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"Reconstruction Revisionism Revisited" by Manisha Sinha in Reviews in American History delves into the complexities of defining and understanding the Reconstruction era in American history. Sinha challenges traditional narratives and offers a new perspective on Reconstruction, emphasizing the agency of Black people, the struggle for interracial democracy, and the interconnected reconstructions of democracy, capitalism, women's rights, and the West. The text highlights the ongoing scholarly debate surrounding Reconstruction, its impact on American society, and its relevance to contemporary challenges to democracy and racial equality. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses four books that focus on the history of fugitives from slavery and their impact on American history. The books cover various aspects of the Underground Railroad, abolitionist movements, and the experiences of escaped slaves in urban settings. Each book offers a unique perspective on the role of fugitives in shaping American history, challenging traditional narratives and highlighting the complexity of their contributions. The authors explore themes of resistance, activism, and the interconnectedness of different strands of the abolitionist movement, providing a nuanced understanding of the historical significance of fugitives from slavery. [Extracted from the article]

Sarah J. Adams's book "Repertoires of Slavery: Dutch Theater Between Abolitionism and Colonial Subjection, 1770–1810" examines Dutch anti-slavery plays from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, revealing that while they criticized Dutch involvement in slavery, they did not challenge white hegemony. Adams argues that these plays upheld white superiority as the status quo, deploying racism as a buffer between abolition and equality. The book analyzes how these plays perpetuated racial stereotypes and white self-representation, shedding light on the historical production of racism and its impact on present-day racial dynamics. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses three books that provide new perspectives on the history and development of race science. "Brown Skins, White Coats" by Projit Bihari Mukharji explores the concept of race beyond visible markers and focuses on seroanthropology. "Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America" by Leslie A. Schwalm examines how race science became institutionalized during the Civil War. "Masters of Health" by Christopher D. E. Willoughby explores the role of race science in the establishment of formal medical education in the United States. These books shed light on the global construction of race and its impact on social and political structures. [Extracted from the article]

The text discusses the book "The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family" by Kerri K. Greenidge, which explores the history of the Grimké family, particularly focusing on Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who were abolitionists and women's rights activists. The book also examines the African American members of the Grimké family, such as Archibald and Francis Grimké, who were prominent figures in the Black community and fought for racial justice. However, the text criticizes Greenidge's book for lacking evidence, containing factual errors, and failing to engage with existing scholarship. The author argues that Greenidge's negative portrayal of Sarah and Angelina Grimké is unpersuasive and overlooks their contributions to the abolitionist movement. The text concludes by stating that while studies on the Grimké family from new perspectives are needed, Greenidge's book falls short in providing a compelling reassessment. [Extracted from the article]

Born to a free Black family, Jack Hodges (ca. 1763–1842) was arrested for the murder of a white man in 1819 and served a term at New York's Auburn State Prison, the world-famous prototype of industrial prison discipline, where he experienced a life-altering Christian conversion. Also known as Jacob Hodges, he became one of the nineteenth century's most famous incarcerated African Americans, appearing in popular crime writing, children's books, reform society reports, and spiritual biographies. Today, however, Hodges is unacknowledged, even among scholars of race and prison studies. My interdisciplinary essay advances both historical and interpretive claims. I reconstruct Hodges's life in the crucible of evangelical Protestantism, racial assimilation, and industrial market capitalism, which worked together, I argue, to shape the ideology of the modern prison system. I also analyze the vivid fantasies about Hodges that circulated in reformist literature. Unlike the majority of captives, whose struggles left only faint traces in the archives, Hodges was neither the object of dehumanizing violence nor the subject of coldly rational surveillance; he was listened to, admired, and treated with sympathy. As a case study in evangelical reformism's sentimental, possessive style of love, the literature about Hodges poses special challenges and opportunities for abolitionist reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay contributes a study of the undocumemoir to existing scholarship on undocu literature. I define the undocumemoir as an evolving literary form that transgresses literary boundaries and is distinguished by three defining characteristics: an engagement with immigration law and policy, a narrative arc of illegality, and the adoption of one or more generic conventions of established literary forms. I provide a reading of three recent undocumemoirs and argue that the undocumemoir departs from discussions of legal citizenship as full legal and political inclusion and show, instead, what I call citizenship violence and define as legal citizenship's function as a mechanism to criminalize and contain migrants. I interpret the undocumemoir's critique of citizenship violence as an incipient abolitionism invested in the creation of a borderless world that both echoes Black abolitionist and recent immigrant rights advocates' critiques of legal citizenship, and invites a consideration of the liberatory potential in the rejection of legal citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

But unless the ideology of the antistate state is challenged and the demand for an expansive and robust welfare state advanced, reliance on mutual aid alone can have the unintended effect of strengthening the antistate state and shoring up class rule. Histories of the State and Class Struggle The state and class struggle are a core theme in Marxist studies, and Gilmore in my view has emerged as the most important and original thinker on the subject. The state we have been fighting for the last forty years is not the Reconstructed state of the postbellum years or the New Deal state under which Du Bois wrote I Black Reconstruction i , but what Gilmore has identified as the "antistate state", reconfigured in the wake of the Keynesian welfare-warfare state. The antistate state is not just a bundle of policies, practices, and expenditures but ideology, and as Gilmore shows, ideas and ideologies have material force and real-life consequences. [Extracted from the article]

As Gilmore observes, abolition is not "an aspirational adventure" but a movement that builds on "already-accumulated encounters and awarenesses and activities."[8] In the words of Critical Resistance cofounder Rose Braz, "abolition defines both the end goal we seek and the way we do our work today. The publication of I Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation i , the highly anticipated collection of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's writing edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, provides an auspicious occasion to reflect on Gilmore's decisive contributions and significant influence.[1] There is perhaps no better testament to the importance of Gilmore's writing, teaching, and public lectures than how generative this work has been for so many community organizers, activists, students, scholars, and people engaged in everyday struggle. To introduce and frame this forum on Gilmore's book, I focus here on briefly highlighting aspects of Gilmore's work in the context of the movement for abolition since the 1990s. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the advocacy of U.S. Senator Charles Sumner for African American attorney John S. Rock in his pursuit for admission to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court. It shows the struggle of Rock to overcome obstacles facing people of color like him in attaining his ambition, his expression of the realities of racism and commendation for Sumner for his commitment to abolitionist principles, and the progress of the motion for Rock's admission to the bar in a conference of justices.

David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times. [2] Reynolds immerses us in Lincoln's immersive cultural experience and argues that Lincoln was adept in "traversing a culture's idioms" and sought to direct "the many cultural forces in America that tended toward conflict, fragmentation, and... chaos" with an eye toward achieving "order, justice, and fairness" (pp. xv, xx, xvi). White has made a habit of doing creative research to produce insightful work that embeds Lincoln and the history of his administration in the contours of popular and political culture.[8] There will be thousands more biographies of Lincoln, but I suggest flipping the Lincoln archive for non-biographical purposes. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the transatlantic connections between the United States and Great Britain in relation to antiracism and anti-oppression movements from the end of the U.S. Civil War to the creation of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. It discusses BLM within a white supremacist climate and explores the historical implications of colonialism.

This economically crafted monograph recounts more of the history behind the shape and intensity of the Atlantic slave trade from the Age of Revolutions to its end. Starting in the lead up to the Constitution of 1812, Sanjurjo recurrently features a young liberal deputy named Agustin de Arguelles (1776-1844) who, in alliance and admiration of British abolitionists, led the efforts to suppress the Atlantic slave trade through the Constitution of 1812. Arguelles and the moderates failed despite the moving descriptions, quoted by Sanjurjo, of the evils they were committing and limiting their goal to ending the Atlantic slave trade, not the institution of slavery. [Extracted from the article]

The article looks back at the politicization of breathing and breathing emergencies in 1850 including the invention of the spirometer, whale breathing, and the struggles for the abolition of slavery. Topics discussed are racial and gender bias reflected by lung capacity and breathing data obtained from spirometer, difference of the whales' breath from that of humans, and breathing as a symbol of liberation from slavery.

This essay argues that Ottobah Cugoano's 1787 abolitionist treatise, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species , advances a critique of two political and literary tropes often associated with the abolitionist movement: humanitarian narrative and appeals to the law. Understanding these critiques allows us to recognize not only greater variety in abolitionist politics, but also abolitionism's general reluctance to treat slavery as an injustice requiring not amelioration, but rather remedy, restitution, and reparation. Cugoano's theory of slavery as a wrong highlights the international and intergenerational character of slavery's injustice. He argues that the historical and ongoing legal justification for slavery has effectively delegitimized the political authorities that sanctioned and supported the institution for centuries. Further, he imagines a revolutionary remedy for this injustice that would begin from a political recognition of slavery's impact on the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rooted in Arundhati Roy's insistence that "the pandemic is a portal" through which to imagine a world beyond the current crises of racial capitalism, this essay reflects on what abolitionist pedagogy might mean by offering an account of the author's own institutional location and of her students' engagements with activists, artists, and community members who draw crucial connections between the University of Pennsylvania's material relation to the city of Philadelphia and the ongoing reality of racialized criminalization that is a legacy of the eighteenth century. Building on this situated example of abolitionist pedagogy, the essay offers a broader model for how the intellectual, social, and material practice of eighteenth-century studies might be more actively engaged with local social-justice struggles, which are not separate from the eighteenth-century histories we study. The essay attends to the material locations of academic work, from the hotels that host our conferences to the universities that employ (or don't employ) us as scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an effective conclusion, Seeley briefly sketches some of the removals of Indigenous nations north of the Ohio in the 1830s and 1840s while also pointing out that "[d]espite a presumed erasure of a Native presence in the north", some communities managed to resist removal, a point often overlooked (p. 328). Yet, consistent with her capacious view of removal, Seeley's focus is on U.S. efforts from the 1780s through the War of 1812 to gain land cessions from Native nations (primarily in the Ohio Valley) and promote their "civilization", while largely allowing them to remain (at least for the time being) on ever smaller territories within their homelands. Although this perspective understates distinctive modes of racialization under U.S. settler colonialism (the "one drop rule" for enslaved Black labor; Indigenous people with "white blood" potentially considered non-Native as a form of elimination),[11] like so many other reframings Seeley offers in this deeply engaging book, it allows us to see crucial issues in new ways. In the meantime, Black migrants - seen by Seeley as to some degree settlers in their own right, but also categorically different from white settlers in that they were often exiles - hoped to gain property as a necessary condition for freedom and political autonomy. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the flight of a mulatto woman named Margaret Grant who escaped slavery in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1770 and again in 1773. The analyses presented within focus on the meaning of freedom through a delineation of acts of self-emancipation, placing Margaret's story in the context of the wider Atlantic world. I contend that Black women asserted their claims to freedom through fugitivity as they invoked the same philosophical arguments that white revolutionaries made in their own struggle against oppression. At stake in this discussion of fugitive women is demonstrating that Black women's resistance in the form of truancy and escape were central components of abolitionism during the Revolutionary era. In fact, motherhood, freedom, and love of family propelled Black women to escape bondage during the Revolutionary era. By excavating the story of Margaret and other fugitive women, the integral role of Black women to the eighteenth-century abolitionist movement is manifest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like words, numbers produced during the chaotic and disorienting events were the products of aspiration, fear and rumor".5 As Brown notes, "historical sources are never transparent reflections of what happened, how, and why; nor, in the case of the Jamaican uprisings, are they merely the literary phantasms of the colonists' imaginations".6 Nonetheless -- and even if "Tacky" himself is not fully knowable -- "Tacky's Revolt is forever entangled with their fears and fantasies. Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt demonstrates, somewhat ironically, that Tacky was not the most consequential leader of the enormous uprising that shook Jamaica during the Seven Years' War. Empire of Violence: Jamaica and the British Imperial Orderin the long Eighteenth CenturyKathleen Wilson Stony Brook University It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to participate in a forum on Vincent Brown's remarkable and illuminating study, Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. [Extracted from the article]

J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy. One is hard pressed to think of any contemporary Protestant conservatives who would qualify as important intellectuals, but the entire intellectual train of conservatism can be seen in the Protestant right-wing of the present day, albeit boiled down to simplified nuggets of conventional conservative wisdom. White Protestant conservatives of the civil rights era take center stage in J. Russell Hawkins's I The Bible Told Them So i , a study of white Southern evangelical resistance to desegregation. Later in the book, we begin to see the dissociation of Protestantism and conservatism, as conservative Protestants endorsed laissez-faire free-market capitalism, something that would have horrified their ancestors, and understood the state as the enemy rather than the guarantor of good Christian order. [Extracted from the article]

Ben Wright's I Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited Abolitionism i and James P. Byrd's I A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War i are equally edifying and thought-provoking, adding detail to much that we already know about nineteenth-century American belief yet offering new ways of thinking about the devoutness of the period. The Civil War "seemed to evoke the scriptures", James Byrd asserts, and throughout the conflict "Americans marveled at how closely the Civil War resembled biblical wars" (p. 74). Indeed, "in a similar way", James Byrd offers, "the American Civil War was not primarily a war over the Bible, but for many Americans it was a biblical war" (p. 287). Christians of the Civil War era believed in the literalness of scripture, Byrd contends, and consequently used the Bible to support their actions in every area of their lives. [Extracted from the article]

In this essay, I examine Harriet Jacobs's intervention in antebellum debates about African American's capacity to "take care of themselves" by recovering her expertise in domestic health science–what Jacobs called "the science of good management" – in and beyond Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). I argue that throughout her narrative as well as in her private and public correspondence, Jacobs transforms caregiving into a strain of what Britt Rusert terms "fugitive science." Jacobs, who performed care labor while enslaved, also worked as a nurse for the Willis family while writing Incidents and then provided aid to formerly enslaved refugees in Civil War "contraband camps." Across her writings, she suggests that if African American women were expected to bolster the health of white charges, then that expertise could be harnessed in service of Black well-being. While historians have documented how enslaved women were often treated as instruments rather than agents of medical knowledge, attending to caregiving highlights an alternative, fugitive legacy of enslaved women and health science in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tracks the circulation of literary and visual representations of the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in order to explore how early nineteenth-century printing practices intersected with debates over slavery. I show that a woodblock engraving published alongside Samuel Warner's understudied narrative of the rebellion was repurposed to depict an entirely different uprising. And I use this recycling to suggest that the aesthetic and technological exigencies of antebellum print culture undermined the proslavery claim—widely repeated in texts like Thomas Gray's better-known Confessions of Nat Turner —that Turner was an exceptional figure whose actions were not exemplary of broader slave unrest. The image's generic style and inherent reproducibility made available a subversive antislavery reading of the revolt that exploited, rather than resisted, the homogenizing logics of race, capitalism, and print to project an insurrectionary black collective whose threatening potential existence demanded abolition. Uniting African American Studies and the history of the book, I attribute this ideological reversal not merely to these texts' form or content but also to their multimedia materiality. Ultimately, the article complicates assumptions about authorial, readerly, and textual agency and offers a way to overcome the limitations of liberal individualism as a framework for black liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second and more important, the tone of Leeser's writings on slavery and abolitionism convey support for the former and antipathy toward the latter.[6] A study of Leeser's written work, with a focus on the terms "Negro" and "slavery", shows that Leeser's sympathy for slavery was rooted in his belief in the inferiority of African Americans and their fundamental weak-mindedness, servility, and barbarity. 53 The words "slave" and "slavery" appears only fifty-eight and fifty-nine times, respectively, in I The Occident i between 1848 and 1861 and rarely refers to African American slavery; see Strickberger, "Covenant", 20. 54 Isaac Leeser, "A Survey of the Field", I Occident i 14, no. 10 (1857), 458, 460-61. 55 Leeser, "Survey", 461. Congregation members vehemently protested the 1864 anti-slavery sermon of Leeser's successor, Sabato Morais.[60] Leeser did not again delve deeply into the subject of slavery in I The Occident i until the nation was on the brink of war. [Extracted from the article]

In this essay I analyze citational practices around Heinrich von Kleist in Italian postmodern theater and Italian feminist biopolitics. In this realm, the reference to Kleist performs a gesture of interruption of traditional eroticism (Catholic, modern, based on women's sexual slavery), in particular, by using and rewriting Kleist's narrative of the Amazons, the legendary tribe of women who would cut their breast to embrace the art of war. Postmodern citations of Kleist introduce a new language around sexuality instead of reenacting the ferocious narrative embedded in the ancient icon. The essay conducts a contrastive reading of two postmodern versions of the Kleistian Amazon in Italy: the first version is Lina Mangiacapre's and Angela Putino's philosophical conversation in "Androgina/Amazzone" as well as in Mangiacapre's stage plays; the second version is Carmelo Bene's cycle of performances on Achilles's "necrophilia." While intellectuals like Laura Mulvey in the UK and Gilles Deleuze in France tend to condemn Kleist for his necrophiliac account of romantic love, in Italy Kleist's pessimistic image of romantic relationships offers a queer standpoint to develop a sustained critique of violent forms of desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's call that abolition means to "change everything," how might we understand an abolitionist literary method? An abolitionist literary method dials into the language of critiquing prisons. This essay contends that recent developments in U.S. discourse concerning prison reform and prison abolition rely on the distinction between metaphor and metonymy. As rhetorical tropes, metaphor and metonymy both operate by means of figurative language. Metaphor creates a parallel formation between terms, popular in prison reformist language (i.e. "prison as labor," "prison as slavery," "schools as prisons," or "black holes as prisons"), while metonymy demonstrates a network between materially related sites, persons, and objects (as in "flesh," "black holes," or "the Prison Industrial Complex") more central to the rhetoric of prison abolition. Following Emily Apter's critique of Fredric Jameson's "carceral metaphors," I demonstrate these distinctions between metaphor-reform and metonymy-abolition through textual analysis of a Black feminist archive by considering the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, George Jackson, Evelynn Hammonds, and Assata Shakur. These different thinkers employ metonymy to illuminate theoretical possibilities for abolition through economics, flesh, motherhood, intimacy, sexuality, and physics over a period of thirty years. That being said, none of these writers define their work by the principal status given to metonymy, and this essay seeks to bring together their interventions through this rhetorical trope. I propose that abolition's stretch through metonymy is central to an abolitionist literary method, provoking the animated reconsideration of language-use by scholars and activists. While not eliding metaphor entirely, this historical materialist work demonstrates that the careful elaboration of words and phrases becomes more robustly anti-carceral when one indexes where, how, and why metaphor and metonymy contract or extend imaginative political possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay places the penal abolition movement in conversation with dramatic literature, in order to understand how dramatists engage issues of policing and systemic racism, and how abolition can be envisioned onstage. Abolition dramaturgies are divisions of space and time in which a world without policing and imprisonment can be envisioned, practiced, experimented, innovated, sounded, felt, spread, and collectivized. Despite this revolutionary potential, the end goals of much performance for racial justice profoundly misrepresents the problem with US policing—a misrepresentation that crystallizes a broader view of police and prison reform in the era of "post-racialism," as well as reflecting deeper insights into the foundation of theatre and performance studies. For example, the play American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown enacts reformance , a structure of repetition, in which change is proposed without transforming foundational carceral structures. In contrast, the plays Pass Over by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu and In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks explore dramatic engagements with abolitionist theories and practices. Further, these plays written by Black women envision how "waywardness" frames the possibility of political transformation after the end of the world. Such performances of ungovernability defy the seeming non-representability of abolition, staging images of violence in such a way that presents new opportunities for reparative relationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

He argues that the colonization debates and the failure of the U.S. government to support colonization policies revealed competing visions of the United States as an empire. Brandon Mills, The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire. The Civil War, Mills argues, occasioned a change in federal policy about colonization, but not an alteration to the principle of "racial separation" that undergirded colonization ideology (p. 182). Mills adeptly unpacks and analyzes these campaigns to explain why ultimately Indian removal triumphed over Indian colonization or Indian republicanism as federal policy and why Black colonization received limited financial and logistical support from the federal government. [Extracted from the article]

LeeAnna Keith, When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War. In deconstructing how Radicals came to "dominate" the Republican Party, I When It Was Grand i illuminates much about how an upstart party seized the reins of government, and how a minority group within that party played an outsized role in shaping politics and policy. While Radicals no doubt shaped Lincoln and his administrative policy, Keith overstretches in applying the label to Lincoln himself. Although most Northerners, including a clear majority of Republicans, attacked slavery to win the war and accepted Black military enlistment and, later, enfranchisement primarily to secure military and party victory, Du Bois argued - against the intellectual currents of his day - that ideology had been central to the Radical Republican project. [Extracted from the article]

State child protection authorities increasingly use modern surveillance technologies and coordinate with law enforcement agencies to manage regulated populations more efficiently. Conceptualizing family policing - US government surveillance and destruction of politically marginalized families - as state counterinsurgency usefully illustrates and illuminates his key points. [Extracted from the article]

Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Faulkner finds something new to say by examining arguments about and redefinitions of the meaning of adultery, as it emerges in commune life, philosophical debate, conventions of the like-minded, the women's rights movement, and gossip-rich courtroom trials. She argues that reformers, in developing the adultery metaphor, helped place "the marriage question at the nexus of the antislavery, moral reform, communitarian, spiritualist, free love, and feminist movements, linking causes that historians usually treat as separate and distinct." Andrews generated enormous criticism when he claimed in the pages of the I New York Tribune i that loveless marriage was a form of adultery - not the first time the adultery metaphor appeared, but the one that received the most publicity. [Extracted from the article]

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1973 short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" depicts a utopian city where the happiness of most of the citizens depends on the misery of a child who lives in a broom closet. We activate the story in the midst of a global pandemic which is laying bare the pre-existing conditions of precarity under gendered settler racial capitalism. We interpret Le Guin's story through an intersectional feminist disability lens, emphasizing the necessity of attending to disability and the carceral institutionalization of disabled people as key to understanding how precarity is distributed. We make the case that "Omelas" represents places of disability confinement, specifically the institutionalization of disabled people in psychiatric and congregate facilities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. By examining two such institutions in Salem, Oregon (Omelas spelled backwards), we make explicit the connections between capitalist precarity and carceral disablement. We argue that disability is key to understanding the capitalist crisis because disablement and the construction of the ability/disability binary has been a key mechanism for constructing disposability in the crisis of capitalism. Turning from crisis of late stage capitalism to the crisis of genre, we show that Le Guin's story forces us to confront the role of ongoing eugenics and ableism in the imagination of feminist abolition. We show how "Omelas" offers a different kind of abolitionist horizon in the form of the "ones who walk away." We, however, push to identify with the child in the broom closet and not the ones for whom the story poses a dilemma. We end with the psych survivors and self-advocacy organizers who cannot physically "walk away," but who instead lead the fight for the abolition of the broom closet from within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article suggests that the comic means by which Ignatius Sancho represents the quotidian violence of slavery in The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African avoids the traditional problems of the sentimental "spectacle" of slavery, including the objectification of the black body and the fetishization of black suffering. Sancho is not simply a comic writer—he is a self-referential analyst of comic traditions—and the Letters showcase complex instances of comic violence as black performance in eighteenth-century England that critique both the slaveholding society and the sentimental abolitionist for their shared reliance on rhetorical strategies that objectify slavery as they spectacularize it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented in which the author contends that Jesmyn Ward's 2017 novel "Sing, Unburied, Sing" constructs conjure healing as a decarceral strategy, or what Angela Y. Davis terms an abolitionist alternative to counteract racism, class bias, patriarchal domination, ecocide and violence of enslavement. Topics covered include how the novel is preoccupied with the healing and harming ritual practices, conjure as intercollective ecological praxis and conjuring abolitionist futures.

This paper seeks to understand the pulse in the body and its "Open" receptiveness to the image/world as an opening to sensation in cinema. Georges Franju's film Le Sang des bêtes (1949) provides a model for the abolition of a spectator who stands apart from the world as a unified subjectivity; the spectator is engaged in an opening to sensation. The sensorial opening in Le Sang des bêtes is derived from the shock of repeated blows, the repetition and "displacement" of body parts into segments, and the micro-movements of the nervous response that travel through the animals in the slaughterhouse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American women were active participants in the antislavery efforts of the early nineteenth century, but they were not fully accepted by their white counterparts. Through the experiences of three women, this article examines the intersection of class, race, and gender in the lives of African American women abolitionists and their efforts to negotiate the racism that permeated American society. African American women sought white allies to fight racism and sexism within the antislavery movement, but those allies often held prejudicial views themselves. The wealth and connections that middle-class or elite status provided some African American antislavery women generated wider options for negotiating barriers to employment and acceptance but could not fully ameliorate the discrimination they faced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue of American Quarterly focuses on various topics including race and racialization, war and violence, policing and the carceral state, memory and trauma, and ecologies and settler colonialism. The essays in this issue explore these themes from different perspectives and historical contexts. For example, one essay examines the representational practices of historically Black schools in the postbellum period, while another analyzes Black political activism during the Korean War through a novel. Other essays discuss the spatialization of traumatic experiences induced by racism, the incipient abolitionism in undocumemoirs, the failures of police demilitarization, and the discourse of anti-immigrant and anti-invasive species rhetoric. The issue also includes book and event reviews. [Extracted from the article]

The paintings and prints of Agostino Brunias (1730–1796) served not only to visualize some of the British Empire's newest colonies following the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, but also to encourage settlement by presenting a utopian vision of slave societies that were content, wealthy, and, most importantly, self-sustaining. This article argues that Brunias's imagery contributed to the ameliorationist rhetoric that accompanied the rise of abolitionism in Britain. By avoiding scenes of plantation labor, discipline, and punishment, and emphasizing instead the refinement, robust health, and fertility of slaves and free people of color, it purported to confirm that amelioration could safeguard slavery's future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the relationship between actual crows and the Jim Crow figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Building on recent work on race and animal studies, the essay argues that Stowe's racialist assumptions about the innate ability of black people to commune with nature allow her to imagine an end to slavery that is inspired by non-human animals. Stowe draws on the demonstrated intelligence and trickster legend of crows in her depictions of "Jim Crow" characters—rebellious black slaves, whom she explicitly links with various kinds of black birds, and who appear subservient but are more subversive than meets the eye. She also uses a cunning crow that lives on a plantation and wreaks havoc on its inhabitants to unite notions of animality and rebellion and to emphasize the parallels between keeping an undomesticated animal as a pet and a person as a slave. This essay in the end suggests that Stowe's racialism, evolved from Uncle Tom's Cabin, serves as a way for her to endorse smaller forms of slave rebellion instead of the violent revolution the title character Dred desires but does not carry out by the end of the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay resituates Frederick Douglass's turn to political abolitionism post-1851 within an Anglo-American discussion in legal hermeneutics about the concept of persona ficta : a legal fiction used to confer personhood on nonhuman entities, such as corporations. Douglass drew on this discussion, with roots in early modernity and a principal exponent in Thomas Hobbes, to adjudicate the unconstitutionality of slavery and the meaning of legal personhood. Rather than vouchsafe legal protections for the enslaved in a transcendent notion of humanity, Douglass sought justice in the idea that personhood is immanent to the artificial yet politically significant domain constituted by legal texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the political implications of the musical dimension of antislavery ballads in the context of English abolitionism. It examines two ballads, William Cowper's "The Negro's Complaint" (1788) and Hannah More's "The Sorrows of Yamba" (1797), both of which were set to the tune of an older English song, Richard Glover's "Admiral Hosier's Ghost" (1740). Glover's ballad commemorates a Caribbean military victory over Spain, as well as a humanitarian disaster—the deaths of thousands of English sailors from yellow fever in Porto Bello (an outpost for the slave trade) under Robert Walpole's leadership. Drawing on Susan Stewart's theory of lyric possession, the essay argues that antislavery ballads by Cowper and More are formally haunted by the melancholy imperial context of Glover's song. It suggests that the project of constructing a political voice for the African slave in these ballads is compromised by the tune they conjure to broadcast that voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]