Temperance and Cosmopolitanism by Carole Lynn Stewart
A study of select nineteenth-century African American authors and reformers who mobilized the discourses of cosmopolitanism and restraint to expand the meaning of freedom.“This book speaks softly and carries a big wallopThrough precise readings and meticulous historical research, Stewart demonstrates that there was a common transnational epistemology uniting black reformers. Highly recommended.”
—Kathryn Lofton, author of Consuming Religion
“Exploring a world torn by the foundational fractures forced by the system of slavery and racial control, Stewart uncovers a history of reform that challenges our understanding of place and mobility in African American history. She considers such writers as William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, George Moses Horton, Frances Harper, and Amanda Berry Smith, finding in their works a cosmopolitan determination to reorient American culture from the ground up. Anyone interested in African American literary and cultural history will want to read this important book.”
—John Ernest, author of Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History
“An original, nuanced, and theoretically robust work of scholarship that will quickly prove to be a tremendous addition to our understanding of race, religion, politics, and public life. Stewart critically reads the multiple languages and expressions of freedom as amalgams that form and inform the multiple meanings of the world and human experience. By deeply probing the complex contours of the temperance movement against the backdrop of the Atlantic world, Stewart adds rich texture and offers fresh perspectives on this protean international movement.”
—Corey D. B. Walker, author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America
“In this study Carole Lynn Stewart shows how a group of enslaved, ex-enslaved, or fugitive African American women and men, through international travel, imaginative vision, and intellectual insight, critically expanded the practice and ideal of temperance from an individualistic, inner purity blind to the corruption of a civic order that tolerated slavery and enabled temperance to a serve as the vital basis for both the inward and societal meanings of freedom.”
—Charles H. Long, author of Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion
“Stewart offers readers a theoretically rich, at times dizzying, account of the various ways Black creative writers, evangelists, and political activists connected cosmopolitanism to innovative practices of resistance and liberation.”
—Stefan M. Wheelock American Literary History
Carole Lynn Stewart is Professor of English Language and Literature at Brock University and the author of Strange Jeremiahs: Civil Religion and the Literary Imaginations of Jonathan Edwards, Herman Melville, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780271090238 |
| ISBN 10 | 0271090235 |
| Title | Temperance and Cosmopolitanism |
| Author | Carole Lynn Stewart |
| Series | Africana Religions |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Pennsylvania State University Press |
| Year published | 2021-02-26 |
| Number of pages | 232 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |