Going Underground

Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Lara Langer Cohen (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

288 Seiten

2023
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-1684-7 (ISBN)

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Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of the underground in nineteenth-century US literature, showing how these formations of the underground can inspire new forms of political resistance.

First popularized by newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s, the underground serves as a metaphor for subversive activity that remains central to our political vocabulary. In Going Underground, Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of this now familiar idea while seeking out versions of the underground that were left behind along the way. Outlining how the underground’s figurative sense first took shape through the associations of literal subterranean spaces with racialized Blackness, she examines a vibrant world of nineteenth-century US subterranean literature that includes Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. Cohen finds that the undergrounds in this literature offer sites of political possibility that exceed the familiar framework of resistance, suggesting that nineteenth-century undergrounds can inspire new modes of world-making and world-breaking for a time when this world feels increasingly untenable.

Lara Langer Cohen is Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College, author of The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture, and coeditor of Early African American Print Culture.

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: A Basement Shut Off and Forgotten during the Nineteenth Century 1
1. The “Blackness of Darkness” in Mammoth Cave 25
2. Early Black Radical Undergrounds 46
3. The Underground Railroad’s Undergrounds 74
4. The Depths of Astonishment: City Mysteries and Subterranean Unknowability 104
5. “To Drop beneath the Floors of the Outer World”: Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Undergrounds 133
6. Subterranean Fire: Anarchist Visions of the Underground 166
Epilogue: Staying Underground 198
Notes 205
Bibliography 245
Index 267

Erscheinungsdatum	20.01.2023
Zusatzinfo	8 illustrations
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	544 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-4780-1684-1 / 1478016841
ISBN-13	978-1-4780-1684-7 / 9781478016847
Zustand	Neuware