex conflict the young nation had yet seen, and it thus calls for a significant rewriting of our senses of African American—and so American—literary history to reflect the power of the Black press.

This book addresses the specific conditions under and the pointed implications with which an ancient story about different orders of gods dueling over the fate of humanity became such a prominent fixture of Atlantic modernity. The Prometheus myth, for several reasons—its fortuitous geographical associations with both Africa and the Caucasus; its resonant iconography of bodily suffering; and its longue-duree function as a limit case for a Platonic-cum-Christian political theology of the Absolute, became a crucial site for conceptualizing human liberation in the immanent space of a finite globe structured by white domination and black slavery. The titan’s defiant theft of fire from the regnant gods was translated through a high-stakes racial coding either as an “African” revolt against the cosmic status quo that augured a pure autonomy—a black revolutionary immanence against which idealist philosophers like Hegel defined their projects and slaveholders defended their lives and positions—or as a “Caucasian” reflection of the divine power evidently working in favor of Euro-Christian civilization that transmuted the naked egoism of conquest into a righteous heteronomy—Euro-Christian civilization’s mobilization by the Absolute or its internalization of a transcendent principle of universal Reason. The Prometheus myth was available and attractive to its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalists and reinventors—from canonical figures like Voltaire, Percy Shelley, Frederick Douglass, and Karl Marx to anonymous contributors of ephemera to abolitionist periodicals—not so much as a handy emblem of an abstract humanism but as the potential linchpin of a racialist philosophy of history.

Why did African American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the 19th century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the centre of this book’s examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. The book is a literary study, but also a social and intellectual history—a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan has called “the Dark Ages of recent American history.” Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, the book argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine’s happiness and economic prosperity. More importantly, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative—a domestic allegory—about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked in these novels, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African Americans’ collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into consummations of civil liberty.

This book analyzes the legal and economic conflicts that occurred when nineteenth-century ideals of family collided with the realities of interracial intimacy. Counterposing nuanced literary interpretations with significant law cases, the book reveals a shared preoccupation with the financial quandaries emerging from cross-racial sexual encounters. The book moves us well beyond scholarship’s usual emphasis on racial identity’s ambiguities, demonstrating instead how interracial intimacy forced confrontations over who counted as family and who had legal access to family money. At stake were the very notion of kinship and the distribution of wealth in the United States. This book explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from antimiscegenation marriage laws. Authors including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, and Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously—sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together.

Why can a “white” woman give birth to a “black” baby, while a “black” woman can never give birth to a “white” baby in the United States? What makes racial “passing” so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making “miscegenation” appear as if it were incest? When did the myth that one can tell a person's race by the moon on their fingernails originate? How did blackness get associated with “the curse of Ham,” when the Biblical text makes no reference to skin color at all? This book, an exploration of “interracial literature,” examines these questions and others. In the past, interracial texts have been read more for a black–white contrast of “either–or” than for an interracial realm of “neither, nor, both, and in-between.” Intermarriage prohibitions have been legislated throughout the modern period and were still in the law books in the 1980s. Stories of black–white sexual and family relations have thus run against powerful social taboos. Yet much interracial literature has been written, and this book suggests its pervasiveness and offers new comparative and historical contexts for understanding it. It ranges across time, space, and cultures, analysing scientific and legal works as well as poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, to explore the many themes and motifs interwoven throughout interracial literature. From the etymological origins of the term “race” to the cultural sources of the “Tragic Mulatto,” the book examines recurrent images and ideas.

Nightmare Envy and Other Stories is a study of Americanist writing and institutions in the twentieth century. Four chapters trace four routes through an “Americanist century.” The first is the hidden history of American Studies in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The second is the strange career of “national character” in anthropology. The third is a contest between military occupation and cultural diplomacy in Europe. The fourth is the emergence and fate of the “American Renaissance,” as the scholar and literary critic F. O. Matthiessen carried a canon of radical literature across the Iron Curtain. Drawing on American and European archives, the book weaves cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic history with portraits of Matthiessen, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, David Riesman, Alfred Kazin, and Ralph Ellison. It excavates the history of the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization, where displaced persons, former Nazis, budding Communists, and glad-handing Americans met on the common ground of American culture. Many of our modern myths of the United States and Europe were formed in this moment. Some saw the United States assume the mantle of cultural redeemer. Others saw a stereotypical America, rich in civilization but poor in culture, overtake a stereotypical Europe, rich in culture and equally rich in disaster. Others found keys to their own contexts in American books, reading Moby-Dick in the ruins. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories chronicles American encounters with European disaster, European encounters with American fiction, and the chasms over which culture had to reach.

The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels, that is texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth-century black writer published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 1950s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity, given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed on black texts. In a series of nuanced readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies. Novels like Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright’s Savage Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America’s abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this particular racial representation is freighted with social power and narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans. Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in the White also provides important historical context to understand how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly integrated nation.

This book asks why so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism apparently violated their most basic principles in relying on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African American figures. As a self-described “tool of the democratic spirit”, designed to “prick the bubbles of abstract types” (William Dean Howells), literary realism would seem to have little in common with the aggressively dehumanizing comic imagery that began to proliferate in American magazines and newspapers after the Civil War. Indeed, Howells touted the democratic impulse of realist imagery, and Alain Locke hailed realism's potential to accomplish “the artistic emancipation of the Negro”. Yet in practice, Howells and his fellow realists regularly employed comic typification of ethnic subjects as a feature of their representational practice. Critics have generally dismissed such lapses in realist technique as vestiges of a genteel social consciousness that failed to keep pace with the movement's avowed democratic aspirations. Such explanations are useful to a point, but they overlook the fact that the age of realism in American art and letters was simultaneously the great age of ethnic caricature. This book argues that these two aesthetic programs, one committed to representation of the fully humanized individual, the other invested in broad ethnic abstractions, operate less as antithetical choices than as complementary impulses, both of which receive full play within the era's most demanding literary and graphic works.

Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the ‘new’ nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa’s literature, it understands ‘disappointment’ both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Struggle (a dis-appointment). Attending to contemporary writers’ treatment of temporality, genre, and form, it considers a range of negative feelings that are also experiences of temporal disjuncture—including stasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. Present Imperfect offers close readings of work by a range of writers—some known to international Anglophone readers (J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb), some slightly less wellknown (including Afrikaans-language novelists Marlene van Niekerk and Ingrid Winterbach), others from a new generation (Songeziwe Mahlangu, Masande Ntshanga). It addresses key questions in South African studies about the evolving character of the historical period in which the country now finds itself. It is also alert to wider critical and theoretical conversations, looking outward to make a case for the place of South African writing in global conversations, and mobilizing readings of writing marked in various ways as ‘South African’ in order to complicate the contours of World Literature as category, discipline, and pedagogy. It is thus also a book about the discontents of neoliberalism, the political energies of reading, and the fates of literature in our troubled present.

In the late nineteenth century, the stereotype of the black male as sexual beast functioned for white supremacists as an externalized symbol of social chaos against which all whites would unite for the purpose of national renewal. The emergence of this stereotype in American culture and literature during and after Reconstruction was related to the growth of white-on-black violence, as white lynch mobs acted in “defence” of white womanhood, the white family, and white nationalism. This book investigates American literary encounters with the conditions, processes, and consequences of such violence through the representation of not just the black rapist stereotype, but of other crucial stereotypes in mediating moments of white social crisis: “lascivious” black womanhood; avenging white masculinity; and passive white femininity. The author argues that these figures together signify the tangle of race and gender representation emerging from turn-of-the-century American literature. The book brings together Charles W. Chestnutt, Kate Chopin, Thomas Dixon, David Bryant Fulton, Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, and Ida B. Wells: famous, infamous, or long-neglected figures who produced novels, essays, stories, and pamphlets in the volatile period of the 1890s to the early 1900s, and who contributed to the continual renegotiation and redefinition of the terms and boundaries of a national dialogue on racial violence.

This book examines the anomalous legal status of black Americans and its influence on the formation of American citizenship, the relationship of U.S. to other states, and the government’s conceptualization of its imperial reach and power. The coordinated relationship between U.S. international and domestic interventions helped produce an alienated black American community whose status resembles refugees and stateless persons. This book underscores the substantive legal, social, and political consequences of the state’s persistent misrepresentation of black citizens as aliens and refugees. Attending to the convergences among refugees, stateless persons, and African Americans, This book exposes the aggressive legal and political dislocations historically confronting black Americans in a new manner, and reveals how the anomalous status of black Americans impacted U.S. empire expansion and black civil rights. Fixed on forms of legal, political and social desubjectivation, dispossession, and violence that collectively transfigure black life and warrant the call for safety, this book illustrates how sanctuary remains perpetually deferred, tragically unsustainable, or simply untenable precisely because blacks continue to occupy something akin to Gerald Neuman’s “anomalous legal zone,” where law is suspended and a new juridical order is effectively produced.

Deploying the trope of “speaking in tongues” to theorize the multivocality of black women’s writing, based on the reconstruction of a fundamentally spiritual practice as critical concept, this book also enlists a second trope, “dancing diaspora,” to theorize the narrativity of black women’s dance, based on the notions of “performing testimony” and “critical witnessing.” Together, these tropes are meant to signify a tradition of black women writing and performing, a tradition privileging the preeminence of voice and narration, along with the roles of listening and witnessing. The book demonstrates how the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Gayl Jones, and Nella Larsen, along with the performances of Josephine Baker and the contemporary video dancer, work to deconstruct dominant and hegemonic traditions through such acts as disruption and revision, conjuration, narrative insurgency, parody, mimesis, witnessing, and “misperformance.” Central to the book’s critical vision is the notion that discourse and other signifying practices must work to dismantle the demarcation between speech and writing, the cultural and social, literature and performance. Its second critical presumption is that their complex subjectivity uniquely positions black women writers and performers to privilege and give contestatory, testimonial, and diasporic expression to difference and identity. The coda stages an imaginary meeting between Toni Morrison and Josephine Baker—writer and performer separated across time, space, and culture—meeting on common ground in the project of disrupting and dismantling dominant chains of signification by way of “speaking in tongues” and “dancing diaspora.”

This book interrogates the representational strategies that 19th-century Americans used in art and literature to delineate blackness as an index to the forms of U.S. citizenship. The book reveals how the difficult task of representing African Americans—both enslaved and free—in imaginative expression was part of a larger dilemma concerning representative democracy. More specifically, the book analyzes how African Americans manipulated aurality and visuality in art that depicted images of national belonging not only as a mode of critique but as an iteration or articulation of democratic representation itself. Such a turn to culture as a particular arena where African Americans had varying levels of agency is all the more necessary in the years before they were ostensibly granted access to formal political structures with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Recovering important aspects of the African American presence in the debates about democracy and citizenship, this book focuses on the mutual engagement with the national idioms by both black and white Americans and illustrates how African Americans in particular deployed artistic practices to enact a more egalitarian society.

Untimely Democracy tells the surprising story of how American authors and activists defined the path of racial progress after the abolition of slavery. Conventional narratives of democracy stretching from Thomas Jefferson’s America to the present day posit a purposeful break between past and present as the key to the viability of this political form—the only way to ensure its continual development. But for Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, Callie House, and the other figures examined in this book, the campaign to secure liberty and equality for all citizens proceeds most potently when it refuses the precepts of progressive time. Placing these authors’ post–Civil War writings into dialogue with debates about racial optimism and pessimism, tracts on progress, and accounts of ex-slave pension activism, and extending their insights into our contemporary moment, the book recovers late nineteenth-century literature as a vibrant site for doing political theory. Untimely Democracy ultimately shows how one of the bleakest periods in American racial history provided fertile terrain for a radical reconstruction of some of the foundational elements of the nation’s political system. Offering resources for moments when the march of progress seems to slow, stutter, and even cease, the book invites readers to reconsider just what democracy can make possible.

This book explores Langston Hughes’s efforts to mediate problems of identity and ethics he faced as an African-American professional writer and intellectual. Determined on a literary career at a time when no African American had yet been able to live off his or her writing; constrained by poverty, racism, and lack of opportunity; and pressed by the hopes, expectations, and demands of readers and critics of all stripes, Hughes had to rely on his dexterity as a mediator among competing positions in order to preserve his art, his integrity, and his unique status as the literary voice of ordinary African Americans. Issues treated include Hughes’s interventions in the shifting definition of “authentic blackness,” his work toward a socially effectual discourse of racial protest, his involvement with liberal politics, his ambivalence toward moral compromise even as he engaged in it, and the imprint of all these matters in texts ranging from his poetry and fiction to his essays and newspaper columns. The conflicting facts, varied experiences, divided impulses, and thorny compromises of his own life led Hughes to develop artistically an inclusive vision of the black community that anticipates by several decades what many cultural critics have come to advocate. The book is also the first to analyze Hughes’s executive-session testimony before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was treated as classified information for fifty years before finally being released to the public in 2003.

This book is the first sustained study of migration as it is portrayed in African American literature, letters, music, and painting. It identifies the “migration narrative” as a dominant African American cultural tradition. Covering a period from 1923 to 1992, the book provides close readings of novels, autobiographies, songs, poetry, and painting; in so doing it carves out a framework that allows for a more inclusive reading of African American cultural forms.