There is a growing interest within scholarship on antebellum African American textual production that focuses on how this material shaped 19th-century cultures of print. This scholarship has examined many important areas such as African Americans' places in the plantation economy, their movements through the commercial world of Atlantic trade, and their presence in antebellum political reform movements. However, little of this work has centered on African Americans in the antebellum American city. This roundtable takes up this focus and turns its attention specifically to how these writers shaped and were shaped by the formation of the city as a locus of commercial exchange and civic activism. Consider, for example, Frederick Douglass' assessment of Baltimore as a city from which escape is "tenfold greater" than the country. As Douglass flees to New York later in the narrative he describes his freedom as feeling like he had escaped from "a den of hungry lions" only to subsequently experience the "insecurity and loneliness" of a place rife with dangers. For many antebellum African Americans the city was, as it was for Douglass, a place that figured both as a cosmopolitan space of opportunity and a site of enslavement and exploitation. Similarly, the city offered a space to imagine general insurrections, as New Orleans does in Martin R. Delany's Blake; or, the Huts of America. In a much different vein, writers such as Solomon Northup and Francis Ellen Watkins Harper remind us of the political implications of the slave auction, a centerpiece of many southern antebellum cities. Major cities, principally New York, provided the staging grounds for newly-founded African American newspapers and periodicals.

In adopting this perspective we seek to shift the viewpoint of current scholarship on slavery and the antebellum period away from its conventional rural setting in favor of examining the pleasures and pitfalls that the urban life of this period offered African Americans. In order to consider this perspective, this roundtable seeks 10 minute responses.

Some questions to keep in mind: How do literary production and cultures of print more generally interrogate the challenges and contradictions of African Americans in the antebellum city? What stories do slaves and free people of color like John Marrant and William Wells Brown tell about the city? How does the slave narrative change when it gets to the city? How do urban genres like the city-mysteries represent characterize African Americans? In what ways to African Americans perform their identities in urban spaces like the theater, the public streets, and the church pews? What kinds of cultural production come from free black communities found in city centers and on the periphery of urban spaces?

Possible jumping off points include:
The city as venue for slave auction
Black settlements in the North
The effects of the Haitian Revolution on cities like Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans
The slave narrative as escape from plantation to city
Free people of color
African American Gothic
Urban reaction to slave revolts

The panel will be in the form of a round table with participants giving short papers, 8 to 10 minutes, and then responding to each other's work and audience questions.

Please submit a current CV and an abstract of no more than 200 words to jvanwormer@gradcenter.cuny.edu by June 28, 2015.