Social media engagement means losing and finding oneself on a sea of disparate and divergent rhythms, which in this chapter is taken as both material condition and metaphor for the mixture of playful surprise and persistent dread that characterizes the digital dimension of contemporary Black life in the United States. This chapter reads together a collection of technologies, digital and nondigital texts, and memory to explore how contemporary Black social media protest draws on and extends legacies of Black textual play.

Much contemporary antiracist and African Americanist scholarship – especially since the 2008 election of President Barack Obama – has assumed a decidedly cynical orientation toward ideas of “post-racialism.” Scholars, journalists, and activists have rightly detected, in numerous deployments of the term, a kind of bad faith utopianism espoused as a cover for political retreat from progressive, race-conscious policies. This chapter recognizes the merits of such anti-post-racial critiques, but also argues against the summary dismissal of the term. More pointedly, the chapter argues for a rethinking of post-racialism that acknowledges and grapples with a long, ideologically heterogeneous history of African American investments in and ambivalence toward the race concept. The upshot of this rethinking is not a defense of post-racialism as such, but a richer and more dynamic portrait of post-racialism’s historical force, social currency, and inner workings. The chapter takes inspiration from, and proceeds through close readings and intertextual analyses of, Danzy Senna’s 2017 novel, New People.

Hilary Green examines this aspect of freedom by considering Emerson Normal School and institution-building in the postwar era and the important role of education in the lives of formerly enslaved women in Mobile, Alabama. Green posits that Emerson Normal was instrumental in permitting former slaves as well as the children born after the end of slavery to become teachers, administrators, and, most important, leaders within their communities. Emerson Normal represented the expansion and refinement of the educational partnership between Black Mobilians and the American Missionary Association after the creation of state-funded public schools. This partnership played a critical role in creating the corps of teachers required for the new public school system. Outside the classroom, graduates employed their preparation for middle-class leadership by actively participating in racial uplift organizations and campaigns. Never viewing their service as limited to the classroom, Emerson Normal graduates became an essential asset for Black Mobilians and their slow, arduous struggle for African American public education and racial equality in Mobile.

Wide consensus exists that the Tea Party influenced the Republican Party. Exactly what those effects were, and how they were achieved is less clear. This chapter examines how the Tea Party disrupted the US political process between 2010 and 2018. Using granular spatiotemporal information on Tea Party activism, we analyze the insurgency’s impact on the Republican primaries for the 2010 election, the 2010 general election, and the aftermath. Our results show that the number of Tea Party protests in a congressional district predicted the number of subsequent primary challengers, and that the number of local Tea Party groups in a district predicted who won. We further examine the emergence in 2010 of the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, which institutionalized the insurgency’s influence in Congress. Of the 71 politicians who joined the Caucus, just 23 remained in the House by 2018. Despite the declining influence of the Tea Party on the streets and in government, its activism appears to have increased radicalization within the Republican Party. We conclude that the Tea Party served as a congressional watchdog, successfully keeping Republicans acting in line with its goals.

This chapter grows out of the strain of queer theory that revolves around questions of time. Many thinkers make sense of queer subjects by exploring their complex relationships to the past, present, and future as well as what time signifies in this context. Taking seriously the critical linkage between queerness and temporality, I consider how queer bodies make us aware of time – whether through temporal refusal, embrace, or displacement. I argue that contemporary novelists Mia McKenzie and Robert Jones, Jr., use queer characters to reorient narrative understandings of time and present new possible relationships to time. McKenzie’s The Summer We Got Free (2013) and Jones’s The Prophets (2021) both attend to the past to write Black queer life, and, in doing so, these authors provide meditations on time and the writing of history. Beginning with a consideration of the larger historical context of Black queer writing from the end of the twentieth century, the chapter highlights the narrative questioning of the temporal placement and meaning of the Black queer body and draws a connection between the narrative construction and conceptions of temporality that disrupt prevalent ways of thinking about time. In these texts, time emerges as a queer formation.

Understanding contemporary African American literature, this chapter argues, requires accounting for the rich, multifaceted dialogue between Black literary production and the visual arts. This chapter traces what Toni Morrison called the “alliances and alignments” between literature and the other arts by analyzing the aesthetics and themes of contemporary African American writing and examining the cross-arts influences that shaped it. The dialogue between African American literature and visual culture is part of a much longer tradition, and contemporary writers have built on many earlier precedents. But this chapter also unpacks how important historical changes, including developments in media technology and the rise of Black art institutions, have generated new and more numerous intersections between Black literary and artistic cultures since the 1970s. Focusing on three key spaces that provided material support and thematic inspiration for Black writers’ experiments with visual art – the home, museum, and university – this chapter examines how authors working in a range of literary genres, including novels, poetry, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and essays, engaged with a variety of visual arts, including painting, film, sculpture, and photography. The influences and aesthetics of visual culture, the chapter shows, powerfully infuse the work of many writers today.

Karen Cook Bell interrogates how Black women in Louisiana and Georgia used Freedmen’s Bureau courts and their knowledge of the landscape to make their own freedom. In both regions, low wages and legal battles placed formerly enslaved women at a disadvantage; however, their labor aided their families and communities. Through the “contract labor system” in Louisiana and access to abandoned lands in Georgia, these women were able to improve their conditions in the short term. While some freedpeople derived marginal economic benefits from wage labor in the immediate aftermath of the war, in Louisiana these newly emancipated women were persistent in their demands for full and fair compensation from the Bureau of Free Labor, which adjudicated a significant number of cases in their favor.

Kelly Jones explores emancipation by illuminating the intersection of several processes in wartime and the postwar decades such as Black women’s social and family networks and their struggle to claim their rights in connection to the service of their men. Using the records connected to the 54th United States Colored Infantry (the other 54th—not the 54th Massachusetts of “Glory” fame), Jones reconstruct the geography of USCT women’s family, work, and society in the post–Civil War years, paying closest attention to the twenty-five years after the war. Emphasizing Black women’s political placemaking during and after the war’s refugee crisis, Jones argues that Black women provided support for their soldiers and the US Army presence overall, but they also constituted part of the occupation force of Arkansas’s capital. They formed the backbone of Unionist Little Rock and forged alliances with White progressive allies. They fought for rootedness, gaining unprecedented control over their domestic lives, and claimed privileges via their association with Black soldiers.

After 2014, the Tea Party began reverting back to its elite origins, as grassroots activism mostly disappeared and politicians aligned with the insurgency left office. This chapter describes the major synthetic conclusions of our book, and the current state of the Tea Party insurgency. Overall, we argue the Tea Party followed a top-down, bottom-up, and then top-down trajectory. Our research underscores the importance of understanding how economic threats motivate conservative activism, as well as the enduring importance of the choices that activists make about mobilizing structures to sustain their activism. The diffuse, decentralized mobilizing structures built by Tea Party activists were similarly selected by progressive movements, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. As a result, the lessons drawn from the Tea Party may apply to other recent waves of mobilization.

Kaisha Esty demonstrates that during the American Civil War, laboring African American women and girls in Union-occupied territory embarked on their own war over the use of their bodies. As fugitives, “contraband,” and refugees, displaced Black women and girls of liminal status confronted gender violence in conditions that often resembled the systemic sexual violence of slavery. As this chapter argues, central to this gender violence was the assumption that Black women were always willing to negotiate sex as part of their (nonsexual) labor. The introduction of wartime legislation protecting women from sexual assault was pivotal. In race-neutral terms, such legislation created a powerful avenue for refugee Black women and girls not only to seek sexual justice but also to challenge and redefine existing cultural and legal understandings of sexual consent. Analysis of testimonies to wartime sexual violence in Tennessee and South Carolina uncovers how formerly enslaved African American women and girls located their violation in relation to their sense of virtue, respectability, and sexual sovereignty.

In the five decades since the publication of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), the satirical mode of discourse has arguably been more prominent in American popular culture than at any point in the nation’s history. Although the 1960s produced innumerable exemplary satires in various genres, the subsequent decades feature an even greater density of significant works that express political, social, and cultural criticisms through the absurdism, parody, polyvocality, and other distinctive characteristics of the satirical mode. Mumbo Jumbo both indicates and accelerates the predominance of what Steven Weisenburger identifies as a "degenerative" satirical mode that fundamentally reorients the nature of both American literature generally and African American literature specifically. Contemporary African American satire remains a literature of dissent, even though it seemingly bears scant relation to either midcentury “protest novels” or the wide range of “uplift” narratives common to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. In the hands of African American authors, degenerative satire is intensely skeptical of a wide range of ideologies that have contributed to the construction, representation, and (de)valuation of blackness as both an individual and collective identity in the contemporary United States.