The 1820s and 1830s have received less attention than the 1840s and 1850s in histories of US abolition. Attending to African American antislavery activism of the 1820s and 1830s reveals that these were transformative decades, particularly regarding the issues of colonization, immediate abolition, and kidnapping. These specific political concerns of an often-overshadowed constituency, African Americans themselves, shaped the literary conventions of slave narratives published in these earlier two decades. Fugitive slave narratives of the 1820s and 1830s feature an active practice of vigilant watchfulness that anticipates and counters the threat of surveillance through sousveillance (watching from below). Sousveillance is thus a specific narrative manifestation of the vigilance urged by black political activists. Later slave narratives, shaped by the priorities of white-dominated institutional abolition, downplay the agency of African American sousveillants in favor of a more passive story of victimization.

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.