Liberating Sojourn

Still in his twenties but already famous for his fiery orations and controversial autobiography, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass traveled to Great Britain in 1845 on an eighteen-month lecture and fund-raising tour. This book examines how that visit affected transatlantic reform movements and Douglass’s own thinking. The first book dedicated specifically to the trip, it features the work of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic--including Douglass biographer William McFeely and abolitionist scholar R. J. M. Blackett--who use Douglass’s visit to reexamine aspects of his life and times. The contributors reveal the visit’s significance to an understanding of transatlantic gender relations, religion, radicalism, and popular views of African Americans in Britain and also examine such topics as Douglass’s attitudes toward the Irish and his campaign against the Free Church of Scotland for accepting southern money. Together, these essays show that Douglass’s journey was a personal and political triumph and a key event in his development, leaving him better prepared to set the strategies and ideologies of the abolitionist movement.

This book takes as its subject the effect of extraterritorial sites - Ireland, Haiti, Egypt - on Frederick Douglass’ writing, self-construction, national, class and racial identity, and status as representative US American man. The most prolific African American writer of the nineteenth century embarked, after his escape from slavery in 1838, on a public career that would span the century and three continents. The narrative of his life in slavery remains a seminal work in the literary and historical canons of the United States, and has recently been included in the corpus of the American Renaissance. Much critical attention has been placed on Douglass’ activities within the United States, his effect on socio-political reform, and relationship to an oppressed and marginalized community of African Americans. Yet much of his literary and political development occurred outside the United States. This innovative book focuses specifically on Douglass’ Atlantic encounters, literal and literary, against the backdrop of slavery, emancipation, and western colonial process. Sweeney’s study will be of interest to those working in the fields of history, literature and cultural studies; to scholars of Douglass; those interested in American and Irish Studies, Black Atlantic studies and postcolonialism; and those engaged in critical work on the literary and historical implications of the United States as empire.

Shows how a series of revolutions that erupted across Europe in the mid to late 1840s were crucial to the creation of modern ideas of constitutional democracy, citizenship, and human rights.

Williams analyses and compares the ways in which African Americans and the Welsh have defined themselves as minorities within larger nation states (the UK and US). The study is grounded in examples of actual friendships and cultural exchanges between African Americans and the Welsh, such as Paul Robeson’s connections with the socialists of the Welsh mining communities, and novelist Ralph Ellison’s stories about his experiences as a GI stationed in wartime Swansea. This wide ranging book draws on literary, historical, visual and musical sources to open up new avenues of research in Welsh and African American studies.

A transatlantic study focusing on African American resistance through unexplored oratorical and performative testimony in the British Isles.

Dark Victorians illuminates the cross-cultural influences between white Britons and black Americans during the Victorian age. In carefully analyzing literature and travel narratives by Ida B. Wells, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Carlyle, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others, Vanessa D. Dickerson reveals the profound political, racial, and rhetorical exchanges between the groups. From the nineteenth-century black nationalist David Walker, who urged emigrating African Americans to turn to England, to the twentieth-century writer Maya Angelou, who recalls how those she knew in her childhood aspired to Victorian ideas of conduct, black Americans have consistently embraced Victorian England. At a time when scholars of black studies are exploring the relations between diasporic blacks, and postcolonialists are taking imperialism to task, Dickerson considers how Britons negotiated their support of African Americans with the controlling policies they used to govern a growing empire of often dark-skinned peoples, and how philanthropic and abolitionist Victorian discourses influenced black identity, prejudice, and racism in America.

During the early 1890s, a series of shocking lynchings brought unprecedented international attention to American mob violence. This interest created an opportunity for Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist and civil rights activist from Memphis, to travel to England to cultivate British moral indignation against American lynching. Wells adapted race and gender roles established by African American abolitionists in Britain to legitimate her activism as a “black lady reformer”—a role American society denied her—and assert her right to defend her race from abroad. Based on extensive archival research conducted in the United States and Britain, Black Woman Reformer by Sarah Silkey explores Wells's 1893–94 antilynching campaigns within the broader contexts of nineteenth-century transatlantic reform networks and debates about the role of extralegal violence in American society. Through her speaking engagements, newspaper interviews, and the efforts of her British allies, Wells altered the framework of public debates on lynching in both Britain and the United States. No longer content to view lynching as a benign form of frontier justice, Britons accepted Wells's assertion that lynching was a racially motivated act of brutality designed to enforce white supremacy. As British criticism of lynching mounted, southern political leaders desperate to maintain positive relations with potential foreign investors were forced to choose whether to publicly defend or decry lynching. Although British moral pressure and media attention did not end lynching, the international scrutiny generated by Wells's campaigns transformed our understanding of racial violence and made American communities increasingly reluctant to embrace lynching.

DIVA discussion on the ways in which representations in the U.S. have been deflected from mythic to "virtual" phenomena in literary and cultural works of the modern era./div