Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century (New World Studies)

As in many literatures of the New World grappling with issues of slavery and freedom, stories of racial insurrection frequently coincided with stories of cross-racial romance in nineteenth-century U.S. print culture. Colleen O'Brien explores how authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Livermore, and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda imagined the expansion of race and gender-based rights as a hemispheric affair, drawing together the United States with Africa, Cuba, and other parts of the Caribbean. Placing less familiar women writers in conversation with their more famous contemporaries--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Maria Child-O'Brien traces the transnational progress of freedom through the antebellum cultural fascination with cross-racial relationships and insurrections. Her book mines a variety of sources--fiction, political rhetoric, popular journalism, race science, and biblical treatises--to reveal a common concern: a future in which romance and rebellion engender radical social and political transformation. -- Publisher website. As in many literatures of the New World grappling with issues of slavery and freedom, stories of racial insurrection frequently coincided with stories of cross-racial romance in nineteenth-century U.S. print culture. This book explores how authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Livermore, and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda imagined the expansion of race and gender-based rights as a hemispheric affair, drawing together the United States with Africa, Cuba, and other parts of the Caribbean. Placing less familiar women writers in conversation with their more famous contemporaries - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Maria Child - the author traces the transnational progress of freedom through the antebellum cultural fascination with cross-racial relationships and insurrections. Her book mines a variety of sources - fiction, political rhetoric, popular journalism, race science, and biblical treatises - to reveal a common concern: a future in which romance and rebellion engender radical social and political transformation Contents Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: To Foment Freedom 1. “What Mischief Would Follow?” Racial Boundaries, Antireformers, and White Space 2. Colored Carpenters and White Gentlemen: Harriet Jacobs’s Pedagogy of Citizenship 3. Desire, Conquest, and Insurrection in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab 4. Republicanism and Soul Philosophy in Elizabeth Livermore’s Zoë 5. Reconstruction Optimism in Julia Collins’s The Curse of Caste 6. The End of Romance in Frances Watkins Harper’s Minnie’s Sacrifice Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index