This essay revisits Emerson’s iconic transparent eyeball passage to rethink it as a moment of crossing over into queer embodiment and sensory expansion. If “trans” is “to move across” and “scandre” to climb, the point is not to rise above the physical world, but to move into it in such a way as to be in touch with its divine energies. To do so was to climb out of the enclosure and isolation of subjectivity and inhabit something much more capacious. Expanding the scope of Transcendentalism proper, the essay tracks this queer “I” into a number of other texts in which a similar experience or phenomenon of ecstasy opens onto novel social, sexual, and gender understandings. Margaret Fuller, Margaret Sweat, women trance writers, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Jacobs animate the “trans-” in Transcendentalism in their critical crossings and dynamic reassemblages of body and soul, self and other, and sex, gender, and race.

In the settler-enslaving context of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, where multiple discourse communities (politics, science, Christianity, and abolitionism) worked in tandem to signify Blackness as a distinct biological entity, Black writers crafted an alternative symbolic order that understood racialized Blackness as a socially constructed embodied experience. This chapter argues that, for thinkers like Phillis Wheatley Peters, Adam Carman, Maria Stewart, Rev. J. W. Loguen, and Harriet Jacobs, the Black body is a site of overdetermined experiences that – when studied – reveal the machinations of anti-Black sociopolitical processes. By focalizing three areas of critical interrogation – moral inversion, natural rights, and sentimentality – I show how these thinkers interrogated the West’s foundational mythologies of nation and selfhood.

This essay explores how writers of the slave narrative, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, use food to communicate the horrors of slavery, relay sensory experiences, and highlight acts of resistance. The essay further argues that Douglass and Jacobs use food imagery and metaphor creatively and in doing so, establish their own literary prowess. Following the developing field of literary food studies, this essay first makes a case for the importance of examining food within genre more broadly, and likewise argues for the literariness of the slave genre, as well as its firm position within the American literary canon. Finally, this essay briefly links Douglass and Jacobs to contemporary African American memoir by tracing how food continues to appear as a vehicle through which writers discuss white supremacy, economic and physical exploitation, and black empowerment within American society.

This chapter interrogates the multiple and nuanced ways in which Harriet Jacobs engaged with developing communications technologies and policies ostensibly designed to connect different sections of the nation to one another. Reading Jacobs’s experiences in the 1830s in relation to an ongoing communications revolution in the United States, this chapter shows how Jacobs ingeniously manipulates formal and informal networks in order to secure freedom for herself and her family.

This chapter considers Bahktin’s theories of the novel not only as heteroglossic but as defining this as a genre of overhearing or snooping about private life in a public form. It contributes to an emergent body of scholarship on the sonic in African American literature that newly attends to the ways in which other literary texts not merely were models in a by-now thoroughly debunked dismissal of Black aesthetics as imitative but were inscribed as “overhead.” Both the early African American novel and slave narratives politicized this defining generic characteristic, exposing the “compromised privacy and surveilled speech” endemic to slavery as preconditions of “insurgent listening.” Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl, Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative are read through an attention to the sonic and overhearing that reveals the novel as both a contested genre and a way of “representing contested space and power.” Overhearing stages a dialectical politics of withholding and risky disclosure, the policing and violations the aural made possible, and the emergence of the early African American novel from this nexus of “a space of ‘conflicted listening.’”

The dream as a rhetorical trope has a long history in African American literature and public discourse. Dreams and visions appear in a number of pre-1830 narratives and are characterized by the narrator’s interactions with the incredible, the divine, or the phantasmagorical. Because dreams are idiosyncratic and unreal, describing those dreams allows narrators to communicate important ideas or goals that might be heterodox or forbidden. Moreover, since it is both personal and imaginary, the dream is entirely unverifiable. This combination of imagination and narration is one reason early African American autobiographers made use of the dream vision as a rhetorical trope: the dream preserves a fictional space within a fact-based narrative. Within these fictional spaces, narrators could offer up visions of justice, morality, and faithfulness that deviated from white, European, and/or Christian norms. They could produce versions of self that were more capable, more powerful, or more insightful than the men who controlled the dominant institutions in the colonies and early United States. Ultimately, narrators could use dreams to make claims on their readers and – at the same time – to authorize their own actions in a world of prohibitions.