Resistance Reimagined

Resistance Reimagined highlights unconventional modes of black women's activism within a society that has spoken so much of freedom but has granted it so selectively. Looking closely at nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings by African American women that reimagine antebellum America, Regis Fox introduces types of black activism that differ from common associations with militancy and maleness. In doing so, she confronts expectations about what African American literature can and should be. Fox analyzes Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, Elizabeth Keckly's Behind the Scenes, Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice From the South, and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose. The thinkers highlighted by Fox have been dismissed as elitist, accommodationist, or complicit—yet Fox reveals that in reality, these women use their writing to protest antiblack violence, reject superficial reform, call for major sociopolitical change, and challenge the false promises of American democracy.