One of the earliest patents for an automaton in Victorian America was for a steam-powered android, drawn as a caricature of a Black man. Most histories of the so-called Steam Man tend to treat this automaton in one of two ways: Historians of science have addressed the machine indirectly, drawing general connections between Victorian Black androids, white femininity, and imputed inferiority; literary and cultural studies have addressed the Steam Man directly as a product of Reconstruction-era white anxiety over free Black labor. In this chapter, we argue for a different way of understanding the Steam Man and other Victorian Black automata, one that sees them as concealing historical truths about the Black technological self in nineteenth-century America. We follow a counterhistory of the mechanics that underpinned Black automata and show that, although androids like the Steam Man portrayed Black people in pastoral, leisurely, and nontechnological roles, their reliance on blackface minstrelsy ultimately concealed the intimate relationships between Black Victorian Americans, contemporary technologies, and the self

This volume considers the meanings of automatism and automata for Victorian culture. In the nineteenth century, theories of automatism became central to scientific and popular understandings of human thought and action. Engineers made the first attempts at constructing mechanisms that replicated the intelligence of human beings. Mechanical automata charmed crowds. Black and Asian automata became popular commodities. This collection brings together essays by scholars of the history of science, literature, theatre, and media, which explore the widespread cultural interest in mechanical automata and conceptions of automatism in the period. The essays examine social, technological, scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic developments that automata and their representation generated. They look at the conceptions of legal responsibility, volition, and creativity that theories of automatism produced, and show how automata and automatism were recruited in constructions of race. The essays examine automata and automatism in literary texts. They demonstrate that Victorian thought on automata and automatism continues to have resonance for current understandings of mind, agency, mechanism, and artificial intelligence.

Crooning emerged as a style that contemporaneous audiences, black and white, read as “white”: it wasn’t until the early 1930s that African American crooners appeared on record. This delay is unusual in American music, where innovations in vernacular music ordinarily have African American origins. That delay is explicable, however, once we recover what crooning signified for black audiences and how that signified meant something different to white audiences. More interesting still is the fact that crooning continues to play a role in contemporary African American music, long after white audiences abandoned it as old-fashioned. The apotheosis of this pattern can be heard in the 1963 record, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Trane then made his one record with a vocalist for fairly obvious reasons, but it is less clear why he chose to do so, not with a jazz singer, but a crooner.

African American culture is best understood as an ongoing community conversation about success that produces homemade citizenship. Because black success so often inspires violence, the community conversation constantly defines and redefines achievement. To pursue success, African Americans debate not only the strategies for attaining it but also its very contours and parameters. That is, they debate how one will even know if one has achieved. As they engage in this process, African Americans create a citizenship that is homemade. Denied basic ingredients like safety by the land of their birth, they cultivate a sense of belonging and achievement that does not depend on civic inclusion; it is a belonging with recourse beyond the nation-state. To recognize homemade citizenship, scholars, teachers, and general readers must look through the lens of achievement rather than resistance. This approach proves especially illuminating when applied to works, such as slave narratives, that readers presume exist to protest injustice. Using the Narrative of Henry Box Brown as a case study, this essay demonstrates the power of reading with an eye toward accomplishment. Brown’s narrative proves animated by a commitment to defining, redefining, and pursuing success while knowing victories inspire violence.

Returning to David Walker’s Appeal, with an exclusive focus on its 1848 publication, this chapter traces the connections between the 1848 anti-monarchical revolutions in Europe, the Mexican American War, and an emerging vision of Black resistance to American Empire. This chapter reads Walker together with the works of Henry Highland Garnet and decisively demonstrates how African American literature articulated the principles and priorities of a transnational 1848.

In this chapter on the poetry of George Moses Horton, the local expands to encompass not only the city of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but also the states of North Carolina and Virginia. This chapter shows how the 1831 Nat Turner insurrection and its aftermath profoundly shaped the enslaved Horton’s later poetry.

This chapter explores the effect of emancipation in Jamaica in particular on the work of Nancy Prince. Connecting Prince’s commentary on Jamaica to her struggles with white-led abolitionist organizations, this chapter looks closely at how Black freedom abroad could be used to critique the policies of US-based abolitionists.

This chapter interrogates the multiple and nuanced ways in which Harriet Jacobs engaged with developing communications technologies and policies ostensibly designed to connect different sections of the nation to one another. Reading Jacobs’s experiences in the 1830s in relation to an ongoing communications revolution in the United States, this chapter shows how Jacobs ingeniously manipulates formal and informal networks in order to secure freedom for herself and her family.

This chapter focuses on a community of Black women writers in Philadelphia who contributed essays and poetry to the Liberator newspaper. The Liberator provided a venue for such writings, but Philadelphia’s free Black women also decisively shaped the tone and politics of the nation’s leading abolitionist newspaper.

This chapter explores the interplay between the genre of the slave narrative and Supreme Court cases concerning copyright and fugitivity decided in the 1830s and 1840s. Looking in particular at the 1838 Narrative of James Williams, a work quickly challenged for its veracity, this chapter reveals important connections between literary works and legal decisions.

This chapter reveals the key theoretical intervention made by David Walker in his Appeal. Examining the work in its 1830 and 1848 iterations, this chapter unpacks the theory of cosmopolitanism developed by Walker and traces its effects.

This chapter shifts to the island of Cuba and the La Escalera conspiracy in the mid-1840s. As this chapter reveals, this conspiracy between free and enslaved people of color in the Spanish colony to overthrow their oppressors takes center stage in the later novels of Martin Delany and Andrés Avelino de Orihuela, each of whom turns to La Escalera in order to develop a particular vision of Black revolution in the hemisphere.

New Orleans provides the context for this chapter’s reading of Les Cenelles in relation to the concerns of the city’s community of francophone free people of color. As this chapter shows, the 1845 collection of poetry not only emerged from discussions over how to provide an education to the city’s Black francophone children, but also articulated a specific theory of education that would later find an institutional home in the city’s first school for free children of color.

This chapter traces how August 1st celebrations of West Indian Emancipation in the United States impacted the works of Frances Ellen Watkins and James Whitfield. As this chapter shows, such celebrations not only provided an occasion for Watkins and Whitfield to write and perform poetry, but also indelibly shaped the form and content of their works.

This chapter looks closely at how literary societies in New York and Philadelphia served as engines of the creation of a particular kind of Black modernity, as expressed in the speeches, essays, and poetry of the members of such societies.

This chapter reveals the profound impact that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had on the slave narrative by comparing narratives from the same author published before and after the passage of the act. Consulting pre- and post-1850 narratives by Henry Box Brown, William Grimes, and Josiah Henson, this chapter illuminates key ways in which the Fugitive Slave Act shaped one of the premier genres of African American literature.