Fugitive Modernities

During the early seventeenth century, Kisama emerged in West Central Africa (present-day Angola) as communities and an identity for those fleeing expanding states and the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The fugitives mounted effective resistance to European colonialism despite—or because of—the absence of centralized authority or a common language. In Fugitive Modernities Jessica A. Krug offers a continent- and century-spanning narrative exploring Kisama's intellectual, political, and social histories. Those who became Kisama forged a transnational reputation for resistance, and by refusing to organize their society around warrior identities, they created viable social and political lives beyond the bounds of states and the ruthless market economy of slavery. Krug follows the idea of Kisama to the Americas, where fugitives in the New Kingdom of Grenada (present-day Colombia) and Brazil used it as a means of articulating politics in fugitive slave communities. By tracing the movement of African ideas, rather than African bodies, Krug models new methods for grappling with politics and the past, while showing how the history of Kisama and its legacy as a global symbol of resistance that has evaded state capture offers essential lessons for those working to build new and just societies.

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.

For nearly a decade, writers' collectives such as Kwani Trust in Kenya and Femrite , the Ugandan women writers' association, have dramatically reshaped the East African literary scene. This text extends the purview of postcolonial literary studies by providing the long overdue critical inquiry that these writers so urgently deserve.

In our globalised world, literature is less and less confined to national spaces. Europe-centred frameworks for literary studies have become insufficient; academics are increasingly called upon to address matters of cultural difference. In this unique volume, leading scholars discuss the critical and methodical challenges that these developments pose to the writing of literary history. What is the object of literary history? What is the meaning of the term “world literature”? How do we compare different cultural systems of genres? How do we account theoretically for literary transculturation? What are the implications of postcolonial studies for the discipline of comparative literature? Ranging in focus from the Persian epic of Majnun Layla and Zulu praise poetry to South Korean novels and Brazilian antropofagismo, the essays offer a concise overview of these and related questions. Their aim is not to reach a consensus on these matters. They show instead what is at stake in the emergent field of global comparatism.

An accessible interpretative history of West Central Africa from earliest times to 1852 with comprehensive and in-depth coverage of the region.

The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse. Racial capitalism is not simply a permutation, phase, or stage in the larger history of capitalism—since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racial, deriving social and economic value from racial classification and stratification. Although Cedric J. Robinson popularized the term, racial capitalism has remained undertheorized for nearly four decades. Histories of Racial Capitalism brings together for the first time distinguished and rising scholars to consider the utility of the concept across historical settings. These scholars offer dynamic accounts of the relationship between social relations of exploitation and the racial terms through which they were organized, justified, and contested. Deploying an eclectic array of methods, their works range from indigenous mortgage foreclosures to the legacies of Atlantic-world maroons, from imperial expansion in the continental United States and beyond to the racial politics of municipal debt in the New South, from the ethical complexities of Latinx banking to the postcolonial dilemmas of extraction in the Caribbean. Throughout, the contributors consider and challenge how some claims about the history and nature of capitalism are universalized while others remain marginalized. By theorizing and testing the concept of racial capitalism in different historical circumstances, this book shows its analytical and political power for today’s scholars and activists.

The Iberian world played a key role in the global trade of enslaved people from the 15th century onwards. Scholars of Iberian forms of slavery face challenges accessing the subjectivity of the enslaved, given the scarcity of autobiographical sources. This book offers a compelling example of innovative methodologies that draw on alternative archives and documents, such as inquisitorial and trial records, to examine enslaved individuals' and collective subjectivities under Iberian political dominion. It explores themes such as race, gender, labour, social mobility and emancipation, religion, and politics, shedding light on the lived experiences of those enslaved in the Iberian world from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. Contributors are: Magdalena Candioti, Robson Pedroso Costa, Rômulo da Silva Ehalt, James Fujitani, Michel Kabalan, Silvia Lara, Marta Macedo, Hebe Mattos, Michelle McKinley, Sophia Blea Nuñez, Fernanda Pinheiro, João José Reis, Patricia Faria de Souza, Lisa Surwillo, Miguel Valerio and Lisa Voigt.

With the Ta-Nehisi Coates–authored Black Panther comic book series (2016); recent films Django Unchained (2012) and The Birth of a Nation (2016); Nate Parker’s cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion; and screen adaptations of Marvel’s Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018); violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however, that the black avenger has always been with us: the trope has fired the news and imaginations of the United States and the larger Atlantic World for three centuries. The black avenger channeled fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by European colonization in the Americas. Even as he is portrayed as a heathen and a barbarian, his values—honor, loyalty, love—reflect his ties to the West. Yet being racially different, he cannot belong, and his qualities in turn make him an anomaly among black people. The black avenger is thus a liminal figure defining racial borders. Where his body lies, lies the color line. Regularly throughout the modern era and to this day, variations on the trope have contributed to defining race in the Atlantic World and thwarting the constitution of a black polity. Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture studies this cultural history, examining a multicultural and cross-historical network of print material including fiction, drama, poetry, news, and historical writing as well as visual culture. It tracks the black avenger trope from its inception in the seventeenth century to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915. Pierrot argues that this Western archetype plays an essential role in helping exclusive, hostile understandings of racial belonging become normalized in the collective consciousness of Atlantic nations. His study follows important articulations of the figure and how it has shifted based on historical and cultural contexts.