Barbara McCaskill

Suzanne M. Miller

Suzanne Miale Miller

Does literature serve a humanizing function? Can it achieve social transformation? What roles does literature play for defining self, creating community, and achieving global perspective? This is the first book to thoroughly explore the methods by which educators, creative writers, and policymakers have constructed workable models of teaching literature in multicultural classrooms. The authors provide an interdisciplinary dialogue on the setbacks, solutions, silences, and successes that often occur in classes of multicultural literature. They all take the stance that definitions of literacy and literature originate as much outside the classroom as within it. With the inclusion of essays by writers themselves--a feature provided by no other book on this subject--the authors offer a unique vocalization of the nationalistic, economic, empowering, and moral purposes that reading and writing serve. The book also includes a current guide to selected resources in multicultural literature, in hopes of encouraging and facilitating instructors in the transformation of their own literature courses into multicultural ones.

Making Space for Difference

Multicultural Literature and Literacies

Paul Walker

Sidonia Serafini

Born into slavery in Hampton County, Virginia, orphaned soon thereafter, and raised for almost two years among Native Americans, the charismatic Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford (c. 1860–May 20, 1909) rose from humble and challenging beginnings to emerge as an inventive and passionate activist and educator who championed social justice. During the post- Reconstruction era and early twentieth century, Stanford traversed the United States, Canada, and England advocating for the rights of African Americans, including access to educational opportunities; attainment of the full rights and privileges of citizenship; protections from racial violence, social stereotyping, and a predatory legal system; and recognition of the artistic contributions that have shaped national culture and earned global renown. His imprint on working-class urban residents, Afro-Canadian settlements, and African American communities survives in the institutions he led and the works that presented his imaginative, literate, ardent, and often comic voice. With a reflection by Highgate Baptist Church’s former pastor, Rev. Dr. Paul Walker, this collection highlights Stanford’s writings: sermons, lectures, newspaper columns, entertainments, and memoirs. Editors Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini annotate his life and work throughout the volume, placing him within the context of his peers as a writer and editor. As an American expatriate, Stanford was seminal in redirecting antislavery activism into an international antilynching movement and a global campaign to dismantle slavery and slave trading. This book squarely inserts this influential thinker and activist in the African American literary canon.

The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Transatlantic Reformer and Race Man

The spectacular 1848 escape of William and Ellen Craft (1824-1900; 1826-1891) from slavery in Macon, Georgia, is a dramatic story in the annals of American history. Ellen, who could pass for white, disguised herself as a gentleman slaveholder; William accompanied her as his "master's" devoted slave valet; both traveled openly by train, steamship, and carriage to arrive in free Philadelphia on Christmas Day. In Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery, Barbara McCaskill revisits this dual escape and examines the collaborations and partnerships that characterized the Crafts' activism for the next thirty years: in Boston, where they were on the run again after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law; in England; and in Reconstruction-era Georgia. McCaskill also provides a close reading of the Crafts' only book, their memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, published in 1860. Yet as this study of key moments in the Crafts' public lives argues, the early print archive--newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, legal documents--fills gaps in their story by providing insight into how they navigated the challenges of freedom as reformers and educators, and it discloses the transatlantic British and American audiences' changing reactions to them. By discussing such events as the 1878 court case that placed William's character and reputation on trial, this book also invites readers to reconsider the Crafts' triumphal story as one that is messy, unresolved, and bittersweet. An important episode in African American literature, history, and culture, this will be essential reading for teachers and students of the slave narrative genre and the transatlantic antislavery movement and for researchers investigating early American print culture.

William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory

Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery

Caroline Gebhard

The years between the collapse of Reconstruction and the end of World War I mark a pivotal moment in African American cultural production. Christened the “Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem” era by the novelist Charles Chesnutt, these years look back to the antislavery movement and forward to the artistic flowering and racial self-consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance. Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem offers fresh perspectives on the literary and cultural achievements of African American men and women during this critically neglected, though vitally important, period of our nation's past. Using a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the sixteen scholars gathered here offer both a reappraisal and celebration of African American cultural production during these influential decades. Alongside discussions of political and artistic icons such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and James Weldon Johnson are essays revaluing figures such as the writers Paul and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the New England painter Edward Mitchell Bannister, and Georgia-based activists Lucy Craft Laney and Emmanuel King Love. Contributors explore an array of forms from fine art to anti-lynching drama, from sermons to ragtime and blues, and from dialect pieces and early black musical theater to serious fiction. Contributors include: Frances Smith Foster, Carla L. Peterson, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Audrey Thomas McCluskey, Barbara Ryan, Robert M. Dowling, Barbara A. Baker, Paula Bernat Bennett, Philip J. Kowalski, Nikki L. Brown, Koritha A. Mitchell, Margaret Crumpton Winter, Rhonda Reymond, and Andrew J. Scheiber.

African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919

Post-bellum, Pre-Harlem

The spectacular 1848 escape of William and Ellen Craft (1824 1900; 1826 1891) from slavery in Macon, Georgia, is a dramatic story in the annals of American history. Ellen, who could pass for white, disguised herself as a gentleman slaveholder; William accompanied her as his master s devoted slave valet; both traveled openly by train, steamship, and carriage to arrive in free Philadelphia on Christmas Day. In "Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery," Barbara McCaskill revisits this dual escape and examines the collaborations and partnerships that characterized the Crafts activism for the next thirty years: in Boston, where they were on the run again after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law; in England; and in Reconstruction-era Georgia. McCaskill also provides a close reading of the Crafts only book, their memoir, "Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom," published in 1860. Yet as this study of key moments in the Crafts public lives argues, the early print archive newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, legal documents fills gaps in their story by providing insight into how they navigated the challenges of freedom as reformers and educators, and it discloses the transatlantic British and American audiences changing reactions to them. By discussing such events as the 1878 court case that placed William s character and reputation on trial, this book also invites readers to reconsider the Crafts triumphal story as one that is messy, unresolved, and bittersweet. An important episode in African American literature, history, and culture, this will be essential reading for teachers and students of the slave narrative genre and the transatlantic antislavery movement and for researchers investigating early American print culture."

Barbara McCaskill

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