Black cosmopolitanism
Subtitle: racial consciousness and transnational identity in the nineteenth-century Americas
By: Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo.
Series: Rethinking the Americas
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 291
Subjects: African Americans -- Race identity.; Blacks -- Race identity -- West Indies.; Cosmopolitanism.; Transnationalism.; African Americans -- Intellectual life.; Blacks -- West Indies -- Intellectual life.; American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism.; West Indian literature -- History and criticism.; Ethnicity in literature.; Race awareness in literature.
Description: "The Haitian Revolution of 1804 was significant because it not only brought into being the first Black republic in the Americas but also encouraged new visions of the interrelatedness of peoples of the African Diaspora. Black Cosmopolitanism looks to the aftermath of this historical moment to examine the disparities and similarities between the approaches to identity articulated by people of African descent in the United States, Cuba, and the British West Indies during the nineteenth century."

"Through readings of slave narratives, fiction, poetry, newspaper editorials, and government documents that include texts by Frederick Douglass, the freed West Indian slave Mary Prince, and the Cuban poets Placido and Juan Francisco Manzano, Nwankwo explicates this growing self-consciousness about publicly engaging other people of African descent. Ultimately, she contends, they configured their identities specifically to counter not only the Atlantic power structure's negation of their potential for transnational identity but also its simultaneous denial of their humanity and worthiness for national citizenship."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [257]-275) and index.