In the whalebone leg worn by Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Melville invents one of the most famous prostheses in the history of the novel. What imaginative labour, that novel asks, is required to force inanimate matter to take on the attributes of life? How do we convert the heavy stuff of which we are made – of which a hostile and inhuman world is made – into the living expression of mind?

This essay explores Melville’s response to this question, particularly as it unfolds in his novella Benito Cereno. The prosthetic logic that is at work in Moby Dick reaches a certain intensity in this short work – where it becomes entangled with the question of racial difference, the question that is at the heart too of the discussion, in Moby Dick, of the ‘whiteness of the whale’. In Benito Cereno, the relation between the white master Cereno and the black manservant Babo is conceived as a prosthetic one. Babo is described as acting as ‘a sort of crutch’ to Cereno, a black extension of white power. The narrator’s capacity to read the power dynamic between Cereno and Babo, between master and servant, depends on the terms in which he conceives of this crutch. If Melville’s novella might be read as a critique and a performance of the process by which a form of black power expresses itself, outside of the terms of what Toni Morrison calls the ‘ideology of whiteness’, then that reading requires us to understand how the capacity for revolutionary self-expression is woven, in Melville’s fiction, into the prosthetic extensions in which it materialises itself.

This essay explores how the Cold War conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union led to a tremendous reorganization of how Americans thought about identity, especially queer identity. The author discusses the activism of homosexual organizers who worked against state repression and then traces the shifting ways Cold War-era novels, plays, and poetry take up the subject of queerness and re-imagine the social possibilities for the homosexual citizen. The work of Tennessee Williams, Patricia Highsmith, and James Baldwin portrays same-sex desire as a social problem and records an overwhelming anxiety about the characters who are aligned with such desires. Later texts by writers such as Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga situate same-sex desire as a means of radical critique and as a site of connection. They make legible the active repression of gender and sexual nonconformity. This essay illustrates how ideas of queer freedom arise and transform in the shadow of repression.

The most familiar way of conjoining religion and queerness in America is proscriptive. This is so despite the vivid presence of non-normative sexualities in the sacred stories of nearly all religions and the formative labors of queer-identified persons in their ranks. In invocations of American religion the default religion is likely to be Christian; the default Christianity, Protestant; the primary office of religion, morality; and the morality in question, sexual morality. In this way, the very category of religion in America is shaped by the pathologizing of non-normative sexualities. If to embrace queer lives is to depart from faithful Christian witness, then all departures from right religion bear the taint of suspect desire. But exile is not the only place of queerness in American religious lives, as literary history amply confirms. By what paths did early American texts come to identify religion as heteronormative? And how has a more generative religious imagination of queerness come to shape American literature? This chapter tracks these questions by moving between Puritan invocations of queerness as civic and spiritual threat and later rejoinders in American letters.

The conclusion proposes alternative ways to think about Christian normativity, drawing on the concepts of polydoxy and religious autonomy from Alvin Reines, with additional support from Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, and the concept of theological disobedience, derived from Louis Michael Seidman’s notion of constitutional disobedience.

This book concludes in 1952, the year that the Miracle decision (Joseph Burstyn Inc. v. Wilson) established motion pictures as protected speech, to suggest one way to mark a common endpoint to the eras of the studio system and American modernism. That year, several books were either completed or published that serve as early instances of genres or attitudes that would come to the fore in postwar American fiction. This conclusion briefly addresses three such works: Lillian Ross’s Picture, James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, and Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe. These books suggest a transformation of writers’ attitudes toward Hollywood, one that coincides with the identification of artistic strategies – the nonfiction novel; the conception of moviegoing as an experience worthy of artistic rendering; the campus novel – that would become increasingly prevalent in subsequent decades. The conclusion ends by giving Hollywood movies the chance to speak for themselves, attending to two MGM films of 1952: Singin’ in the Rain and, more intently, The Bad and the Beautiful. I read the latter as MGM’s version of a literary history of the studio system.

Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter traces some of the aesthetic choices that Black writers have made in order to demonstrate the essay’s capacious formal dimensions for imagining and practicing freedom. Rather than think of freedom as a destination, African American essayists have revised and restructured the form in ways that allow them to document how freedom is practiced continually. In the essays of writers as varied as Anna Julia Cooper, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and Ross Gay, reflections on joy, justice, life as art, and self-care unfold freely. From defiance to mournfulness, from exuberance to acrimony, this chapter explores the various moods and modes of Black essayistic writing, identifying certain tendencies that belong to the genealogy of Black writing in the United States.

Since the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, James Baldwin’s life and work have undergone a renaissance in and outside of the academy. His penultimate novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, which recounts the story of a young African American man who is falsely imprisoned, resonates not only with the Black Lives Matter movement but with the history of mass incarceration. As scholars such as Elizabeth Hinton have demonstrated, draconian prison sentences and police surveillance were inextricably linked to the Civil Rights Movement. If Beale Street Could Talk can be read as a novel that responds directly to the oppressive shifts in policing measures during the 1960s. In fact, as scholars such as D. Quentin Miller have argued, much of Baldwin’s work is preoccupied with what the writer called “the criminal power” of white authority. Examining one of Baldwin’s least studied novels through the lens of carceral studies sheds light on his development as a writer at a point in his career when critics were dismissing him as out of touch with the harsh realities of American political life.

For many scholars of the African diaspora, the genre of travel writing represents a worldview largely informed by Western conquest and colonization. American writer James Baldwin’s encounters with West Africans and North Africans – described in essays he wrote between 1950 and 1972 – questions a longstanding presumption: that African American expatriate writers transcended the limits of travel-writing in order to stand in opposition to colonialist concepts of modernity. This chapter argues that Baldwin’s travel essays implicate dislocated subjects in complex networks of power, at times reasserting Europe’s colonial and racial logics and at times challenging them.

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., is the armature supporting James Baldwin’s 1972 book, No Name in the Street. Just a few pages into the book, Baldwin observes: “Since Martin’s death, something has altered in me, something has gone away.” A spate of assassinations, and particularly King’s, prompts a profound crisis in Baldwin, forcing him to reexamine the ultimate power of love that had governed his life and work. Indeed, a decade earlier in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin had identified love as the key existential and political instrument to guide America out of its “racial nightmare,” in the same way that King had drawn on the Christian notion of agape love to imagine and enact nonviolent direct action to transform Jim Crow America. For Baldwin, King’s murder begins to actualize the apocalypse against which he had forewarned in the early 1960s, and moreover forces him to reckon with his own worldview of human life: “Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make.” At the end of the 1960s, gone is the tempered optimism of Fire, the hope of achieving America, and instead we find in No Name a markedly new form of disenchantment that even love couldn’t temper. This essay traces how Baldwin’s perspective on love, loss, and life is altered by a decade rife with transformation and devastation, illuminating not only a pivotal period of Baldwin’s life and writing, but also of American life and letters.

This chapter details how the essay form participated in changes in conduct, tact, and ways of living in nineteenth-century England, promoting an “ethics of unknowing” that was constantly subject to experimentation and revision. Particular attention is paid to essayists such as William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, who continued the Montaignean tradition in ways that responded to the urbanized modernity of the capitalist metropolis.

The concluding two chapters take up cultural responses to the ongoing violence perpetuated by mass incarceration and the global cycles of warfare and terror. Dennis R. Childs examines narratives of immobility based on police and state violence, imprisonment, and detention and deportation at national borders. He argues that “anti-carceral hip-hop” is the “aesthetic practice [that] represents the quintessential storytelling method for those most commonly targeted for police killing and imprisonment.” Reading hip-hop narratives within a “long twenty-first century” of radical literary, political, and musical practices since the 1970s, he links recent works by Dead Prez, Reyna Grande, Ann Jaramillo, Kendrick Lamar, Monifa Love, Main Source, Invincible, and Askari X to those of James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Public Enemy, Chester Himes, George Jackson, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Assata Shakur, and Malcolm X.

In a number of works, ranging from “The White Negro” to An American Dream to Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer controversially confronts the issue of race. As this chapter explains, he does so in ways that reflect the racist limitations of perspective arising from Mailer’s own position of privilege, and which also capture significant elements of the racial climate of the time.

Norman’s chapter excavates a missing element in studies of the civil rights autobiography tradition: narratives by children who did not tell their own story, but who nevertheless were central to the movement and in many cases helped shape it. These include Melba Patillo Beals, one of the Littlerock Nine and author of Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High. Norman argues that, adorned with diverse artifacts of Black print culture, Beals’s autobiography invites the reader into a journey of becoming a face of everyday Black heroism amid pervasive and fierce white commitments to segregation. Just as important as Beals’s life narrative are those of everyday living during a period of massive social change, including Rosemary Bray’s Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir, which details a childhood shaped by poverty, Catholicism, the welfare state, and a freedom movement providing new language, models, and hopes for a nation’s citizens. Norman’s chapter ultimately traces African American autobiography by children of the movement from Amira Baraka’s daughter Lisa to Paul Coates’s son Ta-Nehisi.

The epilogue indicates continuities and changes in American historical thought, highlighting the persistence of the ways in which politics inform historical awareness, and also showing that Americans continue to read the Constitution and the Bible in spite of – or in light of – historical awareness. While drawing attention to these continuities, the epilogue emphasizes differences in thought as well, particularly the fact that Americans today are more likely than their antebellum predecessors to engage in or to be confronted by conversations revolving around ahistorical and historical thinking. Twenty-first-century historical consciousness can be seen in aspirationalist readings of the Constitution and approaches to the Bible that deliberately account for historical distance. In attending to both continuities and changes, the epilogue underscores Americans’ continued efforts to bridge the meaning of founding documents to our new times, while also emphasizing the limitations of these approaches. A focus on the founders has allowed white Americans to avoid fully confronting the facts of slavery and racial prejudice in our past and, as a result, in our present.

In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty criticizes what he calls the cultural Left for its “Gothic” account of American history, an account that is haunted by specters of power and hypocrisy and that condemns the United States for atrocities for which no future acts can atone. He contrasts this account to the pride the older reformist Left had in the United States and its commitment to fulfilling its still-unachieved ideals of freedom and equality. This paper argues that in relation to a morally burdened past Americans need to learn to practice a form of cognitive dissonance, learning to elide neither its failures nor its possibilities and progress.

Focusing on the major writings of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, this chapter argues that the interpretative horizon of their works is inextricable from the emergence of modern conservatism as a cultural and electoral force. Whereas movement conservatives in the 1950s tended to stress tradition-based hierarchies and organic social order over abstract theories of individual liberty, conservatives began to shift their emphasis in the mid-sixties toward the language of unadulterated patriotism, property rights, and colorblind individualism. In this next stage of their movement, conservatives embraced an ideologically rigid fusion of laissez-faire capitalism and cultural populism that would redirect perceptions of literary value and prestige within American conservatism toward certain conservative strands of New Journalism and, in later years, toward the one-dimensionality of mass-market genre fiction. Finally, conservatives emphasized the “liberal cultural elite” trope with renewed vigor, constructing a monolithic stereotype of white liberal intellectuals whose racial guilt fueled their appetite for difficult, morally complex literature, a form of moral masochism that conveniently helped those same white liberals accrue “hip” cultural capital.

In After the End, John Berger notes that “since the Second World War, a variety of ‘unspeakables’ have seldom been silent, although their utterances have often been disguised or symptomatic.” Berger refers to the traumatizing catastrophes of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, while Morris Dickstein in Gates of Eden adds “the cold war…, the draft, and Vietnam” to the list of crises that signaled end times. This chapter discusses destruction and regeneration as envisioned in literary and popular writing across the political spectrum in the post-World War II decades: during the era of Cold War consensus, Nobel Laureate William Faulkner enjoyed his literary brethren to “forget” the bomb, and leading white male authors indeed wrote narratives of “personal apocalypse” that bracketed world concerns. African American canonical writers of the period were rarely so sanguine; their anti-apocalyptic writings directly targeted the nuclear threat as intensifying racial oppression at home and/or as urgently pointing white America toward national and international brotherhood.By the late 1960s, as fears of the bomb subsided, establishment writers wrote in the apocalyptic shadow of Charles Manson and the generation of frustrated, radicalized youth thought to follow in his wake.