In the first half of the 20th century, the US South lagged behind the Northeast in social and economic development, but in the 1920s and 1930s writers from the US South produced texts that used modernist aesthetic forms to depict poor, rural living conditions. This essay argues that ruralism in the South was a product of modernization, and that cultural development in southern literature preceded modernization, yielding texts that employ a discontinuous narrative technique to depict the rural regions, such as William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and James Agee's and Walker Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

There are plenty of texts in which one might not be surprised to find an alien invasion on only the second page, but The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (2010) – the seven-hundred-page document produced by the Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission – is hardly one of them. The Inquiry Report opens by invoking the dizzying difficulty of its own task: from “millions of pages of documents,” the Inquiry Report begins by noting, its authors have attempted to understand events compared, just in the Inquiry Report's first two pages, to “mass delusion,” “a hurricane,” a “perfect storm,” a “train wreck,” and, finally, an “alien event.” This proliferation of metaphors suggests an encounter with a set of historical conditions whose magnitude and complexity render them recalcitrant to representation. What overwhelms the authors of the Inquiry Report is not simply the complexity – the length and breadth – of the story to be told, but the question of what sort of story it should be: if the crisis was described even by those who should have been in the know as “dramatic and mystifying,” how could one render it legible while at the same time doing justice to its singularity?

For enslaved African Americans in the antebellum period, emancipation was writ large as the most pressing of political imperatives stemming from the most fundamental obligations of justice and humanity. That it could be achieved individually was clear from the activities of countless runaways, fugitives and cultural and political activists, Douglass and Jacobs included, who escaped territories of enslavement to become self-emancipated subjects on free soil. That it could be achieved collectively was evidenced by the success of the Haitian Revolution, with its army of enslaved and free black persons. This piece explores the ways in which emancipation is understood 150 years after US Emancipation at the end of the Civil War, and provides an introduction to the new scholarship on the many acts of emancipation, memorialization and practices of freedom discussed in this special issue.

This paper examines Nation women's engagement and resistance in the Muhammad Speaks (MS) newspaper. MS was created as the official publication of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1960. The paper employed women as journalists and invited contributions from women who had registered with the group. Women's contributions to the paper's production and content reveal their readings of NOI mandates but they equally illuminate a gentle resistance to aspects of the organization. Elijah Muhammad's NOI implemented gender roles for men and women within the organization that were often inflexible. Women embraced the organization's gender roles and found ways to navigate the patriarchal dimensions of the movement. This paper argues that a careful analysis of women's writings for the MS newspaper reveals facets of their activism that have been overlooked in existing scholarly studies.

This essay examines contrasting but complementary narrative and filmic representations of the Guadeloupean resistance to Napoleon's attempt to reimpose a slavery regime in the French colonies. This underrepresented and under-analyzed event, one of landmark importance in the Caribbean tradition of rebellion and self-liberation, focuses our attention more closely on the extended arc of liberatory acts – inscribed in a variety of locations but always espousing the same goal – that mark the identitarian activities of Caribbean slaves almost from the inception of the colonial moment to the act of emancipation. In a large sense, the resistance to Napoleon's invading forces, although ultimately doomed to failure in Guadeloupe, emerged from and was shaped by the specificities of social, economic, and political structures that transformed Guadeloupe during this critical period, and was driven by principles of liberation and self-emancipation emerging from the path adopted by Guadeloupe's governor, Victor Hugues, and the various communities over which he presided. Resistance in Guadeloupe was a fight to preserve a way of life. Analyzing this resistance compels us to acknowledge individual and collective expressions of the idea and practice of freedom that were originally erased by those charged with constructing the colonial script, and draws attention to the still-marginal inscription of these events in contemporary culture.

Afong Moy came to the United States in 1834 as a popular attraction, and remained in the public spotlight until 1850. Her very presence as the first recorded Chinese woman on American soil prompted a heated national discussion regarding how to accommodate the Chinese living among Americans. A two-tiered paradigm that emerged from this dialogue disparaged Chinese culture while extending paternalistic care to Moy, pushing her toward acculturation, which was to be realized in a symbolic way after her disappearance from the exhibition stage. The pattern was not exclusive to Moy; rather, it was a general strategy that Americans had adopted to deal with the small but growing number of Chinese present in the United States prior to the widespread and virulent anti-Chinese sentiment that later engulfed American society. This study therefore sheds light on the oft-neglected early stage of Sino-American relations occurring within American borders.

In part an examination of the speculative arena of genomics, particularly through the historical context of US nuclear detonations in the Pacific in the mid-twentieth century, this essay traces a rhetorical shift in scientific interest in “mutation” to “regeneration.” This shift marks how the financialization of scientific research brokers a profitable conversion of the devastations of the atomic age to the promissory therapies of the Human Genome Project. Against this backcloth, I turn to Larissa Lai's speculative fiction Salt Fish Girl, which resurrects these specters of the Pacific to haunt the HGP's projections and tether transpacific futurity to an irradiated past.

This article addresses the Amistad incident, and the evolving way this event was viewed by Connecticut journalists and residents; an examination of the language used in contemporary newspapers reveals why the Amistad story was largely forgotten in popular imagination in the United States until the 1980s, and completely forgotten in Sierra Leone, the homeland of the captives. The Amistad displayed the nation's most racist beliefs, along with its worst fears, in Connecticut newspaper accounts, accounting for the discomfort with which Southerners in particular regarded the case. The rebellious African kidnap victims were exotic visitors to Connecticut, eliciting much commentary about the “ignoble savages” who might be cannibals, but most certainly seemed to be murderers with insight and intellect; more troubling, they were men – this seemed indisputable – and they were fighting courageously and against the odds for their own freedom, the pivotal American value. In a culture that evaluated savagery visually, there was much to identify as “savage,” but, nonetheless, as the Africans came to reside in Connecticut awaiting their trial, they became human beings, with their own voices, recorded in newspaper accounts. They acquired names, translators, Western clothing, English and Bible lessons, transforming their threatening black masculinity into the only image acceptable to white America, “the suffering servant”; in spite of the pro-slavery newspaper portrayal of the Africans as being lazy, inarticulate in English, mendacious slave-traders, a deliberate process of “heroification” of Cinque was occurring. These competing stereotypes of black man as supplicating victim versus black man as intelligent, violently forceful agent of his own fate were difficult for Lewis Tappan and his fellow abolitionists to navigate. The images also brought into question the value of “moral suasion” as a tool, especially when white Americans were faced with the reality of a strong, potentially violent African man. The Supreme Court decision freed the African captives, but set no precedent for future cases, and it did not improve the lot of even one other enslaved soul; worse yet, the returned captives found no peace after their hard-won return to Africa, nor did they choose to maintain their Christianity, much to the disappointment of their American hosts. Furthermore, the unhappy postscript of the Africans' resettlement called into question the value of the colonization plans so beloved by activists.

This article examines science-fictional allegorizations of Soviet-style planned economies, financial markets, autonomous trading algorithms, and global capitalism writ large as nonhuman artificial intelligences, focussing primarily on American science fiction of the Cold War period. Key fictional texts discussed include Star Trek, Isaac Asimov's Machine stories, Terminator, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), Charles Stross's Accelerando (2005), and the short stories of Philip K. Dick. The final section of the article discusses Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 (2012) within the contemporary political context of accelerationist anticapitalism, whose advocates propose working with “the machines” rather than against them.

Black sovereignty in the Atlantic world pivots, as in the case of Haiti, from a haunting apparition to a haunting recognition, never quite forming a tangible, and legal, sovereignty unto itself. Haiti's tangled and complicated geopolitical positioning within the Atlantic world gives this spectral state of being meaning. Sovereignty, or, as I will suggest, the processes of recognizing sovereignty and the material shape of its appearance, imbues Haiti's sovereign claims with a specific racialized threshold. Reading along Haiti's racio-national edge also illuminates the tenuous position on the international stage of Liberia and Abyssinia – two nations, along with Haiti, that represented the only nation-states in the Atlantic world by the end of the nineteenth century with a majority black population and independence. Although a small representative group, these sites deserve far more scrutiny within the fields of race and sovereignty studies by legal scholars and scholars of transnational American studies, especially because of the ways the nations battled for recognition and respect amongst other nation-states who may have attached derogatory notions of humanity onto the political work and rights of these self-avowed black nations. Haiti is an important example of this phenomenon.

This essay examines Lawd Today!, Richard Wright's posthumously published novel, written in the 1930s but only made available to readers in 1963. Concentrating on the epigraphs that punctuate the novel, the essay demonstrates the significance of the social criticism of the 1910s and 1920s to Wright's formation as literary artist. In particular, Wright was drawn to the writings of the Young American critics, including Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank, whose criticisms of national ideologies furthered a commitment to “Americanism” as a horizon of social and cultural renewal. Wright's intellectual immersion in early twentieth-century US social criticism gave Lawd Today! a Young American critical imprint. Drawing upon the work of Ernesto Laclau on “populism,” the essay reads Wright's novel as invested in an “Americanism” that seeks to describe common features of early twentieth-century black migrant experience in the urban North in terms of larger national and modern dynamics.

In 1987, the artist Ray Johnson, “leader” of the so-called New York Correspondence School, filled his mouth with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and read some of Walt Whitman's musings on the nature of correspondence in a performance that Johnson dubbed Smile. An example of what Johnson termed his “nothings,” Smile took place in an empty ATM vestibule on Long Island, the nostalgic “Paumanok” of Whitman's poetry. Johnson's performance both elevated and mocked Whitman's equally personal approach to the art and practice of correspondence. By invoking Whitman and his thoughts on correspondence, Johnson was keen to respond to descriptions of him as “Dada Daddy” to a younger generation of correspondence artists. Johnson's performance looked not so much to elevate his own ephemeral correspondence art, but to foster a reappraisal of Whitman that considered the ephemerality of his poetic method and opened up a queer line of communication and anti-teleological influence that would disrupt Johnson's own artistic reception. This article examines Smile as an (auto)biographical performance that simultaneously clarifies and clouds the creative methodologies of Johnson and Whitman, declaring Whitman's influence on the irreverent Johnson while rejecting the restrictions of a chronological chain of influence, much as Johnson's earlier mail art had done.

Histories of emancipation find ballast in the moments we memorialize. This piece tracks possessive investments and emancipatory challenges with origins in eighteenth-century New England. In the face of Connecticut's 1784 gradual manumission Act, slaveholders in a New England town protected their family's interests by transforming their human property into intellectual property. In 1798 an enslaved man named Fortune was dissected after his death by his owner, Dr. Preserved Porter, and the skeleton exhibited as a symbol of medical and social capital. Renamed Larry, the bones paid professional dividends for more than a century afterward, and were rearticulated in 1930s Europe before becoming the most popular exhibit at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut. This article fleshes out the buried histories of dis(re)membered black subjects by examining white ownership and display of black bodies after death. By unearthing the relationship between medical knowledge generation and white uses of black bodies, I illustrate how white knowledge and status is indebted not only to black labor in life but also to the work that black bodies continued to do in the name of medical “progress.” This essay interrogates the politics of black death and dissection and the contemporary complexities of historical recovery and resuscitation.

The histories of Tijuana and Hollywood have long been deeply intertwined, leading critics to argue that American cinema was instrumental in constructing the city's reputation as a dark, seedy and amoral space. However, the 1957 film The Tijuana Story presents a clear contradiction between the way in which it is marketed to evoke the “black legend” of Tijuana and its socially conscious content, tracing the real life story of a Tijuanan journalist who was murdered for taking a stand against crime and corruption. Close analysis of The Tijuana Story's paradoxical representation of the city provides a more detailed understanding of Hollywood's relationship with Tijuana and offers a way of discussing the city without reducing it to any one singular mythology. As part of a larger body of films that use images of Mexico to explore left-wing and liberal politics, The Tijuana Story provides further evidence of the persistent connection between Mexico and social revolution in American cinema.

Bruce Sterling's science fiction novel Distraction (1999) envisions a near-future (mid-twenty-first-century) US in which the economy has collapsed, entire categories of skilled and professional labor have ceased to exist, rampant and endemic joblessness leaves masses of the unemployed to survive on the margins as squatters and scavengers, the infrastructure of entire regions is in ruins (Louisiana is described as “underwater” and the West as “on fire”), and the ongoing crisis has enabled the proliferation of ad hoc governance structures (“State-of-Emergency cliques”), even as democratic institutions survive (just barely) in the eviscerated form of pure spectacle. In this world, where, as one character puts it, “money just doesn't need human beings anymore,” a significant portion of the population have opted out of the money economy altogether. Appropriating biotech that can fabricate nutrition from scrub grass and weeds, the novel's nomad proles live off roadside detritus, which they also use to fabricate the phones and laptops central to their wired, moneyless reputation economy. This paper addresses the relation in the novel between economic crisis, the demise of representational politics (what Slavoj Žižek calls the “divorce” of “capitalism and democracy”), and alternative forms of sociality, particularly in the figure of the nomad proles, and of the urban squatters described as practicing a kind of “digital socialism” in what were once the public spaces of government (Senate office buildings, for example). If the reversion to nomadism most emphatically signposts the dissolution of the social body in Distraction, Sterling's representation of the nomad communities also insists that disaggregation is not the same thing as disorganization. Quite the contrary, as one character notes of the nomads, “organization is the only thing they've got.” We are interested in the ways in which this networked form of belonging both does and does not decode as ethnicity, as well as the ways in which it orients the proles both to structures of authoritarian governance and to the (equally wired) edifice of corporate capital. Along related lines, we ask what kind of resistance to capitalism is imagined in a “digital socialism” where private property and the private sphere are “turned inside out” through rfid (radio frequency identification) tagging and ubiquitous mutual “sousveillance”? To what extent do the disruptive effects of new technologies, as embodied by both the nomad proles and the socialist squatters, represent a genuine political opportunity, and to what extent do they represent a technologically determinist fantasy of capitalist collapse without class struggle, in the spaces of newly mediated social possibility created by permanent crisis?