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 strivi...

Unrivalled in its coverage of recent work and writers, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights surveys and analyses the breadth, vitality and development of theatrical work to emerge from America over the last fifty years.This authoritative guide leads you through the work of 25 major contemporary American playwrights, discussing more than 140 plays in detail. Written by a team of 25 eminent international scholars, each chapter provides:· a biogr...

This book brings into conversation perspectives from the disciplines of history, literary studies, archival studies and religious studies, and explores the entanglements of life writing and dependency studies. It demonstrates how life writing offers a vital entry point into the lived realities of dependency across time and space. Personal testimonies, autobiographies and archival traces serve here as contested sites of self-representation, revealing as much about the structures of dependen...

This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance.Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discuss...

Germany has long entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players. Countering this premise, this collection re-charts various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, and resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. Exploring how German financiers, missionaries, and immigrant writers made profit from, morally responded to, and fictionalized their en...

The volume is uniquely located at the interdisciplinary crossroads of Performance Studies and transnational American Studies. As both a method and an object of study, performance deepens our understanding of transnational phenomena and America’s position in the world. The thirteen original contributions make use of the field’s vast potential and critically explore a wide array of cultural, political, social, and aesthetic performances on and off the stage. They scrutinize transnational tra...