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.

The Introduction provides an overview of the history, practice, and future directions of the field. It considers the coherence and stability of the category of contemporary African American literature, examines multiple genealogies and questions of periodization, and describes varied aesthetic practices of grief and grievance, experimentation and play. Embedding African American cultural production within the fraught history of the last five decades, this chapter examines various forces shaping the creation of innovative genres, the turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest, and the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods.

Brandi Brimmer follows the story of Fanny Whitney, an enslaved woman, who belonged to a community of men and women that was bound together by extended ties of kinship and other connections in Union-occupied areas of eastern North Carolina. Brimmer’s chapter pieces together the historical trajectory of widowhood for Black women in post–Civil War America. Using the case files of Fanny Whitney and other southern Black women who applied for survivors’ benefits after 1866, the year the federal government recognized “slave marriage” in pension law, this chapter asks what happened to the women and children Black soldiers depended on, left behind in freedmen’s camps, and reunited with after the war. Black women who were widows, she contends, pieced together their existence on a daily basis. Evidence from the pension files of Black Union widows in eastern North Carolina deepens our understanding of Black women’s lives and labors and sheds light on the ways they struggled to define widowhood for themselves. Brimmer expands the discourse regarding widowed Black women who used community and kinship networks to shape freedom.

This chapter traces the emergence of African American confinement literature in the contemporary African American literary tradition over the past six decades, paying careful attention to the subfield’s examination of racialized and gendered confinement in spaces that include but also extend beyond the carceral geographies of jail and prison. Highlighting the centrality of the literary work of former political prisoner and prison abolitionist Angela Y. Davis to the origins and development of this subfield, this chapter demonstrates how works of African American confinement literature fundamentally eclipse the narrow categorization of “prison writing.” These works explore confinement as both a complicated metaphor for and a recurring lived experience within socially and psychically constricting systems of anti-Black racism, gendered social control, racialized economic exploitation, political repression, and incarceration. In sum, authors of contemporary African American confinement literature draw compelling parallels between the confining racist and sexist institutions and practices from previous eras – such as slavery, the convict lease system, chain gang camps, peonage, lynching, and Jim Crow – and those that persist in the contemporary US carceral state, including racial profiling, state violence, prisoner abuse, policing, and the prison-industrial complex.

With a focus on the nineteenth century, this chapter shows the ways American essayists responded to the new possibilities of national and international travel in the modern age. Modernity offered the ideal conditions under which American travel essays could proliferate: developing infrastructures in transportation, communication, and the publication and distribution of books and periodicals; the growing commercial and imperial reach of the United States; rising literacy rates, which ensured a market for these texts; Old World tourism as a marker of elite and then middle-class identity; the status of Europe as a site of professional training; transatlantic networks of reformers; missionary activity in Asia and Africa; and hemispheric travel in the Americas. Travel writings were popular, a sign that they were performing significant cultural work. The tourist’s or expatriate’s provisional relationship to other peoples and places lent itself to the genre of the essay; this emphasis informed many travel essays. In rendering the interactions between consciousness and place, Americans pushed the boundaries of the genre, as travel essays blended with journalism, fiction, and autobiography.