Blake Or The Huts Of America

Download or read book Blake; or, The Huts of America written by Martin R. Delany and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-13 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin R. Delany’s Blake (1859, 1861–1862) is one of the most important African American—and indeed American—works of fiction of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of Henry Blake’s escape from a southern plantation and his subsequent travels across the United States, into Canada, and to Africa and Cuba. His mission is to unite the black populations of the American Atlantic regions, both free and slave, in the struggle for freedom, whether through insurrection or through emigration and the creation of an independent black state. Blake is a rhetorical masterpiece, all the more strange and mysterious for remaining incomplete, breaking off before its final scene. This edition of Blake, prepared by textual scholar Jerome McGann, offers the first correct printing of the work in book form. It establishes an accurate text, supplies contextual notes and commentaries, and presents an authoritative account of the work’s composition and publication history. In a lively introduction, McGann argues that Delany employs the resources of fiction to develop a critical account of the interconnected structure of racist power as it operated throughout the American Atlantic. He likens Blake to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, in its willful determination to transform a living and terrible present. Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition will be used in undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of African American fiction, on the history of the American novel, and on black cultural studies. General readers will welcome as well the first reliable edition of Delany’s fiction.

Download or read book Fugitive Science written by Britt Rusert and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, 2019 MLA Prize for a First Book Sole Finalist Mention for the 2018 Lora Romero First Book Prize, presented by the American Studies Association Exposes the influential work of a group of black artists to confront and refute scientific racism. Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Britt Rusert uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. Fugitive Science chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields—from astronomy to physiology—to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. This distinct and pioneering book will spark interest from anyone wishing to learn more on race and society.

Download or read book The Origin of Races and Color written by Martin Robison Delany and published by Black Classic Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the books authored by Martin R. Delany (1812-1885), The Origin of Races and Color is perhaps the most obscure. Out-of-print until now, it has been available to the public only through select libraries. At the time of its publication in 1879, this valuable resource presented a bold challenge to racist views of African inferiority. Delany wrote in opposition to a developing oppressive intellectualism that used Darwin's thesis, "the survival of the fittest," to support its demented theories of Black inferiority. Skillfully blending biblical history, archaeology and anthropology, Delany offered evidence to the "serious inquirer" suggesting the first humans were African, and that these Africans were ". . . builders of the pyramids, sculptors of the sphinxes, and original god-kings. . . ." With such radical assertions, Delany advanced a model of ancient history that contradicted the very foundation of intellectual racism. He believed knowledge of one's past was essential, and that it could provide Black people with the regenerative force necessary to inspire their self-improvement. Were he alive today, Delany would certainly feel at home with the present generation of Africancentrists, especially since he developed and articulated so many of their arguments more than a century ago.

Download or read book Abolitionist Geographies written by Martha Schoolman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional narratives of the period leading up to the Civil War are invariably framed in geographical terms. The sectional descriptors of the North, South, and West, like the wartime categories of Union, Confederacy, and border states, mean little without reference to a map of the United States. In Abolitionist Geographies, Martha Schoolman contends that antislavery writers consistently refused those standard terms. Through the idiom Schoolman names “abolitionist geography,” these writers instead expressed their dissenting views about the westward extension of slavery, the intensification of the internal slave trade, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by appealing to other anachronistic, partial, or entirely fictional north–south and east–west axes. Abolitionism’s West, for instance, rarely reached beyond the Mississippi River, but its East looked to Britain for ideological inspiration, its North habitually traversed the Canadian border, and its South often spanned the geopolitical divide between the United States and the British Caribbean. Schoolman traces this geography of dissent through the work of Martin Delany, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. Her book explores new relationships between New England transcendentalism and the British West Indies; African-American cosmopolitanism, Britain, and Haiti; sentimental fiction, Ohio, and Liberia; John Brown’s Appalachia and circum-Caribbean marronage. These connections allow us to see clearly for the first time abolitionist literature’s explicit and intentional investment in geography as an idiom of political critique, by turns liberal and radical, practical and utopian.

Download or read book Black Nationalism in the New World written by Robert Carr and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-18 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVProvides new insight into the development of black nationalism by examining the intersection of African-American and West Indian nationalist literatures./div

Download or read book American Mediterranean written by Matthew Pratt Guterl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-11 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did slave-owning Southern planters make sense of the transformation of their world in the Civil War era? Matthew Pratt Guterl shows that they looked beyond their borders for answers. He traces the links that bound them to the wider fraternity of slaveholders in Cuba, Brazil, and elsewhere, and charts their changing political place in the hemisphere. Through such figures as the West Indian Confederate Judah Benjamin, Cuban expatriate Ambrosio Gonzales, and the exile Eliza McHatton, Guterl examines how the Southern elite connectedÑby travel, print culture, even the prospect of future conquestÑwith the communities of New World slaveholders as they redefined their world. He analyzes why they invested in a vision of the circum-Caribbean, and how their commitment to this broader slave-owning community fared. From Rebel exiles in Cuba to West Indian apprenticeship and the Black Codes to the Òlabor problemÓ of the postwar South, this beautifully written book recasts the nineteenth-century South as a complicated borderland in a pan-American vision.

Download or read book Violence in the Black Imagination written by Ronald T. Takaki and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-07-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1992 has been an explosive year for racial relations in the United States--from the reactions to the Rodney King verdict to debate about Malcolm X and the film portrayal of his role in American history. What relations do the recent events in Los Angeles have to the Watts Riots in 1965? Violence in the Black Imagination shows that these recent events force us to understand the history of racism in America and its legacy of antagonism and violence. Ronald T. Takaki presents three short novels of major African-American leaders in the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist; Martin Delany, the father of black nationalism; and William Wells Brown, a pioneer of the black novel. The novels are accompanied by substantive essays which provide both biographical information on the author and explore the common theme of their work--the issue of black revolutionary violence in antebellum America. The work includes a new preface which examines the 1992 South Central Los Angeles racial explosion in relationship to Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the 1965 Watts Riot.