The period of 1850-1865 consists 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 attentive to history, science, politics, economics, space and movement, the visual, and the sonic. Black writing at mid-century was highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries. Essays 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; and what technologies, including print, enabled African Americans to pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.

Book Information
ISBN 9781108427487
Author Teresa Zackodnik
Format Hardback
Page Count 350
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press