Description: 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.
Brief description: Teresa Zackodnik is a Professor in the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta, where she teaches critical race theory, African American literature and theory, and historical Black feminisms. Her books include The Mulatta and the Politics of Race (2004); Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminisms in the Era of Reform (2011); the six-volume edition African American Feminisms 1828-1923 in the Routledge History of Feminisms series (2007); and 'We Must be Up and Doing': A Reader in Early African American Feminisms (2010). She is a member of the UK-based international research network Black Female Intellectuals in the Historical and Contemporary Context, and is completing a book on early Black feminist use of media and its forms.