<<

EARLY AFRICAN ENGLISH 203 - UC BERKELEY - FALL 2018

Professor Bryan Wagner Contact: [email protected] Course Hours: Tue/Thu 2:00-3:30, Wheeler 106 Office Hours: Tue 4:30-5, Thu 3:30-5, Wheeler 416

This course explores African American literary history from its beginning in the eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century, interpreting major works in the context of and its aftermath. We will reflect on the complex relationship between literature and political activism by examining the genres and formal devices through which responded to the demand for individual and collective self-representation. Course themes include authorship and authenticity, captivity and deliverance, law and violence, memory and imagination, kinship and , passing and racial impersonation, dialect and double consciousness. Required works by authors such as Phillis Wheatley, , and W. E. B. Du Bois are supplemented by reading in history, theory, and criticism.

READING

All required reading is available on the course website. Optional materials listed under “Related Works” on the schedule are also on the website. Optional materials listed as “Background” are held on reserve in Moffitt Library. Be sure to read the required works before turning to the supplementary materials.

UNIVERSITY POLICIES

This course is subject to university policies governing academic integrity, nondiscrimination, disability accommodation, and sexual harassment. Links to these policies are available on the course website.

EVALUATION

Your grade will be determined as follows:

25% Weekly Questions and Classroom Participation 20% Midterm Exam: Identification and Interpretation 20% Final Exam: Identification, Interpretation, and Synthesis 35% Final Essay: 10 pages, including Preparation Assignments

WEEKLY QUESTIONS

Before 11pm on Monday nights, you will submit 2-3 questions about the week’s reading. Questions are to be entered under “Assignments” on the course website. All late submissions will receive half credit. Be sure to explain your questions in sufficient detail, using quotations and other examples as needed. Work hard to formulate real questions—questions, in other words, to which you do not already have answers. When writing your questions, please keep in mind the following criteria:

Good questions are debatable. When a question is debatable, it is possible to imagine several reasonable answers. This means that we won’t all agree right away about the answer to a good question. It also means that a good question cannot be answered simply by recalling a fact or pointing to a sentence on the page. Good questions make for long conversations. They can’t be answered in a few words. You know you have an especially good question if you think that we will continue to disagree about the answer even after we have made our best arguments.

Good questions are precise. When you’re asking a good question, you know the answer will not seem like mere personal opinion. When you’re responding to a good question, you know you need evidence to convince others to accept your answer. Frequently, good questions point to specific passages and ask about their significance. Sometimes, they use technical language to communicate clearly—this may be necessary, for instance, in describing formal conventions or accounting for the theoretical presuppositions we bring to the study of literature and culture.

Good questions are significant. People care about the answers to good questions. When you hear a good question, you are willing to spend some time to answer it. When a good question is asked, there is something immediately at stake for the listener as well as the speaker. However, it is the speaker’s responsibility to explain exactly what is at stake in asking the question.

EXAMS

There are two comprehensive exams in this course, covering all material up to the date of the exam.

The midterm has two parts. The first half of the exam occurs during class on October 16. It asks you to identify passages (author and title) and to explain their importance to the works in which they appear. The second half of the midterm is completed outside of class. It is open book. It asks you to compare and contrast specific works. It is submitted under “Assignments” on the course website on October 17.

There is also a take-home final exam. It will ask you to respond to two broad questions about African American literary history. It is due under “Assignments” on the course website on December 14.

ESSAYS

Essays are 10 pages, double spaced, plus bibliography. Essays are due before December 10. I do not provide prompts for essays. You will compose the question that you attempt to answer in your essay. When writing your question, make sure it meets our criteria for a good question (debatable, precise, and significant). The scale of your question may need be adjusted so it is appropriate for a ten-page essay. This is to be expected. You are encouraged to refine your question during the writing process.

Essays are anticipated by three preparation assignments.

1. A nnotated Bibliography. Before you formulate your essay question, it is helpful to explore additional sources related to the general topic you are planning to address. These may include contextual materials as well as recent works of theory, history, and criticism. Your annotated bibliography should include at least six entries, formatted correctly according to your preferred system. Each entry should be followed by three to four sentences, summarizing the work and evaluating its potential relevance to your research. The bibliography is due on November 5.

2. E ssay Proposal. Essays are also anticipated by formal written proposals, which you are to submit before November 19. Your essay proposal should include the following parts:

One Good Question, and a list of potential answers. Be sure your question satisfies our established formal criteria (debatable, precise, and significant), and be sure to explain your potential answers in sufficient detail, using examples to make your ideas as clear and concrete as possible. If you are able to identify only one reasonable answer to your question, you should ask yourself whether it merits an essay-length investigation.

Draft of the Introduction, laid out in the following sequence. First, the introduction should explain the question your essay answers and indicate why it is worth asking. Second, it should summarize a common-sense answer to your question, an answer that most people are willing to accept at face value. Third, it should identify a problem with the common-sense answer, perhaps a contradiction in its reasoning or an overlooked detail that it cannot explain. Fourth, it should provide a new-and-improved answer to your question that resolves or accounts for the problem that you have just described. This new-and-improved answer is the thesis statement or main claim of your essay.

Catalog of Evidence, including at least ten examples to support your argument. These may be quotations or your own descriptions of chapters, scenes, or other aspects from the text under consideration. Your catalog should include bits from secondary sources, ideally drawn from the works you have already included in your annotated bibliography.

3. C lose Reading: Choose a prose passage or complete poem that is important to the question that you are considering in your essay. Likely, you will want to choose an example included in the catalog of evidence from your proposal. Your close reading should be submitted under “Assignments” on the course website by November 30. It should include the following parts:

Detailed Description, laid out as a list of attributes. What is the literal meaning of the passage? Who are its characters, where is its set, what events are presented, and how and why are these events taking place? Can the passage be separated into sections or segments? How do these sections relate to one another? What are the most important words in the passage? Why? Look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary (oed.com). What kind of verbs are used in the passage? What kind of nouns? Is there any pattern? Are other things implied or suggested in the passage in addition to its literal meaning? Are there important things left unsaid? What about its style? Its syntax? If it is a poem, does it have regular meter and rhyme? If so, what are they? Does the passage include dialect? Figurative language? Metaphors or other devices? Is there irony? Is the irony stable or unstable? Are there allusions? Who is speaking in the passage? From what point of view? Does the passage tell us things about its narrator or other characters? How does the passage relate to the plot or the larger themes developed in the work?

Acknowledgement and Response, in which you consider how your passage might appear to readers inclined to think differently about your essay question. Begin by looking at the potential answers to your question listed in your essay proposal. How would someone committed to one of these common-sense answers see the passage? What might they miss or misunderstand about the passage? In what ways does your answer to your essay’s question provide a better or more complete perspective on the passage? Answer these questions by writing a paragraph in which you acknowledge how others might read the passage before responding by explaining how your perspective accounts for aspects of the passage that others have failed to notice or comprehend.

Close Reading. Type or paste your poem or passage as if you were using it as a block quotation in an essay. Drawing information from your detailed description and your acknowledgement and response, write a paragraph explicating your passage, paying close attention to its form as well as its content, interpreting both obvious and more subtle aspects of the passage in light of the question you are addressing in your essay.

IMPORTANT DATES

Mondays 11pm Weekly Questions October 16-17 Midterm Exam November 5 Bibliography November 19 Essay Proposal November 30 Close Reading December 10 Final Essay December 14 Final Exam

ENGLISH 133A - EARLY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE - FALL 2018

AUG 23 INTRODUCTION

Slavery is often imagined as a static and primitive institution. This is wrong. Slavery varies by time and place. It is basic to economic and political modernization. Slavery does not reflect ancient prejudice; it helped to shape the modern idea of racial identity. “Bars Fight,” the earliest extant poem by an African American, raises essential and still unresolved questions about authenticity, authorship, and tradition.

Reading: Lucy Terry, “Bars Fight” (ca. 1746)

Background: David Brion Davis, I nhuman Bondage (2006) Stephanie Smallwood, S altwater Slavery (2007) Ibram X. Kendi, S tamped from the Beginning (2016)

AUG 28-30 GENIUS IN BONDAGE

Skeptics doubt Wheatley’s authorship and originality. Questions are posed in a trial scenario in which the humanity of the enslaved turns on evidence of imagination. Wheatley inserts the slave’s voice into received forms of the neoclassical ode and elegy. Her tropological interpretation of the Book of Exodus characterizes the as a fortunate fall. Slavery is a unique problem in literary history.

Reading: Phillis Wheatley, P oems on Various Subjects (1773)

Related Works: Somerset v. Stewart, 98 ER 499 (1772) James Albert Gronniosaw, N arrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars (1772) Jupiter Hammon, “An Evening Thought” (1761) and “An Essay on Slavery” (1775)

Background: Vincent Carretta, P hillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (2014) Henry Louis Gates Jr., T he Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2003) Marcus Rediker, T he : A Human History (2008)

SEP 4-6 SON OF

Equiano offers his life story as eyewitness testimony in the debate over the slave trade, establishing a prototype for the by adapting conventions familiar from captivity writing and spiritual autobiography. These precedents determine plot as well as passages where retrospection is enacted through dramatic irony and the experience of astonishment. Because Equiano remains indispensable to historical knowledge of the Middle Passage, questions about his reliability take on special urgency.

Reading: , I nteresting Narrative of the Life (1789)

Related Works: Briton Hammon, N arrative of the Uncommon Sufferings (1760) John Marrant, N arrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings (1785) Ottobah Cugoano, T houghts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery (1787)

Background: Vincent Carretta, E quiano, the African (2005) Daina Berry, T he Price for their Pound of Flesh (2017) Christopher L. Brown, M oral Capital (2006)

SEP 11-13 WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

The A ppeal’ s form of address is shaped by the communication network that facilitates its distribution and reception. Across Walker’s jeremiad, themes and approaches from black abolitionist newspapers (moral self-improvement, immanent critique of revolutionary republicanism) are combined with the evangelical eschatology expressed by slave rebels like and Nat Turner. Controversy over slavery becomes increasingly polarized in the wake of Walker’s pamphlet and Turner’s revolt.

Reading: David Walker, A ppeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829)

Related Works: Thomas R. Gray, T he Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) Robert Alexander Young, T he Ethiopian Manifesto (1829) Martin R. Delany, B lake; or, the Huts of America (1859-61)

Background: Sven Beckert, E mpire of Cotton (2014) Julius S. Scott, A Common Wind (2018) David Allmendinger, N at Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (2014)

SEP 18-20 AMERICAN LION

Douglass both instantiates and transcends the formula of the slave narrative. Standard characters, incidents, and settings are expanded through rhetorical tropes such as apostrophe and chiasmus to include memory and imagination. Consciousness diminished by destitution and family destruction is revived through deductive reason and manly self-assertion. The N arrative anticipates and resists the interpretation proposed in Garrison’s preface, illustrating a tension within the abolition movement.

Reading: Frederick Douglass, N arrative of the Life (1845)

Related Works: Frederick Douglass, M y Bondage and My (1855) Frederick Douglass, “Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall” (1852) Henry Highland Garnet, “Address to the Slaves of the ” (1843)

Background: David Blight, P rophet of Freedom (2018) Robert Levine, T he Lives of Frederick Douglass (2016) Manisha Sinha, T he Slave’s Cause (2016)

SEP 25 VENGEANCE

The earliest extant work of fiction written by an African American, Victor Sejour’s “Le Mulâtre,” employs incomplete frame narration, a shifting point of view, and the trappings of gothic melodrama to reflect on the trauma of miscegenation and turn to revolutionary violence in the family system of slavery. The story contrasts with Frederick Douglass’s portrayal of slave revolt in his only published work of fiction.

Reading: Victor Séjour, “The Mulatto” (1837)

Related Works: “Theresa; a Haytien Tale” (1828) Armand Lanusse, L es Cenelles (1845) Frederick Douglass, "" (1853)

Background: C. L. R. James, T he Black Jacobins (1938) Laurent Dubois, A vengers of the New World (2004) Orlando Patterson, S lavery and Social Death (1982)

SEP 27 AR’N’T I A WOMAN?

Sojourner Truth was a leader in social movements for abolition, women’s rights, temperance, suffrage, and prison reform. Her career illustrates the overlapping purposes of these movements as well as the conflicts among them. Truth’s most famous address has been transcribed in several different versions, revealing the power dynamics that condition the self-representation of ex-slaves in a variety of genres.

Reading: , “Address at the Woman’s Rights Convention” (1851)

Related Works: Frances D. Gage, “Sojourner Truth” (1881) , “The Libyan Sibyl” (1863) Maria Stewart, “Address at the African Masonic Hall” (1833)

Background: Carla L. Peterson, D oers of the Word (1995) Nell Painter, S ojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1997) Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, E nduring Truths (2015)

OCT 2-4 STAGECRAFT

Taking up the rumor—now seen as fact—that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings, C lotel uses a disavowed genealogy to investigate the legacy of revolutionary republicanism. The persists as a character type. Brown’s recycling of passages from a range of sources raises questions about the functions of testimony and genre classification in the abolition movement.

Reading: , C lotel; or, the President’s Daughter (1853)

Related Works: William and Ellen Craft, R unning a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) , A merican Slavery As It Is (1839) , “” (1842)

Background: Ezra Greenspan, W illiam Wells Brown: An African American Life (2014) Annette Gordon-Reed, T he Hemingses of Monticello (2009) Tera W. Hunter, B ound in Wedlock (2017)

OCT 9-11 SOMETHING AKIN TO FREEDOM

Jacobs revises the slave narrative by adapting conventions from domestic fiction to focus on sexual predation and the preservation of family relationships. She questions the sentimental identification encoded both thematically (the topos of child loss) and formally (variations on direct address) in the rhetoric of leading abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe. Understood by some readers as a novel and by others as autobiography, genre classification is again a telling problem in reception history.

Reading: , I ncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

Related Works: John S. Jacobs, A True Tale of Slavery (1861) Frances E. W. Harper, “The Slave Auction” (1854) Harriet Beecher Stowe, U ncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Background: Jean Fagan Yellin, H arriet Jacobs: A Life (2005) Saidiya Hartman, S cenes of Subjection (1997) Martha S. Jones, B irthright Citizens (2018)

OCT 16-17 MIDTERM EXAM

The midterm has two parts. The first half of the exam occurs during class on October 16. It asks you to identify passages (author and title) and to explain their importance to the works in which they appear. The second half of the exam is completed outside of class. It is open book. It requires you to interpret, compare, and contrast works. It is submitted under “Assignments” on our website on October 17.

OCT 18 BLACK RECONSTRUCTION

Reconstruction was an experiment in government that granted ex-slaves equal protection and political representation on the heels of emancipation. Black writers forecast the transition from a traditional society based on inherited status to a modern society based on the liberty to contract. Reconstruction was cut short when white supremacists took over state and local governments, and African Americans faced a new wave oppression. Voting rights were stripped. Segregation codes were passed. Criminal prosecution fed the convict lease and chain gang. Agricultural workers were bound in debt peonage.

Reading: Frances E. W. Harper, “National Salvation” (1867)

Related Works: Frances E. W. Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together” (1866) Frances E. W. Harper, “The Great Problem to Be Solved” (1875) John Mercer Langston, “Equality Before the Law” (1874)

Background: W. E. B. Du Bois, B lack Reconstruction (1935) Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet (2003) Dylan Penningroth, T he Claims of Kinfolk (2003)

OCT 23-25 LIFTING AS WE CLIMB

Harper narrates stages of progress after slavery. Characters are introduced as familiar types (the loyal slave, the tragic mulatto) only to be transformed by their commitment to racial uplift. Passing is shown as a moral dilemma in which loyalty and self-interest are opposed. Emancipation leads to the reunion of the black family separated by slavery. Family reunion interrupts then subsumes the marriage plot.

Reading: Frances E. W. Harper, I ola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1892)

Related Works: Frances E. W. Harper, “The Reunion” (1872) , “A Story of the War” (1880) Anna Julia Cooper, “What are We Worth?” (1892)

Background: Hazel Carby, R econstructing Womanhood (1987) Thavolia Glymph, O ut of the House of Bondage (2008) Kevin K. Gaines, U plifting the Race (1996)

OCT 30- N OV 1 WE WEAR THE MASK

Dunbar adapts themes and nonstandard orthography from the plantation tradition and minstrelsy to appeal to magazine and book publishers. His dialect poems are valued for their racial authenticity, but they are better understood as black imitation of white imitation of black expression. This irony destabilizes the pastoral representation of labor and subsistence. At the same time, dirges meditate on the poet’s alienation. Dunbar’s success comes at the height of the lynching epidemic.

Reading: Paul Laurence Dunbar, L yrics of Lowly Life (1896)

Related Works: Booker T. Washington, “ Compromise Address” (1895) Ida B. Wells-Barnett, M ob Rule in (1900) Ida B. Wells-Barnett, L ynch Law in (1899)

Background: Nadia Nurhussein, R hetorics of Literacy (2013) Paula Giddings, I da: A Sword Among Lions (2008) Eric W. Lott, L ove and Theft (1993)

NOV 6-8 DIALECT AND DESCENT

Chesnutt engages the legacy of slavery through the oral tradition. Frame narration contrasts the world of slavery as depicted in dialect stories with the post-emancipation world in which the stories are told. Elements from oral tradition (enchantment, tricksterism) are repurposed as allegories about property and exchange. The vernacular storyteller’s vexed relationship to his audience models the predicament faced by black authors like Chesnutt and Dunbar working in the established magazine and book trade.

Reading: Charles W. Chesnutt, T he Conjure Woman (1899)

Related Works: Thomas Nelson Page, “Marse Chan” (1884) Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Wife of His Youth” (1898) Charles W. Chesnutt, “Superstitions and Folklore of the South” (1901)

Background: Eric J. Sundquist, T o Wake the Nations (1993) Robert Farris Thompson, F lash of the Spirit (1983) Lawrence Levine, B lack Culture and Black Consciousness (1977)

NOV 13-15 THE NADIR

Chesnutt tests Booker T. Washington’s prediction that property accumulation will lead to political recognition. The Wilmington Riot is the setting for a forensic investigation of lynching, segregation, racist propaganda, disfranchisement, and mass violence under circumstances of urbanization and industrialization. Formal devices like flat characterization and melodramatic coincidence, labeled aesthetic flaws by critics such as E. M. Forster, prove indispensable to Chesnutt’s historical novel.

Reading: Charles W. Chesnutt, T he Marrow of Tradition (1901)

Related Works: Thomas Dixon, T he Leopard’s Spots (1902) D. W. Griffith, dir., B irth of a Nation (1915) Oscar Micheaux, dir., W ithin Our Gates (1920)

Background: Leon F. Litwack, T rouble in Mind (1998) Philip Dray, A t the Hands of Persons Unknown (2002) Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret (2006)

NOV 20 WRITING WORKSHOP

We will be discussing a few essay proposals. We will think together about how they demonstrate representative challenges involved in writing about works of literature. We will also take the time to address the particular claims made in the proposals—applauding strengths, asking for clarification, suggesting alternative evidence, and raising objections in order to advance the writing process.

NOV 27-29 WITHIN THE VEIL

Du Bois draws on history, literature, philosophy, psychology, and sociology to provide a multivalent interpretation of the so-called Negro Problem. Double consciousness is defined for our purposes as a negative state of self-awareness suggested by the statement: “I know who I am only because I know I am not who they say I am.” Documentary approaches to the Black Belt turn melancholy. The spirituals suggest a cultural kinship that spans the Middle Passage. Combining the concerns of previous writers, Du Bois sets the terms for the development of African American literature in the twentieth century.

Reading: W. E. B. Du Bois, T he Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Related Works: Plessy v. Ferguson, 1 63 U.S. 537 (1896) William James, “The Consciousness of Self” (1890) W. E. B. Du Bois, “Propaganda of History” (1935)

Background: David Levering Lewis, W . E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (1994) Khalil G. Muhammad, T he Condemnation of Blackness (2010) Wilson Jeremiah Moses, A frotopia (1998)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

David F. Allmendinger, N at Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Sven Beckert, E mpire of Cotton: A Global History (: Knopf, 2014).

Daina Ramey Berry, T he Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (: Beacon, 2017).

David W. Blight, F rederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom: (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018).

Christopher Leslie Brown, M oral Capital: Foundations of British (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

William Wells Brown, C lotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1853).

Hazel V. Carby, R econstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Vincent Carretta, E quiano, The African: A Self-Made Man (New York: Penguin, 2007).

Vincent Carretta, P hillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011)

Charles W. Chesnutt, T he Conjure Woman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899).

Charles W. Chesnutt, T he Marrow of Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901).

Charles W. Chesnutt, “Superstitions and Folk-Lore of the South,” M odern Culture 13 (1901): 231-35.

Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Wife of His Youth,” A tlantic Monthly 82 (1898): 55-61.

Lydia Maria Child, “The Quadroons” in T he Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom (Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair,1842), 115–41.

Anna Julia Cooper, “What are We Worth?” in A Voice from the South (Xenia, Oh.: Aldine Printing House, 1892), 228-285.

William and Ellen Craft, R unning a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London: William Tweedie, 1860).

Ottobah Cugoano, T houghts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery: and Commerce of the Human Species (London: Published by the Author, 1787).

David Brion Davis, I nhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Martin R. Delany, B lake; or, The Huts of America, ed. Jerome McGann (Cambridge, Mass.: Press, 2017).

Thomas Dixon Jr. T he Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865-1900 (New York: Doubleday Page, 1902).

Frederick Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” in A utographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), 174-239.

Frederick Douglass, M y Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1855).

Frederick Douglass, N arrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: Published at the Anti-Slavery Office, 1845).

Frederick Douglass, O ration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall (Rochester: Lee Mann, 1852)

Philip Dray, A t the Hands of Persons Unknown (New York: Random House, 2002).

Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)

W. E. B. Du Bois, “Propaganda of History,” in B lack Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935), 711-729.

W. E. B. Du Bois, T he Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (C hicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903) .

Laurent Dubois, A vengers of the New World: The Story of the (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Paul Laurence Dunbar, L yrics of Lowly Life (New York: Dodd Mead, 1896).

Olaudah Equiano, T he Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Frances Smith Foster, ed., “Theresa; a Haytien Tale,” A frican American Review 40 (2006): 639–45.

Frances D. Gage, “Sojourner Truth” in H istory of Woman Suffrage, ed. E lizabeth C. Stanton, S. B. Anthony, and Matilda J. Gage ( New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881), 115-117.

Kevin K. Gaines, U plifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

Henry Highland Garnet, “Address to the Slaves of the United States,” in A Memorial Discourse (Philadelphia: J. M. Wilson, 1865), 44-51.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., T he Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Basic, 2003).

Paula J. Giddings, I da: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Harper, 2008).

Thavolia Glymph, O ut of the House of Bondage (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Annette Gordon-Reed, T he Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: Norton, 2009).

Thomas R. Gray, T he Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. (Baltimore: T. R. Gray, 1831).

Ezra Greenspan, W illiam Wells Brown: An African American Life (New York: Norton, 2014).

D. W. Griffith, dir., B irth of a Nation (Los Angeles: Triangle Film Corporation, 1915).

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, E nduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2015).

James Albert , A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself (Bath: W. Gye, 1772).

Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: B lack Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Briton Hammon, A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance (Boston: Green and Russell, 1760).

Jupiter Hammon, “An Essay on Slavery, With Justification to Divine Providence, that God Rules Over All Things by Jupiter Hammon” (Long Island, N. Y.: n. p., 1786)

Jupiter Hammon, A n Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries: Composed by Jupiter Hammon, a Negro belonging to Mr. Lloyd of Queen's Village, on Long Island, the 25th of December, 1760 (Hartford: Printed for the Author, 1761).

Frances E. W. Harper, I ola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (Boston: James H. Earle, 1892).

Frances E. W. Harper, “The Great Problem to Be Solved,” in Alice Moore Dunbar, ed., M asterpieces of Negro Eloquence (New York: Bookery, 1914), 101-106.

Frances E. W. Harper, “National Salvation: A Lecture Delivered Last Evening at National Hall, by Mrs. F. E. W. Harper, with Some Account of the Lecturer,” P hiladelphia Evening Telegraph (1 February 1867), 8.

Frances E. W. Harper, “The Reunion,” in S ketches of Southern Life (Philadelphia: Merrihew, 1872), 20-22.

Frances E. W. Harper, “The Slave Auction,” in P oems on Miscellaneous Subjects (Philadelphia: Merrihew Thompson, 1857), 14-15.

Frances E. W. Harper, "We Are All Bound Up Together," in P roceedings of the Eleventh Women's Rights Convention (New York: Robert J. Johnston, 1866), 90-93.

Joel Chandler Harris, “A Story of the War,” in U ncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation (New York: D. Appleton, 1880), 175-185.

Saidiya V. Hartman, S cenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Tera W. Hunter, B ound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Harriet A. Jacobs, I ncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Published for the Author, 1861).

John S. Jacobs, A True Tale of Slavery (London: Stevens, 1861).

C. L. R. James, T he Black Jacobins: T oussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed., (New York: Random House, 1963).

William James, “The Consciousness of Self,” in T he Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 1: 291-401

Martha S. Jones, B irthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Ibram X. Kendi, S tamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016).

John Mercer Langston, E quality Before the Law: Oration Delivered by Prof. J.M. Langston, of Howard University, Washington, D.C., at the Fifteenth Amendment Celebration (Oberlin: Pratt and Battle, 1874).

Armand Lanusse, ed., L es Cenelles: Choix de Poésies indigenes (New Orleans: H. Lauve, 1845).

Lawrence Levine, B lack Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Robert S. Levine, T he Lives of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).

David Levering Lewis, W . E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race (New York: Holt, 1994).

Leon F. Litwack, T rouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998).

Eric W. Lott, L ove and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

John Marrant, N arrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant (London: Gilbert and Plummer, 1785).

Oscar Micheaux, dir., W ithin Our Gates (Chicago: Micheaux Film and Book Company, 1920).

Wilson Jeremiah Moses, A frotopia: The of African American Popular History (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, T he Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Nadia Nurhussein, R hetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013).

Thomas Nelson Page, “Marse Chan,” C entury 27 (1884): 932-942.

Nell Irvin Painter, S ojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: Norton, 1996).

Orlando Patterson, S lavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

Dylan Penningroth, T he Claims of Kinfolk (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Carla L. Peterson, D oers of the Word: African American Women Speakers and Writers of the North, 1830- 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

Marcus Rediker, T he Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2008).

Julius S. Scott, A Common Wind: Afro-American Organization in the Revolution Against Slavery (London: Verso, 2018).

Victor Séjour, “Le Mulâtre,” R evue des Colonies 3 (1837): 376-392.

Victor Séjour, “The Mulatto,” trans. Philip Barnard, in ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton), 353-365.

Manisha Sinha, T he Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

Stephanie Smallwood, S altwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Somerset v. Stewart 98 ER 499 (1772)

Maria W. Stewart, “An Address at the African Masonic Hall” in M editations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (Washington, D. C.: Enterprise Publishing Company, 1879), 66-73.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Sojourner Truth: The Libyan Sibyl,” A tlantic Monthly 11 (1863): 473-481.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, U ncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852).

Eric J. Sundquist, T o Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Lucy Terry, “Bars Fight,” in Josiah Holland, H istory of Western Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Springfield, Mass.: Samuel Bowles, 1855), 2:360.

Robert Farris Thompson, F lash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983).

David Walker, W alker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829 (Boston: Printed by the Author, 1829).

Booker T. Washington, “[Atlanta Compromise Address]” in ed. Louis R. Harlan, T he Booker T. Washington Papers, 14 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 3:583–587.

Theodore Dwight Weld, A merican Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839).

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, L ynch Law in Georgia (Chicago: Chicago Colored Citizens, 1899).

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, M ob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics (Chicago: Printed by the Author, 1900).

Phillis Wheatley, P oems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: A. Bell, 1773).

“Woman’s Rights Convention: Sojourner Truth,” A nti-Slavery Bugle (21 June 1851), 4.

Jean Fagan Yellin, H arriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic, 2004).

Robert Alexander Young. T he Ethiopian Manifesto: Issued in Defence of the Black Man's Rights in the Scale of Universal Freedom (New York: Robert Alexander Young, 1829).