The empire abroad and the empire at home : African American literature and the era of overseas expansion / John Cullen Gruesser.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gruesser, John Cullen, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

Imperialism in literature.

Literature and globalization.

African Americans--Intellectual life.

African Americans.

Physical Description:

viii, 159 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, [2012]

Summary:

In The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home, John Cullen Gruesser establishes that African American writers at the turn of the twentieth century responded extensively and idiosyncratically to overseas expansion and its implications for domestic race relations. He contends that the work of these writers significantly informs not only African American literary studies but also U.S. political history.

Focusing on authors who explicitly connect the empire abroad and the empire at home (James Weldon Johnson, Sutton Griggs, Pauline E. Hopkins, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others), Gruesser examines U.S. black participation in, support for, and resistance to expansion. Race consistently trumped empire for African American writers, who adopted positions based on the effects they believed expansion would have on blacks at home during a period in which their citizenship rights, and frequently their very existence, were in jeopardy. Given the complexity of the debates over empire and the rapidity with which events in the Caribbean and die Pacific changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it should come as no surprise that these authors often did not maintain fixed positions on imperialism. Their stances depended on several factors, including die foreign location, the presence or absence of African American soldiers within a particular text, the stage of the author's career, and a given text's relationship to specific generic and literary traditions.

Professor of English at Kean University, John Cullen Gruesser is the author or editor of eight books, including Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic (Georgia) and Loopholes and Retreats: African American Writers and the Nineteenth Century. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part 1 African American Literature and the Spanish-Cuban-American War

Chapter 1 Cuban Generals, Black Sergeants, and White Colonels: The African American Poetic Response to the Spanish-Cuban-American War 19

Chapter 2 Wars Abroad and at Home in Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio and The Hindered Hand 39

Part 2 African American Literature, the Philippine-American War, and Expansion in the Pacific

Chapter 3 Black Burdens, Laguna Tales, and "Citizen Tom" Narratives: African American Writing and the Philippine-American War 63

Chapter 4 Annexation in the Pacific and Asian Conspiracy in Central America in James Weldon Johnson s Unproduced Operettas 96.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780820334349

0820334340

9780820344065

0820344060

OCLC:

792884043