Through readings of slave narratives, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, newspaper editorials, and government documents that include texts by Frederick Douglass and freed West Indian slave Mary Prince, Ifeoma Nwankwo explicates the growing interrelatedness of people of African descent through the Americas in the nineteenth century.

Black Cosmopolitanism
Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas

Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo

2005 | 304 pages | Cloth $65.00
Literature | African-American/African Studies | Cultural Studies

Table of Contents

PT. 1. THE MAKING OF A RACE (MAN)
1. The view from above: Placido through the eyes of the Cuban colonial government and white abolitionists
2. The view from next door: Placido through black abolitionists' eyes

PT. 2. BOTH (RACE) AND (NATION)?
3. On being black and Cuban: race, nation, and romanticism in the poetry of Placido
4. "We intend to stay here": the international shadows in Frederick Douglass's representations of African American community
5. "More a Haitian than an American": Frederick Douglass and the black world beyond the United States

PT. 3. NEGATING NATION, REJECTING RACE
6. A slave's cosmopolitanism: Mary Prince, a West Indian slave, and the geography of identity
7. Disidentification as identity: Juan Francisco Manzano and the flight from blackness