2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Why would someone choose bondage over individual freedom? What type of freedom can be found in choosing conditions of enslavement? In Something Akin to Freedom, winner of the 2008 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in African American Studies, Stephanie Li explores literary texts where African American women decide to remain in or enter into conditions of bondage, sacrificing individual autonomy to achieve other goals. In fresh readings of stories by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Gayl Jones, Louisa Picquet, and Toni Morrison, Li argues that amid shifting positions of power and through acts of creative agency, the women in these narratives make seemingly anti-intuitive choices that are simultaneously limiting and liberating. She explores how the appeal of the freedom of the North is constrained by the potential for isolation and destabilization for women rooted in strong social networks in the South. By introducing reproduction, mother-child relationships, and community into discourses concerning resistance, Li expands our understanding of individual liberation to include the courage to express personal desire and the freedom to love.

Possibly the first novel written by a black woman slave, this work is both a historically important literary event and a gripping autobiographical story in its own right. When her master is betrothed to a woman who conceals a tragic secret, Hannah Crafts, a young slave on a wealthy North Carolina plantation, runs away in a bid for her freedom up North. Pursued by slave hunters, imprisoned by a mysterious and cruel captor, held by sympathetic strangers, and forced to serve a demanding new mistress, she finally makes her way to freedom in New Jersey. Her compelling story provides a fascinating view of American life in the mid-1800s and the literary conventions of the time. Written in the 1850's by a runaway slave, THE BONDSWOMAN'S NARRATIVE is a provocative literary landmark and a significant historical event that will captivate a diverse audience.

ABSTRACT: This thesis examines both historical and fictional representations of interracial relationships in the 18th century. My argument in this project is two-fold. First, I argue that some black women used sexual relationships with white men to gain advantages for themselves and their fellow slaves. Second, I argue that novelists of the time period re-wrote history in an attempt to erase the positive aspects of miscegenation.

In Firing Back, six-term Congressman Todd Akin describes in eye-opening detail what it is like to be an unapologetic conservative in a town dominated by media bullies, back-room bosses, and liberals of either party. Although he tried to be a loyal Republican, Akin's first allegiance was always to the Constitution and his conservative principles. When the Bush administration lobbied him to approve its progressive legislative initiatives, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, Akin refused. In the process, he made some serious enemies. Those enemies got their revenge after Akin made an awkward comment about rape. Although he had just won a hard-fought Republican primary in Missouri for US Senate, party bosses tried to coerce him to yield the nomination to their preferred candidate. When Akin refused, the bosses turned their back on him and let Democrat Claire McCaskill win. In Firing Back, Akin tells the story of how the Republican leadership not only threw him under the bus but also ran over him a few times for good measure. Not one of them explained what it was about Akin's remarks that so deeply offended them. Akin names names and takes numbers in Firing Back, but this book is much more than a tell-all. It is a battle-tested guide to Republicans and conservatives to help them find their courage, reclaim their integrity, and, by doing so, help preserve America's faith and freedom.

Regulating Sex is an anthology that presents debates over the role of the state in constructing and controlling erotic practice, intimacy, and identity. The purpose of this edited volume is to address sexual dilemmas in law and the state in substantive areas such as same-sex domestic partnerships, sexual economies, and childhood sexuality via a series of spirited dialogues between socio-legal scholars from diverse disciplinary, national, and political perspectives.

"Why," asks Nick Bromell, "should the political thought of white Americans remain the only theory to which Americans of all ethnicities turn when constructing and reconstructing their understanding of democracy? Must Americans remain locked in an apartheid of experience and perception even after whites have become a minority population in this nation? Hasn't the 2012 presidential election made clear that the time has come to build not just on the votes of citizens of color, but on the varieties of democratic thought their experience has engendered?" In his answers to these questions, Bromell brings to light an underappreciated stream of democratic reflection by black writers and activists from David Walker to Malcolm X. Bromell argues that these thinkers urge Americans to fundamentally re-imagine the nature of their democracy and recognize that indignation can be a powerful and productive democratic emotion; that dignity is just as important to democracy as equality and liberty; that national citizenship can be infused with a sense of responsibility to the world; and that faith can actually promote rather than threaten democratic pluralism. A literary critic and intellectual historian, Bromell draws on a wide range of fiction, essays, speeches, and oral histories, deftly synthesizing recent work in U.S. history, literary and cultural studies, and political theory. Like the figures he discusses, he puts this thought to work in the present moment, this "now." Black democratic insights, he shows, are strikingly relevant to the challenges facing US democracy today, and they provide the basis for a new, post-liberal public philosophy with which to turn back the rise of radical conservatism. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley writes: "In this work of enormous breadth, depth, and imagination, Nick Bromell makes what may be the most original contribution to political theory in the past decade. In this age of alleged color blindness, Bromell has the vision and the chutzpah to turn to African American thought-ideas born of struggle, anchored in questions of dignity, human relationships, and faith-in order to revitalize American democracy. "

Recent scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition. Camp discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties ("frolics") become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.

After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding its first appearance in the 1960s, Neo-Slave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent cultural debates that arose during the sixties."--BOOK JACKET.

A groundbreaking collective biography narrating the history of emancipation through the life stories of women of African descent in the Americas.