From the three-fifths clause and the Mason-Dixon Line to the doctrines of mixed character and separate-but-equal, the legal apparatus of slavery and anti-Black racism in the United States is infamous for its coldly formalist logic. Indeed, the formalism of the first civil rights movement has been obscured by a tendency to ascribe this approach exclusively to its political opponents. This chapter draws on recent reassessments of form in legal and literary studies to illuminate the Black formalist tradition of the long nineteenth century. In particular, I examine how authors (David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt) and litigants (Harriet and Dred Scott) wielded the ancient legal-cultural form of the person to detach certain classes of person (slave, freeman, sailor, citizen, wife, mother, daughter) from racialized human groups (“colored,” white). By contrast, I demonstrate, white supremacists such as Thomas Jefferson and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney sought to naturalize, humanize, and racialize the persons known as “slave” and “citizen.” As the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments attest, early civil rights activists transformed legal personhood in the United States by insisting on the abolition of one class of person (slave) and the reconstitution of another (citizen).

This essay draws upon recent developments in histories of finance and Black studies to argue for an expanded consideration of late nineteenth-century speculative fiction. In recent decades, speculation has emerged as a foundational methodology, critical framework, and literary genre in African American literary studies and Black studies. Yet, within this body of scholarship, speculative fiction is most often associated with anti-realist modes that imagine alternate futures while speculative reading and research methods double as a critique of our political and disciplinary limits. Through a close reading of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition, this essay considers how speculation’s late nineteenth-century instruments and logics determine the novel’s political horizons and narrative structure. By attending to the financial workings of late nineteenth-century novels that might seem to strain against the bounds of either genre fiction or speculative research methods, this essay argues that we can begin to see how a work like Chesnutt’s interrogates a particularly postbellum outlook on the future, one in which the terms of financial speculation can only imagine a future that is an intensification of the past.

This chapter bridges environmental humanities and Black humanities by examining a figure largely, if curiously, excluded from the “ecocritical” canon: Charles Chesnutt, the first African American writer of commercially successful fiction. Reading literary environmentalism beyond the lenses of Romanticism or transcendentalism, Forbes finds in Chesnutt’s late nineteenth-century conjure tales a richly imagined Black environmental heritage that connected race and nature. Chesnutt’s short fiction featuring metamorphoses of humans into plants and animals represents a key node in an alternate, and nonlinear, Black environmentalist timeline. In contrast to environmentalisms that pit nature’s interests against humans’, the insights we see at flashpoints across this tradition, and crucially in Chesnutt’s conjure tales, belie narratives of human/nature separation that underpin most “white” environmentalisms. Moreover, his marshaling of racialized nonhuman agencies also helps us address persistent difficulties associated with new materialist theorizing. Fusing human/plant/animal agencies to frameworks of care and nurturance, characters in Chesnutt’s conjure tales weaponize “waste” against enslavement’s inhuman valuation systems.

This chapter examines Charles Chesnutt’s teaching career in the south during Reconstruction. Chesnutt left his work as a teacher in order to pursue a career in literature, primarily of fiction. The connection between Chesnutt’s stories and his experiences as a Black teacher in the south reveals a new story about Black education crucial to understanding the history of Reconstruction.

While not as financially or critically successful as his previous novels, Charles Chesnutt’s 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream is an important, though understudied, contribution to a vein of black anti-capitalist thought emergent in the post-Reconstruction era. The story of a former Confederate soldier’s failed endeavor to buy a dilapidated cotton mill and introduce economically and racially progressive labor practices, the novel explores how the post-slavery afterlife of the cotton commodity continued to contribute to Black subjugation in the south. In the end, The Colonel’s Dream asks us to consider whether the fallout of racial capitalism can be remedied by introducing more “humane” capitalist practices, or whether capitalism will always proceed on the same, ruinous route it has historically followed.

This essay examines race and late nineteenth-century regional fiction by asking how neighborliness helps arbitrate the tension between representations of membership in local communities and larger histories of national and regional racial dispossession.

This chapter focuses on biographies that illuminate the personal stories of African descendants born in the United States and are currently in print. Green provides a sample of biographies of Black leaders and cultural icons, from Charles Chesnutt’s study of the life of Frederick Douglass, published four years after Douglass’s death. She pinpoints major approaches to the study of African American life in the United States and identifies several subgenres of biography. Much of African American biography relies heavily on archival material — diaries and scrapbooks stored in Black homes, donations to libraries and civic centers, old letters saved by past lovers, interviews of friends and acquaintances, journals left behind by the dead — housed in various venues across the world. A major challenge of the biographer, then, is to write a story that interests and informs, and also shows the significance of the subject's life story; or in other words, to show a balance between the extraordinariness and the ordinariness of the life narrative subject. The chapter ends with suggestions of challenges for producing biographies in the future.

This essay exams southern literature from the end of Reconstruction through the first decade of the twentieth century. Specifically, this essay seeks to contextualize authors like Thomas Dixon, Jr. and Thomas Nelson Page and their nostalgic revisions of the idea of the plantation in southern literature. In their works, Dixon and Page seek to present the South as emblematic of a great Lost Cause, one that was rooted in (to them) a magnificent past, where hierarchical race relations were made abundantly clear. To this end, this essay also examines contemporaneous black authors like Charles Chesnutt and Sutton Griggs (whose novel The Hindered Hand is a direct response to Dixon). Ultimately, by re-centering our focus of this era of southern literature to also encompass the black writers whose mission was to combat white supremacy, we gain a broader and clearer understanding of southern literature in the wake of Reconstruction.

This chapter explores Black masculinity and celebrity at the turn of the century through the lives of American statesman Frederick Douglass, educator Booker T. Washington, scholar/activist W. E. B. DuBois, fiction writer Charles W. Chesnutt, and boxer Jack Johnson, the first African American world heavyweight champion. Johnson’s athletic accomplishments and diverse cultural interests, along with his uncompromisingly bold personality, set a new tone for Black masculinity in the first decade of the twentieth century. His celebrity status, mediated by his status as a Black man, provided him a public platform unprecedented for an African American man. On that platform, he embraced his Black working-class heritage, critiqued the dubious history and practice of colonialism, and unapologetically revealed his preference for socializing with white women. Johnson presented, in both his actions and his physical dominance of white men in the ring, the major issues, aspirations, and concerns in the lives and work of this quartet of Black men.

This chapter surveys the career of Charles Chesnutt, first by focusing on his strategic, self-conscious efforts to enter what he called the literary world. It looks at Chesnutt’s rise in the literary world through publication with Houghton Mifflin and the critical acclaim of William Dean Howells, then his downfall after The Marrow of Tradition led to his being marked as a propagandist. It analyzes his short story “Baxter’s Procrustes” for its satirical insight into the paradoxes of contemporary literary value. It charts his final years when he was recognized by Harlem Renaissance writers as “the first Negro novelist,” even as he struggled to publish new work during that period, making him a sacrifical precursor for the Harlem Renaissance writers with whom he could only partially identify.