In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates about the constructions of American nationhood and national citizenship, the frequently invoked concept of divided sovereignty signified the division of power between state and federal authorities and/or the possibility of one nation residing within the geopolitical boundaries of another. Political and social realities of the nineteenth century—such as immigration, slavery, westward expansion, Indigenous treaties, and financial panics—amplified anxieties about threats to national/state sovereignty. Rochelle Raineri Zuck argues that, in the decades between the ratification of the Constitution and the publication of Sutton Griggs’s novel Imperium in Imperio in 1899, four populations were most often referred to as racial and ethnic nations within the nation: the Cherokees, African Americans, Irish Americans, and Chinese immigrants. Writers and orators from these groups engaged the concept of divided sovereignty to assert alternative visions of sovereignty and collective allegiance (not just ethnic or racial identity), to gain political traction, and to complicate existing formations of nationhood and citizenship. Their stories intersected with issues that dominated nineteenth-century public argument and contributed to the Civil War. In five chapters focused on these groups, Zuck reveals how constructions of sovereignty shed light on a host of concerns including regional and sectional tensions; territorial expansion and jurisdiction; economic uncertainty; racial, ethnic, and religious differences; international relations; immigration; and arguments about personhood, citizenship, and nationhood.

"Imperium In Imperio" is a turn of a century novel which envisages what kind of leadership the Black Civil Rights Movement ought to have–one that is radical and seizes control of the government or the other which stresses on assimilation? Published in 1899 the novel proposed the radical idea of a secret underground group of radicals that is debating these issues. The faces of these two widely disparate ways are two friends–Bernard Belgrave, the proponent of militancy and Belton Piedmont, the pacifist. But what will happen when these two ideologies collide? Can their utopian ideals sustain in the face of reality? Or will their worlds descend into the chaos of a political dystopia? The novel still raises pertinent questions about the issues of Black leadership in present day America and contrary to popular belief, does not provide an easy answer! Sutton Elbert Griggs (1872-1933) was an African-American author, Baptist minister, social activist and founder of the first black newspaper and high school in Texas.

With the Ta-Nehisi Coates–authored Black Panther comic book series (2016); recent films Django Unchained (2012) and The Birth of a Nation (2016); Nate Parker’s cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion; and screen adaptations of Marvel’s Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018); violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however, that the black avenger has always been with us: the trope has fired the news and imaginations of the United States and the larger Atlantic World for three centuries. The black avenger channeled fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by European colonization in the Americas. Even as he is portrayed as a heathen and a barbarian, his values—honor, loyalty, love—reflect his ties to the West. Yet being racially different, he cannot belong, and his qualities in turn make him an anomaly among black people. The black avenger is thus a liminal figure defining racial borders. Where his body lies, lies the color line. Regularly throughout the modern era and to this day, variations on the trope have contributed to defining race in the Atlantic World and thwarting the constitution of a black polity. Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture studies this cultural history, examining a multicultural and cross-historical network of print material including fiction, drama, poetry, news, and historical writing as well as visual culture. It tracks the black avenger trope from its inception in the seventeenth century to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915. Pierrot argues that this Western archetype plays an essential role in helping exclusive, hostile understandings of racial belonging become normalized in the collective consciousness of Atlantic nations. His study follows important articulations of the figure and how it has shifted based on historical and cultural contexts.

In Schools of Fiction, Morgan Day Frank considers a bizarre but integral feature of the modern educational experience: that teachers enthusiastically teach literary works that have terrible things to say about school. From Ishmael's insistence in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick that a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard, to the unnamed narrator's expulsion from his southern college in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the most frequently taught books in the English curriculum tend to be those that cast the school as a stultifying and inhumane social institution. Why have educators preferred the anti-scholasticism of the American romance tradition to the didacticism of sentimentalists? Why have they organized African American literature as a discursive category around texts that despaired of the post-Reconstruction institutional system? Why did they start teaching novels, that literary form whose very nature, in Mikhail Bakhtin's words, is not canonic? Reading literature in class is a paradoxical undertaking that, according to Day Frank, has proved foundational to the development of American formal education over the last two centuries, allowing the school to claim access to a social world external to itself. By drawing attention to the transformative effect literature has had on the school, Schools of Fiction challenges some of our core assumptions about the nature of cultural administration and the place of English in the curriculum. The educational system, Day Frank argues, has depended historically on the cultural objects whose existence it is ordinarily thought to govern and the academic subject it is ordinarily thought to have marginalized.

How transatlantic thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the unification of Britain and the United States Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. Dreamworlds of Race explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order. Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures—Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H. G. Wells—Duncan Bell shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, Bell reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, Dreamworlds of Race analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.

This is a book about two empires—America and Rome—and the forms of time we create when we think about them together. Ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, through novels, journalism, film, and photography, Time and Antiquity in American Empire reconfigures our understanding of how cultural and political life has generated an analogy between Roman antiquity and the imperial US state—both to justify and perpetuate it, and to resist and critique it. The book takes in a wide scope, from theories of historical time and imperial culture, through the twin political pillars of American empire—republicanism and slavery—to the popular genres that have reimagined America's and Rome's sometimes strange orbit: Christian fiction, travel writing, and science fiction. Through this conjunction of literary history, classical reception studies, and the philosophy of history, however, Time and Antiquity in American Empire builds a more fundamental inquiry: about how we imagine both our politics and ourselves within historical time. It outlines a new relationship between text and context, and between history and culture; one built on the oscillating, dialectical logic of the analogy, and on a spatialising of historical temporality through the metaphors of constellations and networks. Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study, this book suggests that recognizing the shape of history we step into when we analogize with the past is also a way of thinking about how we have read—and how we might yet read.