"Offers fresh insights into nineteenth-century black women's cultural production. Compelling and elegantly crafted."--Kathy L. Glass, author of Courting Communities: Black Female Nationalism and "Syncre-Nationalism" in the Nineteenth-Century North "Outstanding in explaining why these figures were important leaders in their own time and are important models today. A truly engaging and significant study."--John Ernest, editor of Douglass in His Own Time Looking closely at nineteenth-century texts and twentieth-century novels written by African American women about antebellum America, Resistance...

Analyses Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, Elizabeth Keckly's Behind the Scenes, Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice From the South, and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose. Fox reveals that these women use their writing to protest antiblack violence, reject superficial reform, call for sociopolitical change, and challenge the false promises of American democracy.