This article shows how and why some free black families ended up living among the enslaved in the late antebellum era. Enslavers brought free people of colour into forms of informal quasi-slavery that differed little from enslavement despite their free legal status. Despite a lack of evidence, piecing together free blacks’ experiences through surviving sources reveals much about the porous boundary between slavery and freedom where enslavers manipulated marginality for financial gain. There was no sharp delineation between slavery and freedom but instead a continuum of oppression characterized by varying degrees of persecution and fragile freedoms.

Isaac Hayes provides a vital public figure through which scholars can analyze, evaluate, and more fully understand the comprehensive nature of the black freedom struggle as it progressed into the 1970s. Hayes merged the integrationist political objectives of mainstream civil rights organizations and leaders with the notions of racial pride, assertiveness, and autonomy that characterized the popular appeal of the black power movement. Hayes, through his “Black Moses” persona and LP of the same name, moved those freedom struggle promises and opportunities into the cultural realm, where he personified African American artistic self-determination. In doing so, he demonstrated that the contemporary conceptualization of black masculinity was not monolithic, as Hayes introduced and embodied an ideal that countered the prevailing notion of black manhood which pervaded popular culture and remains a central component of popular memory concerning black power. Most importantly, Isaac Hayes embodied a model of black masculinity that contradicted the prevailing “black macho” ideal. “Black Moses,” therefore, embodied the freedom of African Americans to move beyond contemporary racial classifications in a cultural capacity and presents scholars with an intriguing model through which to examine the evolution, possibilities, and accomplishments of the post-1960s American black freedom struggle.

This article examines the resurgence of an especially deterministic form of naturalism in contemporary American culture, which can be linked to particular attributes of neoliberalism. In particular, neoliberal power is shown to have been exercised partly through what the author terms “exonerative determinism,” a discourse whereby those in power claim to have been forced by outside circumstances into morally dubious policies. Two neo-naturalist texts – Dave Eggers's novel Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, and the television miniseries The Night Of – are employed as case studies in order to examine the discourse of exonerative determinism. The essay concludes with a brief examination of how this discourse has been more overtly employed during the Trump administration.

In 1857, Henry Box Brown starred in Edward Gascoigne Burton's The Fugitive Free and The Nubian Captive, two “slave dramas” based on his life. His performance inevitably infused both with an antislavery message: in a radical departure from conventional black abolitionist strategies of resistance in the British Isles, the plays change our understanding of British anti-slavery, of Brown, and of black British performance in general. Despite his short acting career, Brown should be placed alongside fellow African American actors like Ira Aldridge for his integral role in challenging the white racial schema on the Victorian stage.

“Opioid Storytelling: Rehabilitating a White Disability Nationalism” argues that stories of the opioid crisis disseminate an emerging white disability nationalism that functions to morph and reconsolidate the “machinery of whiteness” around an affectively charged disability politics. Through a close reading of HBO's 2017 documentary Warning: This Drug May Kill You, directed by Perri Peltz, as well as Beth Macy's New York Times best book of 2018, Dopesick, this essay contends that opioid storytelling redeploys a panic about lost agency and increased vulnerabilities into a melancholic reinvestment in a fantasy ideal of white immunity nationalism. Opioid storytelling's “relapsed” whiteness, which invokes a long history of fears about racial degeneration, restores whiteness's category crisis by presenting middle-class whites as abled disableds, or dopesick addicts, in contrast to an unredeemable noncompliant blackness, and, in doing so, resolves the contradictions within conservative neoliberal discourses between sympathetic addicts and a simultaneous insistence on individual accountability and family values. Opioid storytelling reveals not only a contemporary morphing of a complex history of race and public health, but offers new identifications for “fragile” white subjects to reinvest in intractable hierarchies of white supremacism, while simultaneously thinking of themselves as liberal antiracists.

This article traces the postbellum development and dissemination of the notion of “negro superstition.” By the end of Reconstruction, many whites across the nation, both liberal and conservative, shared in the belief that credulity was the keystone of African American culture. The formulation of superstition as innate racial trait served the conjoined causes of sectional reconciliation and white supremacy, eroding white support for black citizenship. As liberal estimations of black Christianity declined and conservative depictions of African American magical beliefs proliferated, “voodoo” gained traction as a potent imaginary, shorthand for racial atavism, unreason, and dangerous sexuality.

Peter Christian “Paddy” Barrie was a seasoned fraudster who transferred his horse doping and horse substitution skills from British to North American racetracks in the 1920s. His thoroughbred ringers were entered in elite races to guarantee winnings for syndicates and betting rings in the Prohibition-era United States. This case study of a professional travelling criminal and the challenges he posed for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in the early 1930s war on crime highlights both the importance of illegal betting to urban mobsters and the need for broader and more nuanced critiques of Depression-era organized-crime activities and alliances.

This article examines the experiences of Jethro, an enslaved African man who was captured by the Narragansetts during King Philip's War. While captive, Jethro used his bilingualism to gather information about the Narragansett's war plans and then escaped and relayed them to the English. Jethro was granted freedom for this wartime service and went on to purchase property in the North End of Boston. He was representative of the charter generation of enslaved persons who showed that attitudes about race in seventeenth-century Massachusetts were still being formed. This essay further demonstrates how Jethro's story was appropriated by colonial writers at the time for their own unique purposes. Analyzing Jethro's story provides an opportunity to foreground Africanness in American captivity narratives.

The Korean War has never had a notable place in American culture. A crop of recent scholarship by Korean American scholars queries the reasons for this absence of the Korean War's cultural presence, going against the critical commonplace that the war was insignificant and calling for a reckoning with the cultural legacies of the Korean War. Christine Hong's A Violent Peace, Daniel Y. Kim's The Intimacies of Conflict, and Crystal Mun-hye Baik's Reencounters illustrate new directions and new possibilities in the scholarship on the Korean War, which is dominated by historical studies often guided by traditional approaches to international relations or foreign policy. Informed by approaches in ethnic studies – and particularly the field's interest in racialization as transnational and cross-border phenomenon – these books show that it is not only productive to revisit the “forgotten war” but imperative to do so. Through a wide range of cultural texts and with an exclusive focus on the perspectives and experiences of people of color, these studies probe the underexamined role the conflict has played in shaping liberal ideas on freedom and justice, attend to the contradictions of the cultural forms that clothed these ideas in post-World War II US culture, and point to new cultural interventions that challenge and dislodge long-standing Cold War orthodoxies.