Beyond Emancipation

Maroon Freedoms in US Literature, 1850–1862

Explores how African American literary representations of maroons in the decade leading up to the Civil War complicate conventional narratives and geographies of slavery and freedom in the United States.

Beyond Emancipation revisits classic works of nineteenth-century American literature, especially by Black writers, to uncover a hidden history of maroons-enslaved people who ran away but remained hidden in the South. Sean Gerrity argues that literary depictions of "small acts" of marronage reveal an expanded sense of what freedom might look like and where and when it might occur. While taking care not to romanticize historical realities, Gerrity vividly shows how works by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany gesture toward possibilities for Black freedom-making beyond legal emancipation, liberalism, and the white abolitionist literary tradition passed down from Harriet Beecher Stowe. While Beyond Emancipation focuses on texts produced during the brief period between the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Civil War, the book's range of reference and implications are broad, unsettling still dominant ideas and engaging pressing questions in literary criticism, history, geography, and Black studies.

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