Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States

First popularized by newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s, the underground serves as a metaphor for subversive activity that remains central to our political vocabulary. In Going Underground, Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of this now familiar idea while seeking out versions of the underground that were left behind along the way. Outlining how the underground's figurative sense first took shape through the associations of literal subterranean spaces with racialized Blackness, she examines a vibrant world of nineteenth-century US subterranean literature that includes Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. Cohen finds that the undergrounds in this literature offer sites of political possibility that exceed the familiar framework of resistance, suggesting that nineteenth-century undergrounds can inspire new modes of world-making and world-breaking for a time when this world feels increasingly untenable.

Author: Lara Langer Cohen
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 01/20/2023
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9781478019480
ISBN10: 1478019484
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Modern | 19th Century
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies
- Literary Criticism | American | General

About the Author
Lara Langer Cohen is Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College, author of The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture, and coeditor of Early African American Print Culture.