Nineteenth-century mixed-race heroine fiction reflected and contributed to US racial constructions. In its antislavery iterations, it critiqued slavery by revealing the slipperiness of racial categories. Because children inherited the condition of their mothers – regardless of their fathers’ race – enslavers profited from the sexual assault of Black women. Enslavers targeted Black women for sexual violence and hypersexualized them, imagining them as always sexually available to white men. Depictions of mixed-race Black heroines in antislavery fiction addressed these problems. Scholars have discussed these concerns in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or the President’s Daughter, but less attention has been given to his three subsequent revisions of this text. This chapter reads Brown’s serialized novel, Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon as an revealing revision of Brown’s theorization of race in the USA. This revision makes important shifts in both audience and focus and anticipates further development in mixed-race heroine fiction, including writing by Black women whose work has been given less attention than Brown’s or white antislavery authors, skewing perceptions of this genre.

Womens participation in the public sphere was constrained in various ways, even in liberal circles. Anne Thompson (wife of George Thompson), in conjunction with her teenage daughters and African American freedom seekers, engineered an intervention at the Great Exhibition that creatively silenced anti-abolitionists within a social space. After Louisa and Amelia Thompson married and pursued activist and writing careers, they built on such experiences in ways that represent their astute perception of performative dramatugy and ways to strategically intervene in social politics. In Amelia Chessons work life and marriage, this led to a career as the first female performance critic for a British daily newspaper. She honed her ability to describe not only theatre and music performances but also the entire mise-en-scène of complex events. Extensively networked through her own and her familys activist connections, her work as a journalist, political organiser, friend of fellow abolitionists, and matrixed liberal subject reveals a complex reformulation of how the public and private realms have been previously understood.

Watch Night began when enslaved and free African Americans kept vigil, to sing and pray, on December 31, 1862, as they awaited news in the morning of the Emancipation Proclamation. Their optimism gave way to the nominal freedoms and rights of citizenship that African American families and communities experienced in the wake of emancipation and during Reconstruction. African American writers of these decades introduce descriptions of African landscapes, customs, values, and histories as metaphors for the uncertain status and tentative futures their people confronted after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. They associate the African continent with a variety of meanings: the brutal history of slavery; the erasure or dismissal of influential cultures and intellects; a persistent legacy of resistance to oppression and rebellion against bondage; the fugitive status of African Americans in their own country and as exiles abroad; and the precarity of racial progress even as Black schools, churches, and other self-sufficient institutions are established by formerly enslaved Black southern communities.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Civil War and Reconstruction had become sites of significant narrative contests that were carried out in scores of novels and in hundreds of stories published in popular magazines. These writings are arguably central to any understanding of American literary history but usually are represented by only a few canonical Civil War novels, such as Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895), Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock (1898), and Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). Well before the moonlight and magnolia school of Civil War fiction exerted its death grip on the postwar literary imagination, however, an earlier contest waged that sought to set the terms of the debate. Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, William Wells Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper each sought a narrative capable of accounting for the uncertainties and possibilities of this political moment. This essay traces their attempts to imagine a different future, one that broke with the nation’s history of continued abrogation of the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence.

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.

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.

Often Haiti is understood as the central Black revolutionary touchstone for the time, and though Stephen Gilroy Hall examines the ways in which African American writers such as James McCune Smith, William Wells Brown, and George Vashon presented Haiti as “offering instructive lessons about the possibility” of revolution, he also considers the way in which Haiti was activated alongside the American Revolution through the writings of William C. Nell. Importantly, these writers turned to revolutionary pasts as interventions in their historical present when the threat of slavery’s expansion made for what Hall calls “an antislavery war” waged in African American historical writing.

Cody Marrs’s “The Civil War in African American Memory” considers the ways in which African American writers in the wake of emancipation tried to answer the question “How should one remember a revolution that was never allowed to complete itself?” During Reconstruction, Marrs argues, two forms of emancipationist memory emerged. On the one hand, many African Americans saw the Civil War as a historical rupture, a break that required commemoration; on the other hand, many saw it as a historical link, part of a longer and enduring struggle for liberation. Marrs retraces how these views of the war took shape in African American life-writings, periodicals, poems, and speeches that used emancipationist memory to reframe the world remade by the Abolition War. That tendency to turn back to the past to apprehend the present, he argues, is the defining feature of African American memory of the war during this period, and it is what ultimately ties these two commemorative modes together, revealing the war to be both an act and a process, an event as well as an ongoing struggle.

The Introduction to Black Reconstructions gives a basic description of the volume, which offers the most nuanced treatment currently available of Black print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It articulates both the kinds of recovery work and methodological innovations in the book and demonstrates how the recovery work inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. It recognizes that many period texts – by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Mattie Jackson – are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key trends in American culture. It describes the book’s three parts – “Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities”; “Persons and Bodies”; and “Memories, Materialities, and Locations.” It places all of this work in dialogue with key scholarship, especially that flowing from W. E. B. Du Bois’s massively important Black Reconstruction in America (1935).

Katherine Adams’s “‘This Is Especially Our Crop’: Blackness, Value, and the Reconstruction of Cotton” thinks deeply about that historical record’s ties to materiality, labor, and “worth.”Adams focuses on writing that promoted cotton as a site for Black economic self-determination – specifically on how writers negotiated the double bind of racial capitalism, simultaneously countering predictions that freedpeople could not become economic producers without white coercion and resisting the reduction of Black personhood to economic value. Analyzing texts from Martin Delany, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and diverse other authors for the Black periodical press, Adams shows how African American writers and thinkers complicated the putative opposition between capitalist and human value by laying claim to both, appropriating the logic of cotton capitalism in order to inscribe Black personhood within its aporia.

Examining the evolving representation of military service in African American literature reveals how African American writers illustrate the possibility and the disillusionment of military service between the Civil War and World War I, adding individual perspective to the historical record. In The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867), William Wells Brown expresses hope that African Americans would receive citizenship after fighting for their freedom. After Reconstruction, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote Iola Leroy (1893) and Paul Laurence Dunbar published The Fanatics (1901), works that reimagine the consequences of the Civil War in light of the nation’s institutionalized racism. Later, Victor Daly portrayed the experience of an African American soldier in a segregated army in Not Only War (1932). These books demonstrate that the complicated questions about African American military service and citizenship would take generations to resolve.

Chapter 4 focuses on an era where numerous African Americans visited Britain and exploited the rise of popular abolition after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. I argue that while activists such as William Wells Brown and the Reverend Samuel Ward manipulated the interest surrounding the novel to maintain antislavery sentiment, they used the opportunity to chastise and even harshly criticize Britain for its role in the slave trade. The chapter also focuses on two other famous figures in the 1850s, Henry ‘Box’ Brown and Frederick Douglass. ‘Box’ Brown refused to bend to any rule in transatlantic activist history, and while he initially incorporated Stowe’s novel into his visual panorama, he used his savvy business flair and did not solely rely on the text. He constantly reinvented himself and his repertoire to court his celebrity, and even starred in a play based on his own life. Lastly, I explore the reasons why Douglass’ exploitation of adaptive resistance in 1859 was comparatively less successful than his first visit in 1845, in part, he believed, because of the growing racism in British society that would become further entrenched during the Civil War.

Four major accounts written by formerly enslaved people of their experiences as they were trafficked through the New Orleans slave markets can tell us a great deal about human trafficking in antebellum New Orleans, and in turn the Southern United States. Specifically, the autobiographies of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, Josiah Henson, and Solomon Northup showcase the way the New Orleans slave market worked. These four, of the many tens of thousands sold through New Orleans, together offer a composite view of this epicenter in the larger network of human trafficking and enable speculation, in turn, on the nature of the experience of those who endured it in terms of severe alienation, trauma and certain limited possibilities to act by way of shaping their fate.