LITERATURE OF LIBERATION BEFORE 1900

“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” wrote the abolitionist writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper a few years after the Civil War. This course explores the creative productions, critiques, and political projects of colonized people themselves, specifically focusing on writers in the indigenous, African American, and global anti-imperialist traditions. How did these heterogeneous communities differently diagnose the context of colonialism? What positive horizons of freedom, equality, and democracy did they aspire towards? What do their works tell us about gender, land, and labor? We explore themes of sovereignty against settler colonialism in the work of indigenous writers like Kandiaronk, William Apess, E. Pauline Johnson, Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala Sa, and Liliuokalani, Queen of Hawaii. Next, we read the African American abolitionist tradition, beginning with Phillis Wheatley and slave narratives (Frederick Douglass, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs) followed by works by Harriet Wilson, Ida B. Wells, and Machado de Assis. The final third of the class will focus on works by those encountering imperialism in Egypt, South Asia, Latin America, the Philippines, and China: Al-Jabarti, Dinabandhu Mitra, José Martí, Jose Rizal, Huang Zunxian, and Qiu Jin.