Overview

Black Atlas presents definitive new approaches to black geography. It focuses attention on the dynamic relationship between place and African American literature during the long nineteenth century, a volatile epoch of national expansion that gave rise to the Civil War, Reconstruction, pan-Americanism, and the black novel. Judith Madera argues that spatial reconfiguration was a critical concern for the era's black writers, and she also demonstrates how the possibility for new modes of representation could be found in the radical redistricting of space. Madera reveals how crucial geography was to the genre-bending works of writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, James Beckwourth, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. These authors intervened in major nineteenth-century debates about free soil, regional production, Indian deterritorialization, internal diasporas, pan-American expansionism, and hemispheric circuitry. Black geographies stood in for what was at stake in negotiating a shared world.

Full Product Details

9780822358114

Table of Contents

Reviews

In Black Atlas Judith Madera shows how the shifting territory comprising the nation and the even more fluid relation of African Americans to that evolving terrain enabled the writing of such key figures such as Martin Delany, William Wells Brown, and Pauline Hopkins. In so doing, Madera provides an important contribution to African American literary criticism; the expanding corpus of material focused on territoriality, transnationalism, and empire; and our understanding of the rise of the novel in the Americas. -- Caroline Levander, author of Where is American Literature? Where other scholars have adopted hemispheric or black Atlantic approaches to the works of nineteenth-century African American writers, Judith Madera develops an intranational framework. She aims to 'deconstruct national terrain,' and her success in doing so is what makes her discussion of space and geography in relation to black literature so distinctive. Arguing that 'black literary citizenship emerges in relation to boundaries,' Madera makes a bold and original contribution to our understanding of African American literature. -- Michelle Stephens, author of Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer What an ambitious and challenging project Judith Madera has constructed! Black Atlas offers a brilliant theoretical template, imaginatively and intellectually stunning. This book is just what the world of literary and cultural concerns needs as a tonic re-placement and re-imagining. -- Houston A. Baker, Jr., author of Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory ...an illuminating study of place and place-making. -- James S. Finley Transfers

In Black Atlas Judith Madera shows how the shifting territory comprising the nation and the even more fluid relation of African Americans to that evolving terrain enabled the writing of such key figures such as Martin Delany, William Wells Brown, and Pauline Hopkins. In so doing, Madera provides an important contribution to African American literary criticism; the expanding corpus of material focused on territoriality, transnationalism, and empire; and our understanding of the rise of the novel in the Americas. Where other scholars have adopted hemispheric or black Atlantic approaches to the works of nineteenth-century African American writers, Judith Madera develops an intranational framework. She aims to 'deconstruct national terrain,' and her success in doing so is what makes her discussion of space and geography in relation to black literature so distinctive. Arguing that 'black literary citizenship emerges in relation to boundaries,' Madera makes a bold and original contribution to our understanding of African American literature.

Where other scholars have adopted hemispheric or black Atlantic approaches to the works of nineteenth-century African American writers, Judith Madera develops an intranational framework. She aims to 'deconstruct national terrain,' and her success in doing so is what makes her discussion of space and geography in relation to black literature so distinctive. Arguing that 'black literary citizenship emerges in relation to boundaries,' Madera makes a bold and original contribution to our understanding of African American literature. -- Michelle Stephens, author of Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer What an ambitious and challenging project Judith Madera has constructed! Black Atlas offers a brilliant theoretical template, imaginatively and intellectually stunning. This book is just what the world of literary and cultural concerns needs as a tonic re-placement and re-imagining. -- Houston A. Baker, Jr., author of Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory In Black Atlas Judith Madera shows how the shifting territory comprising the nation and the even more fluid relation of African Americans to that evolving terrain enabled the writing of such key figures such as Martin Delany, William Wells Brown, and Pauline Hopkins. In so doing, Madera provides an important contribution to African American literary criticism; the expanding corpus of material focused on territoriality, transnationalism, and empire; and our understanding of the rise of the novel in the Americas. -- Caroline Levander, author of Where is American Literature?

Author Information

Judith Madera is Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Wake Forest University.

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