African-American Literature

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.