In Search of Liberty

African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Title Details

Pages: 326

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 07/15/2021

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6010-2

List Price: $41.95

Hardcover

Pub Date: 07/15/2021

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6008-9

List Price: $120.95

eBook

Pub Date: 07/15/2021

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6009-6

List Price: $41.95

eBook

Pub Date: 07/15/2021

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6810-8

List Price: $41.95

In Search of Liberty

African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

The first book devoted to the wide-ranging international lives of African Americans in the nineteenth century

Skip to

  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Contributors

In Search of Liberty explores how African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggles for freedom as part of the larger Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture the pursuits of equality and justice by African Americans across the Atlantic World through the end of the nineteenth century, as their fights for emancipation and enfranchisement in the United States continued. This book illuminates stories of individual Black people striving to escape slavery in places like Nova Scotia, Louisiana, and Mexico and connects their eff orts to emigration movements from the United States to Africa and the Caribbean, as well as to Black abolitionist campaigns in Europe.

By placing these diverse stories in conversation, editors Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene have curated a larger story that is only beginning to be told. By focusing on Black internationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, In Search of Liberty reveals that Black freedom struggles in the United States were rooted in transnational networks much earlier than the better-known movements of the twentieth century.

In Search of Liberty extends our understanding of African American internationalism during the nineteenth century, just as it illuminates the experiences of those Black individuals who sought refuge across the larger Atlantic world. Scholarly and accessible, it sets an important marker that will shape future work in this area.

—J.R. Oldfield, The Journal of American History

The interdisciplinary approach of In Search of Liberty is an important example for students in African American and African Diaspora studies programs, as the comparison of history, literature, and theater in some of the essays is compelling and an important intervention in studies of Black internationalism, which are often focused on a single discipline.

—Stephanie J. Richmond, The Journal of the Civil War Era

Gerald Horne

Angela F. Murphy

Pia Wiegmink

Claire Bourhis-Mariotti

Brandon R. Byrd

Dexter J. Gabriel

Marcus Bruce

Caree A. Banton

Lawrence Aje

Thomas Mareite

Mekala Audain

Franco Paz

Harvey Whitfield

James Sidbury