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Author Ball, Erica L., 1971- author.

Title To live an antislavery life : personal politics and the antebellum Black middle class / Erica L. Ball.

Imprint Athens : University of Georgia Press, ℗♭2012.

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Descript 1 online resource (xv, 175 pages) : illustrations
polychrome. rdacc http://rdaregistry.info/termList/RDAColourContent/1003
Series Race in the Atlantic world, 1700-1900
Race in the Atlantic world, 1700-1900.
Bibliog. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents African American advice literature and Black middle-class self-fashioning -- Slave narratives and the Black self-made man -- Antislavery discourse and the African American family -- Domestic literature and the antislavery household -- Transnationalism, revolution, and the Anglo-African magazine on the eve of the Civil War.
Summary In this study of antebellum African American print culture in transnational perspective, Erica L. Ball explores the relationship between antislavery discourse and the emergence of the northern black middle class. Through innovative readings of slave narratives, sermons, fiction, convention proceedings, and the advice literature printed in forums like Freedom's Journal, the North Star, and the Anglo-African Magazine, Ball demonstrates that black figures such as Susan Paul, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany consistently urged readers to internalize their political principles and to interpret all their personal ambitions, private familial roles, and domestic responsibilities in light of the freedom struggle. Ultimately, they were admonished to embody the abolitionist agenda by living what the fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward called an "antislavery life." Far more than calls for northern free blacks to engage in what scholars call "the politics of respectability," African American writers characterized true antislavery living as an oppositional stance rife with radical possibilities, a deeply personal politics that required free blacks to transform themselves into model husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, self-made men, and transnational freedom fighters in the mold of revolutionary figures from Haiti to Hungary. In the process, Ball argues, antebellum black writers crafted a set of ideals--simultaneously respectable and subversive--for their elite and aspiring African American readers to embrace in the decades before the Civil War
Note English.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - Worldwide
Subject Free African Americans -- History -- 19th century.
Free African Americans -- Social conditions -- 19th century.
Free African Americans -- Attitudes -- History -- 19th century.
Citizenship -- United States -- History -- 19th century.
Antislavery movements -- United States -- History -- 19th century.
United States -- Race relations -- History -- 19th century.
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Political Freedom & Security -- Civil Rights.
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Political Freedom & Security -- Human Rights.
HISTORY -- United States -- 19th Century.
Antislavery movements (OCoLC)fst00810800
Citizenship (OCoLC)fst00861909
Free African Americans (OCoLC)fst00933834
Free African Americans -- Social conditions (OCoLC)fst00933835
Race relations (OCoLC)fst01086509
United States (OCoLC)fst01204155
1800 - 1899
ISBN 9780820344676 (electronic bk.)
0820344672 (electronic bk.)
9780820329765
0820329762
9780820343501
0820343501
9781283733328
1283733323