This volume provides an illuminating exploration of the development of early African American literature from an African diasporic perspective—in Africa, England, and the Americas. It juxtaposes analyses of writings by familiar authors like Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano with those of lesser known or examined works by writers such as David Margrett and Isabel de Olvera to explore how issues including forced migration, enslavement, authorship, and racial identity influenced early Black literary production and how theoretical frameworks like Afrofuturism and intersectionality can enrich our understanding of texts produced in this period. Chapters grouped in four sections – Limits and Liberties of Early Black Print Culture, Black Writing and Revolution, Early African American Life in Literature, and Evolutions of Early Black Literature – examine how transitions coupled with conceptions of race, the impacts of revolution, and the effects of religion shaped the trajectory of authors' lives and the production of their literature.

This book analyses historical, literary, and cultural shifts in African American literature from the 1920s-1930s.

This volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core is the recognition that many period texts - by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward - are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key socio-historical and cultural trends in the nineteenth century. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped in three sections - 'Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities', 'Persons and Bodies', and 'Memories, Materialities, and Locations' - and focus on debates over race, nation, personhood, and print that were central to Reconstruction.

African American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990 tracks Black expressive culture in the 1980s as novelists, poets, dramatists, filmmakers, and performers grappled with the contradictory legacies of the civil rights era, and the start of culture wars and policy machinations that would come to characterize the 1990s. The volume is necessarily interdisciplinary and critically promiscuous in its methodologies and objects of study as it reconsiders conventional temporal, spatial, and moral understandings of how African American letters emerged immediately after the movement James Baldwin describes as the 'latest slave rebellion.' As such, the question of the state of America's democratic project as refracted through the literature of the shaping presence of African Americans is one of the guiding concerns of this volume preoccupied with a moment in American literary history still burdened by the legacies of the 1960s, while imagining the contours of an African Americanist future in the new millennium.

"This volume provides an illuminating exploration of the development of early African American literature from an African diasporic perspective-in Africa, England, and the Americas. It juxtaposes analyses of writings by familiar authors like Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano with those of lesser known or examined works by writers such as David Margrett and Isabel de Olvera to explore how issues including forced migration, enslavement, authorship, and racial identity influenced early Black literary production and how theoretical frameworks like Afrofuturism and intersectionality can enrich our understanding of texts produced in this period. Chapters grouped in four sections-Limits and Liberties of Early Black Print Culture, Black Writing and Revolution, Early African American Life in Literature, and Evolutions of Early Black Literature-examine how transitions coupled with conceptions of race, the impacts of revolution, and the effects of religion shaped the trajectory of authors' lives and the production of their literature. Rhondda Robinson Thomas is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University specializing in early African American literature. She is the author of Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1770-1903 (2013). Her essays have appeared in African American Review and American Literary History. She is a member of the Society of Early Americanists"--

African American literature in the years between 1800 and 1830 emerged from significant transitions in the cultural, technological, and political circulation of ideas. Transformations included increased numbers of Black organizations, shifts in the physical mobility of Black peoples, expanded circulation of abolitionist and Black newsprint as well as greater production of Black authored texts and images. The perpetuation of slavery in the early American republic meant that many people of African descent conveyed experiences of bondage or promoted abolition in complex ways, relying on a diverse array of print and illustrative forms. Accordingly, this volume takes a thematic approach to African American literature from 1800 to 1830, exploring Black organizational life before 1830, movement and mobility in African American literature, and print culture in circulation, illustration, and the narrative form.