This chapter examines late nineteenth-century instances of a fictional trope of “mind invasion,” in which the white male unconscious is controlled by the very subaltern mind that Western science associated with “primitive” levels of mental and cultural evolution. The psychical automatism of mind invasion sometimes reproduces the power dynamics of colonialism, but the chapter examines countervailing examples in which the colonizer’s unconscious is dominated by mental powers and occult knowledge attributed to the colonized. It also explores depictions of extraterrestrial or future-human mind invasion, which redraw the racialized hierarches of mind constructed by Western scientists. Reiterations of the mind-invasion trope satirized the claim of educated white males to possess superior rationality, detached objectivity, and the ability to resist automatist mental states. The chapter analyses the multivalent aims of this reversal, including antimaterialism, a defense of paranormal experience, and a decolonizing attack on the very concept of racial hierarchy.

The final chapter, “Mesmeric Revolution: Pauline Hopkins’s Matrilineal Haiti,” extends the coordinates of Hopkins’s global commitments, charting an alternative geography beneath the Africa-oriented Of One Blood. By turning to the Caribbean, Hopkins reveals how Haiti emerges at key moments of energetic resistance. Moreover, she explicitly genders these moments of resistance as feminine. Focusing on the matrilineage of Hannah, Mira, and Dianthe, I argue that women in the novel carry specifically Haitian valences: from colonial Saint-Dominguan mesmerism, to the poison of Makandal, to the legacy of marronage. This muted Caribbean geography recenters women at the heart of the narrative, adumbrates Hopkins’s anti-imperialist politics, and subverts the dehumanizing energy politics of plantation genealogies.

The essay focuses on the uses and significance of the trope of passing, as both theme and literary strategy, in African American fiction from the 19th to the 21st century. Passing as a theme pushed the boundaries of arbitrary, but operative, racial dichotomies, while passing as a literary strategy enabled radical experimentation with novelistic conventions. African American writers revised the tragic mulatta and mulatto characters by articulating a black-centered racial imaginary that infused the trope of passing with profound political and literary relevance. Deploying the high visibility of all-but-white characters as a screen to introduce new figures in American literature, they advanced a far from monolithic understanding of blackness that foregrounded its intraracial diversification and intersection with gender and class. African American writers adopted the trope of passing in order to expose the sociopolitical construction of “race,” unsettle prevailing racial epistemologies of blackness, popularize a more complex racial imaginary, and teach self-consciously critical modes of reading literature and, by extension, reality. Through a diachronic approach, the essay shows how the trope of passing was repurposed in different literary-historical periods and how it retains its relevance as a malleable literary strategy of cultural and political intervention.

The Colored Co-operative Publishing Company is known for launching the literary career of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Not only did it publish her first novel, Contending Forces (1900); it also published the Colored American Magazine, which Hopkins contributed to and edited. Few people know of the Colored Co-operative’s other publishing initiatives, however. This chapter explores the publication history of Ellen Wetherell’s In Free America; or, Tales from North and South (1901), the only other bound book published by the Colored Co-operative besides Contending Forces. Wetherell was a white woman from Lynn, Massachusetts. Before she rose to prominence in her local Socialist Party, she self-published an anti-lynching pamphlet and then expanded and published it as a book through the Colored Co-operative. I argue the publication of this book marks a critical moment of transition and fluidity in African American literary history, for it marks the moment when a Black publisher took deliberate, concrete steps to expand its sphere of influence beyond the Black community, and by empowering a local white author to find her national voice, the company claimed power for itself.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the US annexation of Hawaii (1898) and imperial war in the Philippines (1899–1902) marked a radical shift in East-West relations and US foreign and domestic policies on the Asia-Pacific. This decade witnessed the simultaneous expansion of US empire in the Pacific and the proliferation of exclusion and restriction policies against Asian immigrants on US soil. This chapter mines the pages of the most influential of early Black literary magazines, the Colored American Magazine, and the lesser-studied works of one of its most celebrated contributors, Pauline E. Hopkins, to investigate the complex cross-racial and interethnic tensions and alliances that occur in Black writings from this period. Hopkins’s rhetoric of monogenesis and interracial kinship limned both the possibilities and limits of Afro-Asian linkages and connections against the US empire-state. A minor yet persistent theme in later African American and Asian American writings, this idea of shared kinship sought to challenge US colonialism and its taxonomic approach to racial difference. These writings contribute to an emerging Black American discourse on the Asia-Pacific.

Sherita Johnson considers a region much more associated with African Americans in Reconstruction in her “Reconstruction of the South in African American Literature.” Johnson examines the transformations of a place, people, and Black literary tradition(s) responding to the political and cultural conflicts of the era and finds that Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, William Wells Brown, James Madison Bell, Albery A. Whitman and Pauline Hopkins all present “Black witnesses” to Reconstruction in their works: slaves emancipating themselves, freedmen and women staking claims to Southern homes built by generational struggles, and black citizens enacting the promises of democracy. Ultimately, her chapter provides case studies of diverse texts – travel narratives, epic poems, autobiographical sketches, and moral theatre – to consider how such works by African American writers help to correct the historical record of Reconstruction and of Southern literary history.

Kathy Glass’s “Black Reform, Writing, and Resistance” highlights social networks, textual politics, and Black resistance and focuses on African Americans’ sustained literary activism against myriad social evils after the Civil War. The chapter begins to map the politics of uplift, temperance, and social reform, with emphasis on work by Julia C. Collins, Harper, and William Wells Brown. Glass suggests these texts underscore literature’s potential for political work by inspiring readers and encouraging collective resistance against oppression.