This book tests the limits of fugitivity as a concept in recent Black feminist and Afro-pessimist thought. It follows the conceptual travels of confinement and flight through three major Black writing traditions in North America from the 1840s to the early 21st century. Cultural analysis is the basic methodological approach and recent concepts of captivity and fugitivity in Afro-pessimist and Black feminist theory form the theoretical framework.

This book tests the limits of fugitivity as a concept in recent Black feminist and Afro-pessimist thought. It follows the conceptual travels of confinement and flight through three major Black writing traditions in North America from the 1840s to the early 21st century. Cultural analysis is the basic methodological approach and recent concepts of captivity and fugitivity in Afro-pessimist and Black feminist theory form the theoretical framework.

Interested in the ideological workings of fiction, I study how major avant-garde tropes promote the potential of permanent renewal as white America’s property. Renewal ties to the capacities to create, progress, transcend, and simply be. From Black critique we know that, within dominant discourse, all these capacities have been denied to Black bodies ever since colonization. Black work has been fetishized, appropriated, stolen, and dismissed in and by dominant culture, while Black being is construed as negativity and barred on the level of ontology. It follows then that racialization operates on multiple levels in the conceptual frame of renewal. I study this conceptualization by re-reading the works of and criticism on progressive white authors. I examine how images of renewal enable the claim on futurity, transformative potential, and movement forward as exclusively white properties. Premised on oppositions between positive capacities and a state of complete incapacitation, these images are often viewed as separate constructions. This project shows that, deriving from white ideology, such representations are symbiotic and simultaneous - the "good" story of white renewal rests on the continual transgression towards Black being.

The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding history in moving images. It engages this popular and dynamic field that has evolved rapidly from film and television to digital streaming into the age of user-created content. The volume addresses moving image history through a theoretical lens; modes and genres; representation, race, and identity; and evolving forms and formats. It brings together a range of scholars from across the globe who specialize in film and media studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy of history, and education. Together, the chapters provide a necessary contemporary analysis that covers new developments and questions that arise from the shift to digital screen culture. The book examines technological and ethical concerns stemming from today’s media landscape, but it also considers the artificial construction of the boundaries between professional expertise and amateur production. Each contributor’s unique approach highlights the necessity of engaging with moving images for the academic discipline of history. The collection, written for a global audience, offers accessible discussions of historiography and a compelling resource for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in history, film and media studies, and communications. Both Chapter 17 and the Afterword of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Drawing on a wide range of major literary voices, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known writers such as William Attaway (Blood on the Forge) and Dorothy West (The Living Is Easy), Rodgers conducts a kind of literary archaeology of the Great Migration. He mines the writers' biographical connections to migration and teases apart the ways in which individual novels relate to one another, to the historical situation of black America, and to African-American literature as a whole. In reading migration novels in relation to African-American literary texts such as slave narratives, folk tales, and urban fiction, Rodgers affirms the southern folk roots of African-American culture and argues for a need to stem the erosion of southern memory.

Twentieth-century America has witnessed the most widespread and sustained movement of African-Americans from the South to urban centers in the North. Who Set You Flowin'? examines the impact of this dislocation and urbanization, identifying the resulting Migration Narratives as a major genre in African-American cultural production. Griffin takes an interdisciplinary approach with readings of several literary texts, migrant correspondence, painting, photography, rap music, blues, and rhythm and blues. From these various sources Griffin isolates the tropes of Ancestor, Stranger, and Safe Space, which, though common to all Migration Narratives, vary in their portrayal. She argues that the emergence of a dominant portrayal of these tropes is the product of the historical and political moment, often challenged by alternative portrayals in other texts or artistic forms, as well as intra-textually. Richard Wright's bleak, yet cosmopolitan portraits were countered by Dorothy West's longing for Black Southern communities. Ralph Ellison, while continuing Wright's vision, reexamined the significance of Black Southern culture. Griffin concludes with Toni Morrison embracing the South "as a site of African-American history and culture," "a place to be redeemed."

A showcase of the extraordinary career America’s first Black novelist and pivotal figure in African American literature “It is difficult to imagine any one of his contemporaries who contributed as much or as richly to so many genres.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr. Born a slave and kept functionally illiterate until he escaped at age nineteen, William Wells Brown (1814–1884) refashioned himself first as an agent of the Underground Railroad, then as an antislavery activist and self-taught orator, and finally as the author of a series of landmark works that made him, like Frederick Douglass, a foundational figure of African American literature. His controversial novel Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (1853), a fictionalized account of the lives and struggles of Thomas Jefferson’s black daughters and granddaughters, is the first novel written by an African American. This Library of America volume brings it together with Brown’s other groundbreaking works: Narrative of William W. Brown: A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847), his first published book and an immediate bestseller, which describes his childhood, life in slavery, and eventual escape; later memoirs charting his life during the Civil War and Reconstruction; the first play (The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, 1858), travelogue (The American Fugitive in Europe, 1855), and history (The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, 1862) written by an African American; and eighteen speeches and public letters from the 1840s, 50s, and 60s, many collected here for the first time. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.