Between the Lines: Literary Transnationalism and African American Poetics

Between the Lines examines the role of three women poets of African descent--Frances Harper, Cristina Ayala, and Auta de Souza--in shaping the literary history of the Americas. Despite their different geographic locations, each shared common concerns and wrestled in their works with the sociopolitical predicaments of the late nineteenth century. Their verse vigorously examined slavery and confronted the existential struggle against boundaries imposed by race, nation, and gender. The writers each conceived of the poem as a dynamic forum where new concepts of individual and collective freedoms could be imagined. In their work readers encounter the poem as a site of cross-cultural exchange, a literary space in which the boundaries of nation can be redefined. Between the Lines places national poetics in a global economy of identities, histories and languages. It looks to poetry to demonstrate how people translate from one cultural or linguistic arena to another, how literary expression writes identities, and how language is used to conceptualize history. The book is the first to juxtapose Cuba, Brazil and the United States in a study of nineteenth-century women's poetry, and the first to include the Lusophone literary tradition in a comparative study of African descendants in Latin America, the U.S., and the Caribbean. With close readings and expertly rendered translations, Monique-Adelle Callahan situates the work of these three poets in a hemispheric context that opens up their writing to new interpretations and expands the definition of "African American" literature.

About the Author :
Monique-Adelle Callahan is an independent scholar.

Review :
"This is a serious and innovative project. By putting poems in conversation with one another, Callahan stages an encounter of poets who, despite their differences, grapple with a similar set of concerns regarding slavery and freedom, race and gender, and the literary forms and language that would permit an ethical relationship to the legacy of slavery. Between the Lines will make a significant contribution to the field." --Zita Nunes, author of Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas "Monique-Adelle Callahan makes a compelling argument for a comparative reading of the poetry of African diaspora descendants in the American hemisphere, allowing for the revision of the nineteenth-century canon according to transatlantic conceptions of slavery and freedom." --Flora Mar�a Gonz�lez Mandri, author of Guarding Cultural Memory: Afro-Cuban Women in Literature and the Arts