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The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
African American literature has changed in startling ways since the end of the Black Arts Era. The last five decades have generated new paradigms of racial formation and novel patterns of cultural production, circulation, and reception. This volume takes up the challenge of mapping the varied and changing field of contemporary African American writing. Balancing the demands of historical and political context with attention to aesthetic innovation, it considers the history, practice, and future directions of the field. Examining various historical forces shaping the creation of innovative genres, the turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest, and the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods, this Companion provides an invaluable point of reference for readers seeking rigorous and cutting-edge analyses of contemporary African American literature.
Counterlife
In Counterlife Christopher Freeburg poses a question to contemporary studies of slavery and its aftereffects: what if freedom, agency, and domination weren't the overarching terms used for thinking about Black life? In pursuit of this question, Freeburg submits that current scholarship is too preoccupied with demonstrating enslaved Africans' acts of political resistance, and instead he considers Black social life beyond such concepts. He examines a rich array of cultural texts that depict slavery—from works by Frederick Douglass, Radcliffe Bailey, and Edward Jones to spirituals, the television cartoon The Boondocks, and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained—to show how enslaved Africans created meaning through artistic creativity, religious practice, and historical awareness both separate from and alongside concerns about freedom. By arguing for the impossibility of tracing slave subjects solely through their pursuits of freedom, Freeburg reminds readers of the arresting power and beauty that the enigmas of Black social life contain.
Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership
How a preoccupation with charismatic leadership in African American culture has influenced literature from World War I to the present
Rendered Obsolete
Through the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illuminate the country. The Pennsylvania petroleum boom of the 1860s brought cheap and plentiful petroleum into the market, decimating whale oil’s popularity. Here, from our modern age of fossil fuels, Jamie L. Jones uses literary and cultural history to show how the whaling industry held firm in US popular culture even as it slid into obsolescence. Jones shows just how instrumental whaling was to the very idea of “energy” in American culture and how it came to mean a fusion of labor, production, and the circulation of power. She argues that dying industries exert real force on environmental perceptions and cultural imaginations. Analyzing a vast archive that includes novels, periodicals, artifacts from whaling ships, tourist attractions, and even whale carcasses, Jones explores the histories of race, labor, and energy consumption in the nineteenth-century United States through the lens of the whaling industry’s legacy. In terms of how they view power, Americans are, she argues, still living in the shadow of the whale.
Victorian Soul-Talk
This book explores the decades between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1884 when British poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Robert Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, along with their transatlantic contemporary Walt Whitman, defended the civil rights of disenfranchised souls as Western nations slowly evolved toward modern democracies with shared transnational connections. For in the decades before the new science of psychology transformed the soul into the psyche, poets claimed the spiritual well-being of the body politic as their special moral responsibility. Exploiting the rich aesthetic potential of language, they created poetry with striking sensory appeal to make their readers experience the complex effects of political decisions on public spirit. Within contexts such as Risorgimento Italy, Civil War America, and Second Empire France, these poets spoke from their souls to the souls of their readers to reveal insights that eluded the prosaic forms of fiction, essay, and journalism.
African American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930: Volume 9
This book analyses historical, literary, and cultural shifts in African American literature from the 1920s-1930s.
The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin
This Companion offers fresh insight into the art and politics of James Baldwin, one of the most important writers and provocative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Black, gay, and gifted, he was hailed as a "spokesman for the race," although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds. Individual essays examine his classic novels and nonfiction as well as his work across lesser-examined domains: poetry, music, theatre, sermon, photo-text, children's literature, public media, comedy, and artistic collaboration. In doing so, The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin captures the power and influence of his work during the civil rights era as well as his relevance in the "post-race" transnational twenty-first century, when his prescient questioning of the boundaries of race, sex, love, leadership, and country assume new urgency.
Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos
This book explores the diversity of meanings that accrue around the terms 'hobo', 'tramp', and 'vagabond'.
The New Melville Studies
This collection reimagines Melville as both a theorist and a writer, approaching his works as philosophical forms in their own right.
Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America
This book gives readers a fresh take on Depression-era poetry in relation to the idea of modernity experienced as crisis.
