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The Strangers Book explores how various nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger. Rejecting the idea that humans have easy access to a common reserve of experiences and emotions, they countered the notion that a person can use a supposed knowledge of human nature to claim full understanding of any other person's life. Instead they posited that being a stranger, unknown and unknowable, was an essential part of the human condition. Affirming the unknown and unknowable differences between people, as individuals and in groups, laid the groundwork for an ethical and democratic society in which all persons could find a place. If everyone is a stranger, then no individual or class can lay claim to the characteristics that define who gets to be a human in political and public arenas.Lloyd Pratt focuses on nineteenth-century African American writing and publishing venues and practices such as the Colored National Convention movement and literary societies in Nantucket and New Orleans. Examining the writing of Frederick Douglass in tandem with that of the francophone free men of color who published the first anthology of African American poetry in 1845, he contends these authors were never interested in petitioning whites for sympathy or for recognition of their humanity. Instead, they presented a moral imperative to develop practices of stranger humanism in order to forge personal and political connections based on mutually acknowledged and always evolving differences.

Cody Marrs’s concept of “transbellum literature” has urged critics to reconsider the position of the Civil War that neatly divides literary history into “antebellum” and “postbellum.” Marrs’s idea encourages us to see both continuity and discontinuity between the postbellum and antebellum periods. Taking as a main subject of inquiry Herman Melville’s “Lee in the Capitol” in Battle-Pieces , one of the poems written from the perspective of the South, I would like to inquire into what the South as a geographical and political entity meant to Melville after the Civil War. In this poem, Melville gets inside Robert E. Lee’s inner psyche, ventriloquizing his suppressed emotions. By ventriloquizing Lee, Melville can be seen as doing violence to the alterity of the South in ways that conflict with his representation of others in his antebellum fiction. This essay interrogates how the Civil War changed Melville’s approach to representing alterity by focussing on the presence of the South as a geographical other in Battle-Pieces . At the heart of this perceived change lies his concern with representing community rather than individuals. However, Melville ultimately finds himself othered from the southern individuals, thereby demonstrating less discontinuity than continuity in terms of his ethics of alterity.

\"Introduction,\" \"Preface,\" \"Abrams, Clara \"Granny,\" \"Aerosol Art,\" \"Africanisms,\" \"Allen, Richard,\" \"Antebellum Period,\" \"Anthropology. \" \"Appropriation of Black Folklore,\" \"Art, Fine,\" \"Assimilation,\" \"Baad,\" \"Babylon,\" \"Black Man, The/Negro,\" \"Carriacou,\" \"Commodification of Black Folklore,\" \"Conversion Narratives,\" \"Cotton Elizabeth,\" \"Devil, The,\" \"Dread Talk,\" \"Encyclopedia of Black Folklore and Humor,\" \"Etiological Tales,\" \"Festivals,\" \"Field Nigger/House Nigger,\" \"Film,\" \"Fraternity Lore,\" \"Funk,\" \"Gaan Gadu,\" \"Games, Folk,\" \"Holy Piby,\" \"Israelites,\" \"Jamaica,\" \"Jockeying,\" \"Lawman, The,\" \"Marking,\" \"Music,\" \"Mustanging,\" \"Mythology,\" \"Native American and African American Folklore,\" \"Nonverbal Communications,\" \"Plantains,\" \"Protest Songs,\" \"Proverbs,\" \"Steffens, Roger,\" \"Shine,\" \"Sounding,\" \"Sports,\" \"Syncretisms,\" \"Texas Blues,\" \"Thomas, Henry,\" \"Titanic,\" \"Trains,\" \"Virgin Islands,\" \"Wood Carving,\" and \"Work Songs.\" Essay in special issue accompanying the art exhibition Variance: Making and Unmaking Disability at the Rhode Island School of Design.

This essay argues for the existence of a contemporary genre: the US house poem. Looking briefly over some precursor poems in the British country-house tradition, the essay finds that poetic genres re-emerge in a punctuated fashion, embedded in the rhythms of historical capitalism. Twenty-first century poems by Nikki Wallschlaeger, Jennifer S. Cheng, and Tracy K. Smith craft a politics and poetics of domestic interiors by recentering the house poem around the bodies, affects, and perceptions the genre has traditionally excluded. Attending to the generic contexts for contemporary US poetry clarifies the nature of political speech found in some of its dominant strains, which can depend as much on the arguments the poems conduct with poetic histories as on the rhetorical stances they take in the political present.

[...]his contemporaries admired McGirt as a literary figure. The role newspapers played in nineteenth century African American communities is detailed in Elizabeth McHenry's groundbreaking work Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (2002); she notes, \"[r]ather than bound books, newspapers were the primary sites of publication and sources of literary reading for African Americans in the nineteenth century\" (12). Literary critic Frances Smith Foster, with \"A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture\" (2005), too, called attention to the expansiveness of the Black press from its beginning in the antebellum period; for example, Freedom's Journal was much more than an abolitionist paper, in that it contained national and international news (727). The article is a reply to readers wanting more explanation on \"Negro suffrage,\" which McGirt had stressed in the previous issue: \"We wish to place ourselves on record as stating in most unequivocal terms and in a manner as strong as possible, 'The only safeguard of the Negro Race is in the use of

According to the Proceedings of the 1873 Delaware Colored Convention, Harper had a minimal presence, having offered readings of her poetry. The major topic of the Delaware convention, however, was access to public schools for Black children. Because the public education system in Delaware explicitly denied Black children access to state-funded schools, and the state consistently rebuffed African Americans' appeals for financial support, Harper's sentiments seem apt. Howard is also the school where legendary Black principal Edwina Kruse, as well as one of her star teachers and close friends, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, worked and organized around a variety of social justice issues for African Americans. Considering that the University of Delaware was named in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, it is clear that work to overcome the challenges of educating the state's African American students continued.

Beyond reintroducing her work to contemporary audiences, this essay argues that Ray's post- Reconstruction poetic excavations into American history and the classical past reveal trajectories of black historical consciousness that are not yet encoded in literary history. Other poems in Ray's oeuvre, including sonnets and ballads, range from musings on the natural world to retellings of classical Greco- Roman history and mythology.2 Whereas most critics have characterized the content of Ray's verses as divorced from contemporaneous racial struggles such as Jim Crow or the lynching epidemic, I read her commemorative and classical verses as purposefully engaging in a community- based poetics of retrospection that mourns the failures of Radical Reconstruction. Considered as companions to elegies such as \"To My Father\" and \"In Memoriam (Frederick Douglass),\" Ray's ekphrastic meditations on classical and neoclassical sculptures such as the Venus de Milo (c. 100 bce) and Randolph Rogers's Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii (1855), as well as Thomas Ball's Freedmen's Monument (1876), draw on classical history as a versatile metaphor for nineteenth- century American race relations.3 Some critics have balked at the genteel or mannered style of Ray's poetry. [...]Ray's poems, like the many other verses written by northern black women (such as the poets named by Mossell) and published in periodicals such as The Woman's Era and A.M.E. Church Review, are authentic reflections of her social and cultural milieu.5 As late as 1926, the African American educator and activist Maritcha R. Lyons praised Ray's \"versatility, love of nature, classical knowledge,...

In 1939, the radio-dramatist Norman Corwin broadcast two poems by Sterling Brown on a special episode of CBS's Words Without Music dedicated to “Negro poetry.” The circumstances of Corwin's radio adaptation reveal a specific dimension of Brown's achievement as a poet of black dialect that is difficult to apprehend on the printed page: the poetry's own constitutive relation to the media-ecological conditions of its making. Brown's poems can be said to resist the exclusionary terms of midcentury network broadcasting precisely insofar as they bear the latent traces of prior encounters with mass media. Formulated with regard to Brown and Corwin, the concept of latent remediation offers a means of grasping how a technologized soundscape can materially transform the formal protocols even of poems never destined for the airwaves.

[...]I show how Hemphill's poetry embodies black gay men's collective longing for black family and communit}', and yearning for forms of intimacy outside of the pathology that the black racial family embodies. [...]Hemphill deploys queer bodily desire to reveal how both erotic fulfillment and sexualized state violence were produced by and inseparable from the global economic and social transformations occurring during the 1980s. The immediacy of Beam's and Hemphill's histories does not provide them with \"simple access\" to the truth of their lives or deaths. [...]Hemphill is left to ask why black gay men are dying, who wants them dead, and what purpose if. serves. Furthermore, black gay writing in the 1980s and '90s offers us a glimpse of how black gender and sexual difference is lived differently under regimes of antiblackness. [...]this body of work prompts scholars to take more seriously the continuities and discontinuities of violence directed toward, black queer and transgender people within larger structures of antiblackness.