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Albion W. Tourgee (1838-1905) was a major force for social, legal,
and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Best known for his Reconstruction novels A Fool's Errand
(1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), and for his key role in the
civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), challenging
Louisiana's law segregating railroad cars, Tourgee published more
than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as
nonfiction works of history, law, and politics. This volume is the
first collection focused on Tourgee's literary work and intends to
establish his reputation as one of the great writers of fiction
about the Reconstruction era arguably the greatest for the wide
historical and geographical sweep of his novels and his ability to
work with multiple points of view. As a white novelist interested
in the rights of African Americans, Tourgee was committed to
developing not a single Black perspective but multiple Black
perspectives, sometimes even in conflict. The challenge was to do
justice to those perspectives in the larger context of the story he
wanted to tell about a multiracial America. The seventeen essays in
this volume are grouped around three large topics: race,
citizenship, and nation. The volume also includes a Preface,
Introduction, Afterword, Bibliography, and Chronology providing an
overview of his career. This collection changes the way that we
view Tourgee by highlighting his contributions as a writer and
editor and as a supporter of African American writers. Exploring
the full spectrum of his literary works and cultural engagements,
Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the
Literary Work of Albion Tourgee reveals a new Tourgee for our
moment of renewed interest in the literature and politics of
Reconstruction.
Exploring the unsteady foundations of American literary history,
Race in American Literature and Culture examines the hardening of
racial fault lines throughout the nineteenth century and into the
twentieth while considering aspects of the literary and
interrelated traditions that emerged from this fractured cultural
landscape. A multicultural study of the influential and complex
presence of race in the American imagination, the book pushes
debate in exciting new directions. Offering expert explorations of
how the history of race has been represented and written about, it
shows in what ways those representations and writings have
influenced wider American culture. Distinguished scholars from
African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and
white American studies foreground the conflicts in question across
different traditions and different modes of interpretation, and are
thus able comprehensively and creatively to address in the volume
how and why race has been so central to American literature as a
whole.
As the story of the United States was recorded in pages written by
white historians, early-nineteenth-century African American writers
faced the task of piecing together a counterhistory: an approach to
history that would present both the necessity of and the means for
the liberation of the oppressed. In "Liberation Historiography,"
John Ernest demonstrates that African Americans created a body of
writing in which the spiritual, the historical, and the political
are inextricably connected. Their literature serves not only as
historical recovery but also as historical intervention.
Ernest studies various cultural forms including orations, books,
pamphlets, autobiographical narratives, and black press articles.
He shows how writers such as Martin R. Delany, David Walker,
Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs crafted
their texts in order to resituate their readers in a newly
envisioned community of faith and moral duty. Antebellum African
American historical representation, Ernest concludes, was both a
reading of source material on black lives and an unreading of white
nationalist history through an act of moral imagination.
Albion W. Tourgee (1838-1905) was a major force for social, legal,
and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Best known for his Reconstruction novels A Fool's Errand
(1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), and for his key role in the
civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), challenging
Louisiana's law segregating railroad cars, Tourgee published more
than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as
nonfiction works of history, law, and politics. This volume is the
first collection focused on Tourgee's literary work and intends to
establish his reputation as one of the great writers of fiction
about the Reconstruction era arguably the greatest for the wide
historical and geographical sweep of his novels and his ability to
work with multiple points of view. As a white novelist interested
in the rights of African Americans, Tourgee was committed to
developing not a single Black perspective but multiple Black
perspectives, sometimes even in conflict. The challenge was to do
justice to those perspectives in the larger context of the story he
wanted to tell about a multiracial America. The seventeen essays in
this volume are grouped around three large topics: race,
citizenship, and nation. The volume also includes a Preface,
Introduction, Afterword, Bibliography, and Chronology providing an
overview of his career. This collection changes the way that we
view Tourgee by highlighting his contributions as a writer and
editor and as a supporter of African American writers. Exploring
the full spectrum of his literary works and cultural engagements,
Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the
Literary Work of Albion Tourgee reveals a new Tourgee for our
moment of renewed interest in the literature and politics of
Reconstruction.
This is a new edition of a classic slave narrative, now fully
annotated.It is the most celebrated escape in the history of
American slavery. Henry Brown had himself sealed in a
three-foot-by-two-foot box and shipped from Richmond, Virginia, to
Philadelphia, a twenty-seven-hour journey to freedom. In
""Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown"", written by Himself,
Brown not only tells the story of his famed escape, but also
recounts his later life as a black man making his way through white
American and British culture. Most important, he paints a revealing
portrait of the reality of slavery, the wife and children sold away
from him, the home to which he could not return, and his rejection
of the slaveholders' religion - painful episodes that fueled his
desire for freedom.This edition comprises the most complete and
faithful representation of Brown's life, fully annotated for the
first time. John Ernest also provides an insightful introduction
that places Brown's life in its historical setting and illuminates
the challenges Brown faced, both before and after his legendary
escape.
What is African American about African American literature? Why
identify it as a distinct tradition? John Ernest contends that too
often scholars have relied on naive concepts of race, superficial
conceptions of African American history, and the marginalization of
important strains of black scholarship. With this book, he creates
a new and just retelling of African American literary history that
neither ignores nor transcends racial history. Ernest revisits the
work of nineteenth-century writers and activists such as Henry
'Box' Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, William Wells
Brown, and Sojourner Truth, demonstrating that their concepts of
justice were far more radical than those imagined by most white
sympathizers. He sheds light on the process of reading, publishing,
studying, and historicizing this work during the twentieth century.
Looking ahead to the future of the field, Ernest offers new
principles of justice that grant fragmented histories, partial
recoveries, and still-unprinted texts the same value as canonized
works. His proposal is both a historically informed critique of the
field and an invigorating challenge to present and future scholars.
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