Black atlas: Geography and scales of movement in African American literature.
Item
-
Title
-
Black atlas: Geography and scales of movement in African American literature.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3288747
-
identifier
-
3288747
-
Creator
-
Irwin-Mulcahy, Judith.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: David S. Reynolds
-
Date
-
2007
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, American | Geography | History, Black
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation examines the literature as well as the social and geopolitical theory of a range of nineteenth-century African American authors writing between 1853-1900: William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, Pauline Hopkins, and Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson. What unifies the authors in this collection is that they all used their literature as a theater for deliberation about the national landscape. They were sharply attentive to typologies of borderlands and the connection between geography and physical mobility. They also understood geography to be something textual, a discourse that reflected both privilege and exclusion.;This study is built around several critical nineteenth-century flashpoints, which shaped national perceptions about the landscape and territoriality. These included antebellum abolitionism movements prior to the Civil War, United States attempts to accede Cuba for slavery throughout the decade of the 1850s, and Jim Crow mobilization in turn-of-the-century Boston. I also address the ways African American writers in the nineteenth century were deeply attuned to a question that has only more recently commanded the attention of contemporary cultural geographers and literary historians alike: the question of spatial scale and the ways it operates at manifold levels, from region and nation to wider diasporan spaces.;William Wells Brown investigated the conflation of industrialization and planter politics in both the national Capitol and the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia. Martin Delany devoted considerable sociological research to the theme of internal diasporas within the United and the transatlantic circuits of colonialism, from West Africa's Guinea Coast to Cuba. Pauline Hopkins fashioned a black public sphere within the urban geography of 1896 Boston, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson remapped the locales of late-century New Orleans to write a regionalism that was consciously creolite and transnational.;Each of the authors opened the theme of landscape to new modes of textual experimentation. They offered ways to explore the often-inaccessible habitats, places, and people of the United States through their writings. They also revealed interconnections between shifting national orders and the idioms and voices that circulated within regional cultures.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.