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On March 23, 1849, Henry Brown climbed into a large wooden postal crate and was mailed from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, to freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “Box Brown,” as he came to be known after this astounding feat, went on to carve out a career as an abolitionist speaker, actor, magician, hypnotist, and even faith healer, traveling the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada until his death in 1897.The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown is the first book to show how subversive performances were woven into Brown’s entire life, from his early days practicing magic in Virginia while enslaved, to his last shows in Canada and England in the 1890s. It recovers forgotten elements of Brown’s history to illustrate the ways he made himself a spectacle on abolitionist lecture circuits via outlandish performances, and then fell off these circuits and went on to reinvent himself again and again. Brown’s stunts included creating a moving panoramic picture show about his escape; parading through the streets dressed as a “Savage Indian” or “African Prince”; convincing hypnotized individuals that they were sheep who would gobble down raw cabbage; performing magic, dark séances, and ventriloquism; and even climbing back into his “original” box to jump out of it on stage.In this study, Martha J. Cutter analyzes contemporary resurrections of Brown’s persona by leading poets, writers, and visual artists. Both in Brown’s time and in ours, stories were created, invented, and embellished about Brown, continuing to recreate his intriguing, albeit fragmentary and elusive, story. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown fosters a new understanding not only of Brown’s life but of modern Black performance art that provocatively dramatizes the unfinished work of African American freedom.
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First published in 1797, The Columbian Orator helped shape the American mind for the next half century, going through some 23 editions and totaling 200,000 copies in sales. The book was read by virtually every American schoolboy in the first half of the 19th century. As a slave youth, Frederick Douglass owned just one book, and read it frequently, referring to it as a "gem" and his "rich treasure." The Columbian Orator presents 84 selections, most of which are notable examples of oratory on such subjects as nationalism, religious faith, individual liberty, freedom, and slavery, including pieces by Washington, Franklin, Milton, Socrates, and Cicero, as well as heroic poetry and dramatic dialogues. Augmenting these is an essay on effective public speaking which influenced Abraham Lincoln as a young politician. As America experiences a resurgence of interest in the art of debating and oratory, The Columbian Orator--whether as historical artifact or contemporary guidebook--is one of those rare books to be valued for what it meant in its own time, and for how its ideas have endured. Above all, this book is a remarkable compilation of Enlightenment era thought and language that has stood the test of time.
Speeches, addresses, etc. --- Addresses --- Collected papers (Anthologies) --- Discourses --- Orations --- Papers, Collected (Anthologies) --- Festschriften --- Lectures and lecturing --- Enlightenment. --- Frederick Douglass. --- debate. --- early American life. --- eloquence. --- oratory. --- political theory. --- self improvement. --- speaking skills. --- speeches.
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Labor and labor norms orient much of contemporary life, organizing our days and years and driving planetary environmental change. Yet, labor, as a foundational set of values and practices, has not been sufficiently interrogated in the context of the environmental humanities for its profound role in climate change and other crises. This collection of essays demonstrates the urgent need to rethink models and customs of labor and leisure in the Anthropocene. Recognizing the grave traumas and hazards plaguing planet Earth, contributors expose fundamental flaws in ideas of work and search for ways to redirect cultures toward more sustainable modes of life. These essays evaluate Anthropocene frames of interpretation, dramatize problems and potentials in regimes of labor, and explore leisure practices such as walking and storytelling as modes of recasting life, while a coda advocates reviving notions of work as craft.
Global environmental change. --- Leisure --- Work --- Philosophy. --- work, jobs, labor, environment, time, racism, purpose, Anthropocene, Unisphere, Wendell Berry, Thomas Pynchon, Frederick Douglass, John Burroughs, Dorothy Wordsworth, Harriet Martineau, English Lake District, climate change, Dharug Nura.
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The end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernity - industrialisation, racialisation, and capitalism - were quickly reshaping the world. 'The Unintended' slows down the moment in which the technology of photography seemed to speed itself - and so the history of racial capitalism - up. It follows the substantial shifts in the markets, mediums, and forms of photography during a legally murky period at the end of the nineteenth century. Monica Huerta traces the subtle and paradoxical ways legal thinking through photographic lenses reinscribed a particular aesthetics of whiteness in the very conceptions of property ownership.
United States --- Race relations --- History --- Delsartism. --- Frederick Douglass. --- abolition. --- aesthetics. --- copyright. --- expression. --- gesture. --- intellectual property. --- legal thought. --- lithograph. --- nineteenth-century America. --- performance. --- photography. --- privacy. --- publicity. --- race. --- racial capitalism. --- theatre. --- Photography --- Images, Photographic --- Portrait photography
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Constraints on freedom, education, and individual dignity have always been fundamental in determining who is able to write, when, and where. Considering the singular experience of the African American writer, William W. Cook and James Tatum here argue that African American literature did not develop apart from canonical Western literary traditions but instead grew out of those literatures, even as it adapted and transformed the cultural traditions and religions of Africa and the African diaspora along the way. Tracing the interaction between African American writers and the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, from the time of slavery and its aftermath to the civil rights era and on into the present, the authors offer a sustained and lively discussion of the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Rita Dove, among other highly acclaimed poets, novelists, and scholars. Assembling this brilliant and diverse group of African American writers at a moment when our understanding of classical literature is ripe for change, the authors paint an unforgettable portrait of our own reception of "classic" writing, especially as it was inflected by American racial politics.
American literature --- African American authors --- History and criticism. --- Classical influences. --- african american literature, literary criticism, education, dignity, identity, cultural traditions, western lit, religion, diaspora, africa, ancient greece, rome, slavery, civil rights era, jim crow, phillis wheatley, frederick douglass, ralph ellison, rita dove, poets, poetry, famous novelists, black scholars, racial politics, classical influences, leisure moments, genteel classicism, harlem, satire. --- English literature --- Agrarians (Group of writers)
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What is the opposite of freedom? In Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts answers this question with definitive force: slavery, and from there he unveils powerful new insights on the human condition as it has been understood between these poles. Crucial to his investigation is the concept of marronage-a form of slave escape that was an important aspect of Caribbean and Latin American slave systems. Examining this overlooked phenomenon-one of action from slavery and toward freedom-he deepens our understanding of freedom itself and the origin of our political ideals. Roberts examines the liminal and transitional space of slave escape in order to develop a theory of freedom as marronage, which contends that freedom is fundamentally located within this space-that it is a form of perpetual flight. He engages a stunning variety of writers, including Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Rastafari, among others, to develop a compelling lens through which to interpret the quandaries of slavery, freedom, and politics that still confront us today. The result is a sophisticated, interdisciplinary work that unsettles the ways we think about freedom by always casting it in the light of its critical opposite.
Maroons. --- Fugitive slaves --- Liberty. --- africana studies, slavery, enslaved, history, historical, human condition, humanity, opposition, free, escape, caribbean, latin america, systems, power, politics, political, ideals, morals, values, liminal, transitional, flight, analysis, critique, critical, academic, scholarly, research, theory, theoretical, hannah arendt, web du bois, angela davis, frederick douglass, samuel taylor coleridge, literary, literature.
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This surprising global history of an indispensable document reveals how the passport has shaped art, thought, and human experience while helping to define the modern world. Narrow escapes and new starts, tearful departures and hopeful arrivals, unwanted scrutiny in the backrooms of officialdom: some of our most memorable experiences involve a passport. In License to Travel, Patrick Bixby examines the passports of artists and intellectuals, ancient messengers and modern migrants to reveal how these seemingly humble documents implicate us in larger narratives about identity, mobility, citizenship, and state authority. This concise cultural history takes the reader on a captivating journey from pharaonic Egypt and Han-dynasty China to the passport controls and crowded refugee camps of today. Along the way, the book connects intimate stories of vulnerability and desire with vivid examples drawn from world cinema, literature, art, philosophy, and politics, highlighting the control that travel documents have over our bodies as we move around the globe. With unexpected discoveries at every turn, License to Travel exposes the passport as both an instrument of personal freedom and a tool of government surveillance powerful enough to define our very humanity.
Passports --- History. --- Ai Weiwei. --- Elon Musk. --- Frederick Douglass. --- Gertrude Stein. --- Global studies. --- Hannah Arendt. --- Langston Hughes. --- Marc Chagall. --- Paul Robeson. --- Slavoj Žižek. --- Sun Ra. --- Willa Cather. --- abroad. --- adventure. --- citizenship. --- continent. --- country. --- cultural history. --- culture. --- explore. --- identity. --- mobility. --- new places. --- state. --- tourist. --- travel. --- visit.
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"Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure-the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark-in the works of black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people-all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find black and animal life in fraught proximity. Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of antiblackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene"--
Blacks in literature. --- American literature --- Animals in literature. --- Literature and race --- Anthropomorphism in literature. --- African American authors --- History and criticism. --- Race and literature --- Race --- Negroes in literature --- Blacks in literature --- Black people in literature. --- American literature - African American authors - History and criticism --- Literature and race - United States --- Animals in literature --- Anthropomorphism in literature --- african american. --- afrofuturism. --- animal studies. --- animals literature. --- anthropocene. --- bipoc authors. --- black experience. --- black masculinity. --- critical race theory. --- du bois. --- feminist thought. --- frederick douglass. --- harlem renaissance. --- modern poetry. --- motherhood. --- white supremacist.
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