Among the challenges to Black feminist tradition today is a gap between the visibility of intersectional disparities faced by Black women and nonbinary people, and the mobilization of this knowledge to meet problems such as economic precarity and sexual and gender discrimination. Ironically, as the rhetoric of intersectionality has become central to diversity and equity initiatives in academia and publishing, in its institutional iterations, intersectionality has moved away from earlier Black feminist commitments to dismantling systems of inequity, discrimination, and oppression. Contemporary African American literature reflects anxiety about intersectionality’s conflicted service to the individualistic values of neoliberal capitalism while recognizing it remains powerful for critiquing and refining Black feminist priorities and politics surrounding solidarity. This ambivalence is seen in the narratives discussed in this chapter, in particular, in the way they turn to intersectional logics to think through problems of transnational coalition building, gender and sexual discrimination, and economic precarity. This chapter argues that contemporary African American literature reflects anxiety about Black feminist ideas without commensurate gains in equality, safety, and freedom for Black women, providing stark representations of Black female personhood that articulate the urgency of moving beyond this impasse to face the challenges of our time.

When fierce insurgencies such as the Tea Party emerge, they are often considered spontaneous and unpredictable. Over time, sudden bursts of social movement mobilization are typically traced to long arcs of activism that had finally come to fruition. Chapter 2 theoretically contextualizes the decades of conservative activism that ultimately gave rise to the Tea Party. To develop our theory of the Tea Party’s emergence, maturation, and decline we describe 1) the decades of elite-driven efforts to mobilize grievances among White Christians; and 2) the suddenly imposed facilitating conditions stemming from the Great Recession, and status threats linked to the election of Barack Obama. Together these factors produced the perfect interpretive moment that set the Tea Party in motion. To account for the Tea Party’s trajectory and ultimate decline, we focus on the role of its diffuse mobilizing structures, which minimized coordinated event planning and networking between chapters. Also, the hollowing out of American political parties allowed an insurgency like the Tea Party to make rapid inroads that ultimately shaped the Republican Party’s platform.

It has been widely assumed the Tea Party paved the way for Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. Yet, little research has examined the transition from the Tea Party’s takeover of the Republican Party to Trump’s subsequent capture of the GOP. This chapter examines the Tea Party’s engagements with Donald Trump between 2009 and 2018. Tea Party activists initially admired Trump’s amplification of the birther conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that Barack Obama was not a natural born citizen. However, activists dismissed or ridiculed Trump’s political ambitions. By 2013, activists had warmed to Trump’s positions on Islam and immigration, but still did not view him as a viable political candidate. After Trump won the 2016 election, there was a sea shift in tone, as the remaining Tea Party activists enthusiastically embraced his America First agenda. These observations are corroborated by an analysis of the impact that Tea Party activism had on the 2016 Republican primaries for president and the general election. Our analyses shows that Tea Party activism had little impact on helping Trump become President, consistent with the insurgency’s larger ambivalence about Trump’s candidacy.

Activists make important strategic decisions about how to build social movements, which are often linked to the individual biographies and political views of participants. This chapter focuses on those who supported the Tea Party, the activists who took part in collective action, and how the insurgency was organized. We begin by developing estimates of the number of Tea Party activists, concluding that between 140,000 and 310,000 citizens took part. Tea Party activists were atypically conservative, and self-identified as evangelical Christian compared to supporters and the general US population. The second section of the chapter analyzes the mobilizing structures created by the Tea Party, especially the national umbrella groups that emerged to sustain the insurgency, and the local chapters maintained by activists. The mobilizing structures adopted by the Tea Party greatly facilitated its rapid expansion, but individual groups were almost entirely independent. As a result, coordinated action became difficult to sustain over time. The thin mobilizing structures of the Tea Party we document in this chapter are crucial to understanding the insurgency’s rapid decline.

After its emergence in 2009, the Tea Party rapidly became a significant force in American politics. Yet, by 2014, multiple signs pointed to a significant decline in activism. What happened to the Tea Party? This chapter provides an overview of the Tea Party, its activities, and central actors, followed by a summary of our theoretical approach to understanding the movement. The chapter also details the main research questions and provides chapter summaries. The Tea Party is characterized as an insurgent social movement that was split across three main actors: elite conservative groups that facilitated the Tea Party’s emergence, grassroots activists who staged protests and founded local chapters, and Republican politicians who gave voice to the institutionalized faction of the movement.

On April 15, 2009, 1,022 Tax Day Tea Party rallies took place across the US. These rallies were transformative for the Tea Party and served to put the insurgency on the national stage. Soon after April 15, local Tea Party groups began appearing across the country. By the end of 2009, 743 local Tea Party chapters had come into existence. This chapter develops an explanatory account of the earliest wave of Tea Party protests and the early risers that followed. We emphasize the dual importance of material threats brought about by the Great Recession, and status threats linked to a perceived decline in social power among White conservative Christians. Our results show that the Tea Party was set in motion by powerful, well-resourced conservative groups. The groups honed the Tea Party’s message and built an online infrastructure allowing any potential activist to stage a rally or form a local Tea Party group. The grassroots expansion of the Tea Party took off and became the public face of the insurgency. Tea Party activism was most intense in communities with higher levels of both material threats and status threats.

This rich and innovative collection explores the ways in which Black women, from diverse regions of the American South, employed various forms of resistance and survival strategies to navigate one of the most tumultuous periods in American history – the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The essays included shed new light on individual narratives and case studies of women in war and freedom, revealing that Black women recognized they had to make their own freedom, and illustrating how that influenced their postwar political, social, and economic lives. Black women and children are examined as self-liberators, as contributors to the family economy during the war, and as widows who relied on kinship and community solidarity. Expanding and deepening our understanding of the various ways Black women seized wartime opportunities and made powerful claims on citizenship, this volume highlights the complexity of their wartime and postwar experiences, and provides important insight into the contested spaces they occupied.

Karen Cook Bell is Professor of History and the Wilson H. Elkins Endowed Professor at Bowie State University, Maryland. Her book Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America won the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society International Book Award in 2022.

Crystal Feimster examines the Black soldiers of the 4th Regiment of the Native Guard (also known as the Corps dAfrique) stationed at Fort Jackson, Louisiana, and the laundresses who served them and their white officers. Both Black soldiers and laundresses were formerly enslaved people who had seized their freedom by joining and aiding the Union cause. Over the course of six weeks, in December 1863 and January 1864, they engaged in open munity to protest racial and sexual violence inflicted by White Union officers. In so doing they made visible the violent terms of interracial interaction that informed the meaning of wartime freedom and Black labor (terms that were still very much rooted in the prisms and discourses of enslavement). More importantly, as free labor, Black women began to negotiate a deeply abusive racial and sexual terrain.

Despite the initial high-profile burst of public protest in 2009, Tea Party activism declined quickly and never returned to its initial level or ferocity. At its peak, the insurgency turned out more than one million supporters at protests staged on April 15, 2010. This chapter utilizes a systematic sampling of 19,758 Tea Party gatherings between 2009 and 2014. We distinguish between protests, meetings, awareness events, and political events, and analyze the rise and rapid decline of the Tea Party’s patterns of local activism. The Tea Party quickly moved away from staging public protests, and instead, focused their efforts on hosting what we call maintenance events, especially monthly or biweekly chapter meetings. We link the swift decline of Tea Party protest to three factors. First, we emphasize the role of activist burnout and activist disillusionment with protest’s effectiveness. Second, we identify an astounding decline in media attention to Tea Party protests after 2009. Last, we highlight the widespread belief held by many Tea Party activists that the Internal Revenue Service had directly targeted local groups.

This chapter wrestles with the contradictory power that popular romance wields in American culture. These novels both uphold heteropatriarchal norms through their fidelity to the marriage plot, but also unsettle romance tropes as a mode of resisting pernicious stereotypes about Black love and dysfunctional families and counter ubiquitous representations of Black pain. Through a close reading of work by writers such as Sister Souljah, Terry McMillan, and Beverly Jenkins, this chapter upends the claim that Black popular romance is unimaginative and does not merit serious critical analysis as well as defies the common belief that Black popular fiction is a political wasteland. As it reimagines Black popular romance as a space of political possibility with immense cultural impact, this chapter deromanticizes the book publishing industry as a site of antiracism by uncovering the numerous hurdles that Black popular romance writers must clear before they publish novels with Black love at the center.

The Tea Party’s local chapter network played an essential role in the insurgency’s momentum, but almost no research has examined these groups beyond accounting for their emergence. This chapter focuses on the external factors related to Tea Party organization building and maintenance. Using web crawlers and newspaper data, we analyzed the trajectory of the 3,587 local Tea Party chapters that had collectively embodied the insurgency, emphasizing when chapters were formed, how long they survived, and when they stopped showing any signs of organized activity. Between 2011 and 2012 – the peak years of the Tea Party’s organized activity – more than 2,000 chapters were active. Beginning in 2012, chapters began to disappear. By the end of 2014, less than 10% of all Tea Party groups showed any signs of activity. The decline of local Tea Party groups is associated with lowering material threats as the economy slowly recovered from the Great Recession. At the same time, status threats help account for the persistence of Tea activism. The election of politicians affiliated with the Tea Party had little impact on local chapter survival.

Felicia Jamison analyzes Black women in the Georgia Low Country during the Civil War who used the personal time afforded them after laboring on rice plantations to acquire property and pass on goods to their children. Using the testimonies of women in the records of the Southern Claims Commission, Jamison demonstrates how Black women secured property before the war, lost their valuable property as Union soldiers traversed the region and commandeered their goods, and petitioned the Commission for restitution to provide for themselves and their families after the war. Using the “politics of acquisition” as a framework, Jamison argues that women in Liberty County, Georgia, used property to enhance their lives and secure their freedom. She demonstrates that the loss of personal goods such as clothing, livestock, and bushels of agricultural products severely hampered Black women and their families transition into freedom.