Cody Marrs’s concept of “transbellum literature” has urged critics to reconsider the position of the Civil War that neatly divides literary history into “antebellum” and “postbellum.” Marrs’s idea encourages us to see both continuity and discontinuity between the postbellum and antebellum periods. Taking as a main subject of inquiry Herman Melville’s “Lee in the Capitol” in Battle-Pieces, one of the poems written from the perspective of the South, I would like to inquire into what the South as a geographical and political entity meant to Melville after the Civil War. In this poem, Melville gets inside Robert E. Lee’s inner psyche, ventriloquizing his suppressed emotions. By ventriloquizing Lee, Melville can be seen as doing violence to the alterity of the South in ways that conflict with his representation of others in his antebellum fiction. This essay interrogates how the Civil War changed Melville’s approach to representing alterity by focussing on the presence of the South as a geographical other in Battle-Pieces. At the heart of this perceived change lies his concern with representing community rather than individuals. However, Melville ultimately finds himself othered from the southern individuals, thereby demonstrating less discontinuity than continuity in terms of his ethics of alterity.

Black Power and existentialism were mutually reinforcing movements in the late 1960s. Stokely Carmichael used French existentialism to shape some Black Power principles, which demonstrated existentialism’s continued relevance to racial equality. Existentialism reinforced values, such as moral purpose and self-definition, which supported positive appraisals of Black Power revolt on campuses. Carmichael’s adoption of French existentialism illuminates transnational influences on Black Power dating to the 1940s, as well as how important French existentialist texts amplified Black perspectives. The meeting of French existentialism and Black Power assisted increased representation of Black perspectives on campuses, and popular awareness that representation was as important as desegregation to equality.

While the bulk of the study of the burgeoning movement to (re)name streets for Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) has predominantly been centered on the creation of a new geography of commemoration honoring the leader’s legacy and philosophy, little work has explicitly addressed the spatial motivations undergirding Black communities’ insistence on quickening the pace of such a process. This study strives to bring this point further by proposing to analyze the growing phenomenon of street naming for King in terms of Black communities’ relentless determination to challenge and reformulate the long-established practices shaping the MLK toponymic streetscape, especially in the southern part of the United States. On a deeper level, the paper reveals that Black communities and leaders use the spatial commemoration of King as a conduit for the acquisition of a more equitable share of and control over the urban landscape with their white counterparts. The politics of street naming thus lays bare the history and legacy of racial segregation in the South, the unfinished journey of the march for socio-spatial justice, and the rising power of Black communities.