Black nationalism has featured prominently in twentieth-century African-American social and political thought and refers to a set of ideologies that concern the relationship of people of African descent to the US nation state. This chapter tracks the emergence of modern Black nationalism in the mid-twentieth century and exposes how it is a discourse concerned with redefining both racial and gender identity. Paying particular attention to the work of Black women writers, the essay illustrates how the interface of literature and politics under the aegis of Black nationalism becomes a space for exploring and disrupting gender ideologies. Gender politics provides a foundation for some articulations of Black nationalism through the hierarchical rhetoric of the ‘promise of protection’, in which women ostensibly trade safety for social power and agency. Through an analysis of Alice Walker’s short story collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), the essay illuminates the artistic engagement of nationalist thought and showcases the danger and falseness of the promise of protection, showing both the potential and limits of the influential social logic of nationalism.

Chapter 5 focuses on the changes in the editorial profession that resulted from the rise to prominence of the New Bibliography and shows how the consolidation of editorial authority and the increasingly quasi-scientific method (or mystique) of the New Bibliography worked to exclude women from its editorial ranks. This resulted in a significant decrease of woman-edited editions around the middle of the twentieth century. Continuing previous discussion of male collaborators, it demonstrates that well into the twentieth century, women editors’ successes still relied in part on finding a way into the primarily masculine network of editors via their male colleagues and allies, focusing on the careers of Grace Trenery, Una Ellis-Fermor, Alice Walker, and Evelyn Simpson.

Scholars of both American and U.S. southern history have turned attention to the Indigenous traces often overlooked at the dark heart of place-making. Such revisionism has proved no easy feat in the South, a place where “real” Indians are presumed to be largely extinct after the sweeping Removal land-clearing policies of the 1830s. Nonetheless, Indigenous traces linger – preserved indelibly in the region’s place names, cultural memories, and compensatory fictions. Especially in southern literature, Native hauntings appear to speak for themselves; but they are also uncannily, frighteningly reticent: “vanish’d,” “incomprehensible,” and “inexplicable.” As vital precursors to a traumatic regional history – their expulsion directly facilitating the rise of the South’s plantation economy – this chapter suggests that their centrality can be neither fully recovered nor reckoned with. Indeed, for southerners from a surprising range of backgrounds and moments, the Indian endures as a consistent, formative presence central to the region’s fictions of identity.