Beyond Emancipation: Maroon Freedoms in US Literature, 1850–1862(SUNY series in Multiethnic Literatures)

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: Canadas in the South 1. Swamp Things 2. Beyond Revolt 3. Toward Stillness 4. Emancipation, Interrupted Coda: Maroon Pasts, Maroon Futures Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Sean Gerrity is Associate Professor of English at Hostos Community College, City University of New York.

Review :
"In focusing on marronage in the United States, a relatively ill-known and understudied topic in US historical and literary studies, Beyond Emancipation offers a worthy new angle for the study of nineteenth-century US abolitionist literature. Gerrity shows how differently such staples as Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave, Martin R. Delany's Blake, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred read when analyzed from that specific prism, bringing into relief a range of individual and collective meanings of freedom and action." — Grégory Pierrot, author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture