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American Abolitionist Geographies draws of methodologies from history, geography and literary studies to examine how American literary abolitionists writing after 1834 (the year of British Emancipation) used locations inside and outside of the United States as imaginative terrain for social reform. By engaging critically with the discourse of US imperialism, I argue, these writers endeavored to imagine political alternatives to the unstable Union and to call into being concrete social changes in the Southern US. Examples include: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wells Brown and Haiti and the British West Indies; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Delany, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and James Redpath and maroon communities of the US South and the Caribbean; and the relation explored in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin between Liberia and the western US.
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