Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature [Hardcover]

Through a reading of periodicals, memoirs, speeches, and fiction from the antebellum period to the Harlem Renaissance, this study re-examines various myths about a U.S. progressive history and about an African American counter history in terms of race, democracy, and citizenship. Reframing 19^thcentury and early 20^th-century African-American cultural history from the borderlands of the U.S. empire where many African Americans lived, worked and sought refuge, Knadler argues that these writers developed a complicated and layered transnational and creolized political consciousness that challenged dominant ideas of the nation and citizenship. Writing from multicultural contact zones, these writers forged a new black politics one that anticipated the current debate about national identity and citizenship in a twenty-first century global society. As Knadler argues, they defined, created, and deployed an alternative political language to re-imagine U.S. citizenship and its related ideas of national belonging, patriotism, natural rights, and democratic agency.

Acknowledgments Introduction: Black Politics and Diasporic Intimacy: Remapping the Nation and Citizenship Part I: Transnational Citizenship in the Golden Age of Black Nationalism 1. To Breathe Central America : Hemispheric Interplays and Martin Delanys Imagining of Citizenship in the Colored Republic 2. Fashioning Democracy in America: Eliza Potter, Elizabeth Keckley and Black Working-Class Women in the Consumer Republic 3. Trans-American Seductions and Creolized Black Reconstruction: The Imagining of Democratic Agency in Post-Civil War African-American Fiction Part II: Reconstructing Black Citizenship at the Age of Empire4. Accommodated Citizenship: Black Cowboys and the Borderland West 5. Sensationalizing Patriotism: Sutton Griggs and the Sentimental Nationalism of Citizen Tom 6. Policing the Isthmus: The ContestedlÀ