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The Black Romantic Revolution:Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery
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The prophetic poetry of slavery and its abolition
During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers - enslaved and free - allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility.
These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism - lyric poetry, prophetic visions - to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and U.S. imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery’s sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe’s stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics’ cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.
Reviews
Written with deep and layered seriousness, and a healthy willingness to provoke and play, this impressive study reads Black poetry as profoundly political and as exceeding politics. Subtly theorized, especially via Black feminist theory, and attentive to changing imperatives of political coalition building, it nevertheless keeps the poets and the poetry front and center. The old surrealist insistence that poetry can be an emancipatory and creative activity emerges here not as an injunction but as one central aspect of lived history.
The Black Romantic Revolution is well written, characterized by smoothly flowing prose that offers both clarity and nuance. Matt Sandler's meticulous attention to literary form and to cultural context produces a study full of surprises supported by concrete evidence. Above all, The Black Romantic Revolution takes its insights from the authors it examines. Quite deliberately, Sandler refuses to look at nineteenth-century African American poets through the lens of European Romanticism, allowing its ideals to ground arguments about Black writers' validity. Instead, he studies their choices so faithfully that he shows readers how early Black poets developed a Romanticism of their own. Sandler's readers will come to appreciate authors like Frances E. W. Harper and George Moses Horton - as well as the turbulent decades and complex cultural landscape to which they contributed - in truly unexpected ways.
With uncommon verve, Matt Sandler correlates Romantic poetic idioms from the natural world regarding whirlwinds and the coming storm to those about revolution and the impending crisis from the political world. The Black Romantic Revolution has as a latent question what happens to our understanding of the long nineteenth-century when re-read through the optics of African American literary studies, historical poetics, and Romanticism. Sandler not only illustrates how African American poets extended the temporal and thematic scope of Romanticism but also how black American poets came to fulfill its political yearnings and aesthetic apotheosis. In so doing, Sandler offers a trenchant critique of, and necessary corrective to, the disciplinary formations that have heretofore failed to put into clearer view the shared horizons between "African American" and "Romanticism."
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Sandler has assembled a book featuring Black voices from pre-emancipation America. These poets were both free and enslaved and the book centers on their advocacy on emancipation, and their vision about what post-slavery America might be, prophesies that are still felt today.
, Broooklyn Based -
There’s no doubt that The Black Romantic Revolution will serve as a valuable guide and resource for scholars who study nineteenth-century African American literature. Moreover, literary scholars interested in Transatlantic studies have much to gain by following Sandler connect the dots from Eurocentric Romanticism to Black American Romanticism.
, Cultural Front -
Thunderous, accessible ... Sandler challenges established ideas about the poets' relationship to Romanticism, but never gets bogged down in academic turf battles. Instead, he highlights the work, the poets and their political and cultural worlds, guiding readers through history, biography, theory and engaging close readings of the poems themselves.
, Shelf Awareness (Starred Review) -
The Black Romantic Revolution brings a somewhat unknown element of US literature further into the public consciousness. Sandler’s prose illuminates some of the genre’s important texts, placing the works and their creators in the political and literary moment they were composed. Simultaneously, he provides the reader with an understanding of the meaning these poets and their works hold for today, when the ongoing struggle for a genuine and lasting Black liberation from a legacy of US white supremacy remains disturbingly elusive.
, CounterPunch -
The Black Romantic Revolution is an example of generative scholarship that properly meets the weight of our moment...As Sandler uncovers the neglected artistic and political projects of 19th-century African American poets, he both builds the Western canon and Blackens it...In our moment, this Black work matters.
, Los Angeles Review of Books -
The Black Romantic Revolution does not simply expose the lies about freedom and abolition we have inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries; rather, [it turns] to the past to call forth lyrical alternatives to long-standing narratives about enlightenment and revolution.
, Public Books -
A glimpse into the ways that Black literary production has capaciously engaged itself beyond the rigid boundaries of genres and intended audiences.
Studies in Romanticism