Matt Sandler argues that not only did African American poets write “in Romantic revolutionary moods” at mid-century, but they used the lyric, in particular, to bridge divisions within and between the abolition movement and enslaved and free people. For writers like Joshua McCarter Simpson, James Monroe Whitfield, Frances Harper, and George Moses Horton, the lyric’s amenity to both contemplation and public performance was generically useful for the deliberations on and challenges to liberal individualism they posed. These African American poets complicated the lyric’s mechanics and capacities in ways that turned its interior deliberations to revolutionary aims and “claims about the place of Black life in American history.” Overall, Sandler underscores, lyric poetry, perhaps more than any other genre, “moved across the oral/print binary” and likewise moved across the color line as well as among abolitionist, free status, fugitive, and enslaved communities and groups to facilitate coalitions. Provocatively, this made the lyric what Sandler calls “the medium of the conspiracy.”

In “African American Literature of the West and the Landscape of Opportunity,” Janet Neary considers the ways in which Black writers of the American West presented California as a brief loophole of economic opportunity for Black citizens in the expanding and consolidating nation – a way of defining place with fascinating parallels to Marrs’s work on memory. Although early Black newspapers in California linked economic mobility with legal enfranchisement, Neary suggests that California’s idiosyncratic response to Reconstruction paradoxically shut down certain avenues of opportunity for Black citizens, centering wealth production with white property owners. Focusing on James Williams’s 1873 Life and Adventures of James Williams and Thomas Detter’s 1871 Nellie Brown, or the Jealous Wife, Neary argues that African American Western writers articulated economic possibility and upward mobility with social justice and racial equality, while simultaneously highlighting the mercenary and racially biased nature of the law both before and after Reconstruction.