Black Mothers and the National Body Politic: The Narrative Positioning of the Black Maternal Body from the Civil War Period through the Present focuses on the struggles and triumphs of black motherhood in six works of narrative prose composed from the Civil War period through the present. Andrea Powell Wolfe examines the functioning of the black maternal body to both define and undermine ideal white womanhood; the physical scarring of the black mother and the reclamation of the black maternal body as a site of subversion and nurturance as well as erotic empowerment; and the construction of oppressive discourses surrounding black female bodies and reproduction and the development of resistance to these types of discourses. These tensions undergird a multifaceted discussion of the narrative positioning of the black maternal body within and in relationship to the national body politic, an inherently exclusionary and restrictive metaphorical entity constructed and socially contracted over time by an already politically empowered citizenry. Ultimately, close analysis of the texts under study suggests that the United States—as a figurative body complete with imagined “parts” that perform separate functions, from intelligence to labor, ingestion to expulsion—has simultaneously used and cast off the black maternal body over the course of centuries.

Winner of the 2023 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies “All-Electric” Narratives is the first in-depth study of time-saving electrical appliances in American literature. It examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens between 1945, when the “all-electric” home came to be associated with the nation's hard-won victory, and 2020, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects in the 21st century. The appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification and time-saving comprises a crucial, but overlooked, element in 20th-century literary forms and genres including Beat literature, Black American literature, second-wave feminist fiction, science fiction, and postmodernist fiction. Through close-readings of dozens of literary texts alongside print and television ads from this period, Dini shows how U.S. writers have unearthed the paradoxes inherent to claims of appliances' capacity to “give back” time to their user, transport them into a technologically-progressive future, or “return” them to some pastoral past. In so doing, she reveals literary appliances' role in raising questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanization, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinking-while both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Popular Front produced a significant era in African American literary radicalism. While scholars have long associated the black radicalism of the Popular Front with the literary Left and the working class, Christin Marie Taylor considers how black radicalism influenced southern fiction about black workers, offering a new view of work and labor. At the height of the New Deal era and its legacies, Taylor examines how southern literature of the Popular Front not only addressed the familiar stakes of race and labor but also called upon an imagined black folk to explore questions of feeling and desire. By poring over tropes of black workers across genres of southern literature in the works of George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Eudora Welty, and Sarah Elizabeth Wright, Taylor reveals the broad reach of black radicalism into experiments with portraying human feelings. These writers grounded interrelationships and stoked emotions to present the social issues of their times in deeply human terms. Taylor emphasizes the multidimensional use of the sensual and the sexual, which many protest writers of the period, such as Richard Wright, avoided. She suggests Henderson and company used feeling to touch readers while also questioning and reimagining the political contexts and apparent victories of their times. Taylor shows how these fictions adopted the aesthetics and politics of feeling as a response to New Deal–era policy reforms, both in their successes and their failures. In effect, these writers, some who are not considered a part of an African American protest tradition, illuminated an alternative form of protest through poignant paradigms.

In the increasingly multi-racial and multi-ethnic American landscape of the present, understanding and bridging dynamic cross-cultural conversations about social and political concerns becomes a complicated humanistic project. How do everyday embodied experiences transform from being anecdotal to having social and political significance? What can the experience of corporeality offer social and political discourse? And, how does that discourse change when those bodies belong to Arab Americans and African Americans? Therí A. Pickens discusses a range of literary, cultural, and archival material where narratives emphasize embodied experience to examine how these experiences constitute Arab Americans and African Americans as social and political subjects. Pickens argues that Arab American and African American narratives rely on the body’s fragility, rather than its exceptional strength or emotion, to create urgent social and political critiques. The creators of these narratives find potential in mundane experiences such as breathing, touch, illness, pain, and death. Each chapter in this book focuses on one of these everyday embodied experiences and examines how authors mobilize that fragility to create social and political commentary. Pickens discusses how the authors' focus on quotidian experiences complicates their critiques of the nation state, domestic and international politics, exile, cultural mores, and the medical establishment. New Body Politics participates in a vibrant interdisciplinary conversation about cross-ethnic studies, American literature, and Arab American literature. Using intercultural analysis, Pickens explores issues of the body and representation that will be relevant to fields as varied as Political Science, African American Studies, Arab American Studies, and Disability Studies.

Felipe Smith tracks the emergence of particular gender images--such as white witch, black madonna, mammy, and white lady--and their impact on early African American literature. Smith gives us a remarkable synthesis of historical readings combined with a highly original contribution to the comprehension of racial thought and literary writing.

In Emancipation's Daughters, Riché Richardson examines iconic black women leaders who have contested racial stereotypes and constructed new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States. Drawing on literary texts and cultural representations, Richardson shows how five emblematic black women—Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, and Beyoncé—have challenged white-centered definitions of American identity. By using the rhetoric of motherhood and focusing on families and children, these leaders have defied racist images of black women, such as the mammy or the welfare queen, and rewritten scripts of femininity designed to exclude black women from civic participation. Richardson shows that these women's status as national icons was central to reconstructing black womanhood in ways that moved beyond dominant stereotypes. However, these formulations are often premised on heteronormativity and exclude black queer and trans women. Throughout Emancipation's Daughters, Richardson reveals new possibilities for inclusive models of blackness, national femininity, and democracy.

From nineteenth-century black nationalist writer Martin Delany through the rise of Jim Crow, the 1937 riots in Trinidad, and the achievement of Independence in the West Indies, up to the present era of globalization, Black Nationalism in the New World explores the paths taken by black nationalism in the United States and the Caribbean. Bringing to bear a comparative, diasporic perspective, Robert Carr examines the complex roles race, gender, sexuality, and history have played in the formation of black national identities in the U. S. and Caribbean—particularly in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana—over the past two centuries. He shows how nationalism begins as an impulse emanating "upwards" from the bottom of the social and economic spectrum and discusses the implications of this phenomenon for understanding democracy and nationalism. Black Nationalism in the New World combines geography, political economy, and subaltern studies in readings of noncanonical literary works, which in turn illuminate debates over African-American and West Indian culture, identity, and politics. In addition to Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America, Carr focuses on Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces; Crown Jewel, R. A. C. de Boissière’s novel of the Trinidadian revolt against British rule; Wilson Harris’s Guyana Quartet; the writings of the Oakland Black Panthers—particularly Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver; the gay novella Just Being Guys Together; and Lionheart Gal, a collection of patois testimonials assembled by Sistren, a radical Jamaican women’s theater group active in the ‘80s. With its comparative approach, broad historical sweep, and use of texts not well known in the United States, Black Nationalism in the New World extends the work of such theorists as Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, and Nell Irwin Painter. It will be necessary reading for those interested in African American studies, Caribbean studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, and American studies.

To Defend this Sunrise examines how black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state’s co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of “multicultural dispossession.” This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.

This edited book considers the need for the continued dismantling of conceptual and cultural hegemonies of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the humanities and social sciences. Cutting across a wide range of literature, film and art from different contexts and ages, this collection seeks out the interpenetrating dynamic between both terms. Highlighting the inherent instability of East and West as oppositional categories, it focuses on the ‘crossings’ between East and West and this nexus as a highly-charged arena of encounter and collision. Drawing from varied literary contexts ranging from Victorian literature to Chinese literature and modern European literature, the book covers a diverse range of subject matter, including material drawn from psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory and studies related to race, religion, diaspora, and gender, and investigates topical social and political issues —including terrorism, nationalism, citizenship, the refugee crisis, xenophobia and otherness. Offering a framework to consider the salient questions of cultural, ideological and geographical change in our societies, this book is a key read for those working within world literary studies.

Recovering the Black Female Body recognizes the pressing need to highlight through scholarship the vibrant energy of African American women's attempts to wrest control of the physical and symbolic construction of their bodies away from the distortions of others.