Timeline; Volume 4: 1850-1865, Introduction, Teresa Zackodnik; Part 1. Black personhood and citizenship in transition: Section introduction, Teresa Zackodnik; 1. Freedom's accounts-the semi-citizenship narrative, Stephen Knadler; 2. Conduct discourse, slave narratives, and Black male self-fashioning on the eve of the Civil war, Erica L. Ball; 3. Picturing Blackness with and against Stowe's lens, Michael A. Chaney; 4. African American periodicals and the transition to visual intercourse, Autumn Womack; Part 2. Generic transitions and textual circulation: Section introduction, Teresa Zackodnik; 5. Overhearing the African American novel, 1850-1865, Hollis Robbins and Mark Sussman; 6. Black romanticism and the lyric as the medium of the conspiracy, Matt Sandler; 7. Black newspapers, novels and the racial geographies of transnationalism, Ben Fagan; 8. Creoles of color, poetry and the periodic press in union occupied New Orleans, Jennifer Gipson; 9. The Haitian and American revolutions and Black historical writing at mid-century, Stephen Gilroy Hall; Part 3. Black geographies in transition: Section introduction, Teresa Zackodnik; 10. Freedom to move, Janaka Bowman-Lewis; 11. Black activism, print culture and literature in Canada 1850-1865, Winfried Siemerling; 12. Antislavery activist networks and transatlantic texts, Barbara McCaskill; 13. Haiti as diasporic crossroads in transnational African American writing, Marlene L. Daut; Bibliography.

This volume reframes mid-century African American literature as highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries.