The essays explore the loopholes and retreats employed and exploited by African American polemicists, poets, novelists, slave narrators, playwrights, short story writers, essayists, editors, educators, historians, clubwomen, and autobiographers during the nineteenth century. The contributions use comparative, transnational, literary historical, cultural studies, and Foucauldian perspectives to examine how apparent weakness was turned into strength, and the machinery of oppression into the keys to liberation.