Black Skin, Blue Books
African Americans and Wales 1845-1945
Distributed for University of Wales Press
357 pages
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5 1/2 x 8 1/2
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© 2012
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents
Contents
General Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Introduction
1. Black Skin, Blue Books: Frederick Douglass, Abolitionism and Victorian Wales
2. ’In the Wide Margin’: Modernism and Ethnic Renaissance in Harlem and Wales
3. ’They feel me a part of that land’: Paul Robeson, Race and the Making of Modern Wales
4. The Invisible Man’s Welsh Routes: Ralph Ellison in Wartime Wales
Conclusion: 1945
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Introduction
1. Black Skin, Blue Books: Frederick Douglass, Abolitionism and Victorian Wales
2. ’In the Wide Margin’: Modernism and Ethnic Renaissance in Harlem and Wales
3. ’They feel me a part of that land’: Paul Robeson, Race and the Making of Modern Wales
4. The Invisible Man’s Welsh Routes: Ralph Ellison in Wartime Wales
Conclusion: 1945
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Review Quotes
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University
“The connections between the slave trade and its abolition in the United States and England have been amply documented. Those between African Americans and Celtic peoples and cultures, however, remain under-explored. Black Skin, Blue Books begins with a comparative chapter on the Victorian era in Wales and African America, before moving on to modernism and to the connections between Paul Robeson, Ralph Ellison, and the Welsh. It fills a void that most of us did not even know existed! This compelling and well-researched book is a major, fresh contribution to Black Atlantic Studies.”
Adam Bradley, author of Ralph Ellison in Progress and Book of Rhymes
“Daniel G. Williams’s Black Skin, Blue Books is written with grace and uncommon insight. It is a model for transnational scholarship that opens up a new tributary of literary connection. By exposing moments of ‘contact and comparison’ between the literatures of black America and of Wales, Williams offers up surprising and necessary insights that defy our assumptions about race, place, and nation. I can think of few books that better illustrate the capacity of authors from very different parts of the world to arrive at what Ralph Ellison once termed ‘those abiding patterns of experience’ that help to define our shared sense of humanity.”
Jeffrey C. Stewart, author of Paul Robeson: Artist as Citizen
“Daniel G. Williams explores passionately what at first blush seem like strange bedfellows—African Americans and the Welsh—until one dips inside this surprising book. Emerging from its pages is an intertwined but twisted history of struggle against discursive imperialism over centuries of misunderstanding and misapplied notions of who is literate, who is human. Williams reveals that African American and Welsh literary politics are not only connected by a discourse of Blackness, but by Welsh and Black performative traditions.”
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