Early Black Worldmaking: Body, Compass, and Text

“Early Black Worldmaking: Body, Compass, and Text” previews a Black cultural history of the abolition epoch. It focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century author–activists. Judith Madera tracks an emancipatory network that linked pioneering abolitionist communities in the Caribbean and US by print channels and shared place-based histories. Madera states that Black geographies grew up in reading societies, church organizations, cottage industries, women’s leadership groups, social clubs, and political debate fora. Black women abolitionists, she claims, called for a civics that first needed to be built. They cast blueprints for better worlds because they could imagine that other worlds were possible.