Race, Romance and Rebellion

As in many literatures of the New World grappling with issues of slavery and freedom, stories of racial insurrection frequently coincided with stories of cross-racial romance in nineteenth-century U.S. print culture. Colleen OBrien explores how authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Livermore, and Gertrudis Gmez de Avellaneda imagined the expansion of race and gender-based rights as a hemispheric affair, drawing together the United States with Africa, Cuba, and other parts of the Caribbean. Placing less familiar women writers in conversation with their more famous contemporariesRalph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Maria ChildOBrien traces the transnational progress of freedom through the antebellum cultural fascination with cross-racial relationships and insurrections. Her book mines a variety of sourcesfiction, political rhetoric, popular journalism, race science, and biblical treatisesto reveal a common concern: a future in which romance and rebellion engender radical social and political transformation.