Dear Colleagues:

I’m happy to announce the publication of Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century.

Part literary criticism and part cultural history, Activist Sentiments examines nineteenth-century social and political literacies and reading practices. Pier Gabrielle Foreman reveals how Black women’s complex and confrontational commentary–often expressed directly in their journalistic prose and organizational involvement–emerges in their sentimental, and simultaneously political, literary production.

“Activist Sentiments reevaluates with a savvy, critical eye the nexus of sex, sentiment, and reform that distinguishes classic nineteenth-century African American women’s narratives. Always informative, consistently revealing, and invitingly written, Foreman’s book belongs in the company of the major studies in this field by Frances Smith Foster, Hazel Carby, Claudia Tate, and Carla L. Peterson.”–William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, University of North Carolina, and coeditor of The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins.

“With key readings and startling acuity, Foreman’s work will be very useful not only to literary scholars but also to historians of the black woman’s era.”–Rafia Zafar, author of We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870

“In this stimulating and impressive work, Foreman provides astute readings of previously ignored work. This text makes a significant contribution to several areas of scholarship including American literature, history, women’s studies, and black studies.”–Jennifer DeVere Brody, author of Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture
Pier Gabrielle Foreman
Visiting Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies
Bowdoin College, 2008-2009; Fall 2009
Professor of English and American Studies
Occidental College, Los Angeles
Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Politics of Sex and Representation in Harriet

Jacobss Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Confession and Commodities, Silence and Sale

Sexual Truth, Testimony, and Tyranny

Flint, Sands, and Willis: South to North, Daddies to Dandies

Aunt Marthas Mask

Chapter 2 Naming Our Nigs Multivalent Mothers

Extended Family: Auntiess Place and Property

Ma Nig and Maternal Abandonment

Multivalent Mulattas and Legal Racing

(Un)Trustworthy Narrators and Multiple Starts

Chapter 3 Reading White Slavery, Sexuality and Embedded

History in France E.W. Harpers Iola Leroy

Cultural Literacy, Legible Transcripts and Reading Aright in the 1890s

Forced Prostitution, Rape and White Slaverys Double Meanings

Ida B. Wells, Frances Harper and the Two Iolas.

Embedded Genealogies: Martin Delany, Lucy A. Delaney and Iolas Lucille Delany

Petitioning Science, or Martin Delany and Dr. Frank, George and Lewis Latimer

Chapter 4 Reading/Photographs: Emma Dunham KelleyHawkinss’ Four  Girls at Cottage City, Victoria Earle Matthews and the Womans Era

Reading/Photographs

Acquire the Habit of Reading: Womens Clubs and Literary Critique

The Womans Era’s Photographic Bylines

Victoria Earle and Vera Earle

Optic History

Chapter 5 Home Protection, Literary Aggression and Religious Defense

in the Life and Writings of Amelia E. Johnson

Public Standing and Civic Action: The Life and Legacy of Amelia E. Johnson

Women, the Law and Baltimores Brotherhood of Liberty

Racial Inequalities or, Snatching the Whip and Switching the Script

Temperance and Bad Parental Temperaments

Coda On Burials and Exhumations