This dissertation examines the relationship of the American publishing industry to Black American writers, with special focus on the re-emergence of the street lit sub-genre. Understanding this much maligned sub-genre is necessary if we are to understand the evolution of African-American literature, especially into the current era. Literature is best understood as a combinative process, produced not only by writers but various mediating figures and processes besides, at the combined levels of content, commercial production and distribution, and social and literary context. Therefore, offered here is a critical intervention into what has until now largely been a moralistic and polarizing high art/low art argument by considering street lit within the vast flows of literature by and about Black Americans, writing about urban areas, the market forces at work within the publishing industry and the writer's place in the midst of it all.

Unsung, Unwavering deploys African Americanist and feminist literary criticism in order to problematize how scholars have read nineteenth-century African-American women's activism and knowledge production. I simultaneously expand contemporary critical inquiry in (at least) two key ways: I analyze nineteenth-century black women's interrogation of the effects of liberalism as juridical, economic, and affective performance; and I unsettle sedimented perspectives of black resistance as inherently militant, male, and vernacular.

The first three chapters, in particular, address the ways in which Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper undermine fundamental liberal and Enlightenment precepts including reason, individualism, and the privileging of a transcendental Subject. Each of these women also rely on distinct tropes of embodiment in their writing to contest reigning prescriptions toward objectivity, while making visible the constraints of practices including tolerance and inclusion.

The first chapter, "`They Won't Believe What I Say': Theorizing Freedom as an Economy of Violence," analyzes Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859), in which Wilson exposes the coerciveness of liberalism via dense engagement with questions of sexuality, labor and poverty, and the figure of the tragic mulatta. Keckly's Behind the Scenes (1868) similarly dislodges hegemonic models of individual sovereignty, progress, and interracial intimacy. As I argue in the second chapter, titled "The Production of `Emancipation': Race, Ritual, and the Reconstitution of the Antebellum Order," Keckly's politicized acts of witnessing and selective self-commodification foreground insidious modes of control embedded within American progressivism. Cooper, on the other hand, condemns prevailing ideals of abstraction and universality. Her reconceptualization of dominant tenets of civility, freedom, and equality; invocation of musical metaphor; and irruptions of sarcastic wit throughout A Voice From the South (1892), I contend in "`Wondering under Which Head I Come': Sounding Anna Julia Cooper's Fin-de-Siécle Blues," compel a radical reevaluation of our ways of recognizing social change. Novels such as Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, as evidenced in the concluding chapter of "`Mammy Ain't Nobody Name': Power, Privilege and the Bodying Forth of Resistance," provoke dialogue with Wilson, Keckly, and Cooper, and demonstrate the ongoing relevance of interrogating the limits of American liberalism in the neoliberal present.

Following Jane Bennett and Mel Y. Chen’s theoretical interventions regarding “levels of aliveness,” cultural production, animacy hierarchies and racial mattering, this study explores how twentieth and twenty-first century American literature can function as an emancipatory repository for African American and Latina/o embodied racialized subjects. The methodology involves close readings and theoretical interventions informed by Bennett, Chen, Gloria Anzaldúa, Bruno Latours, Michel Foucault, Paulo Freire and Erica R. Edwards, while investigating how art-tethered counterpublics can help resist the hegemonic forces of neoliberalism on the African American and Latina/o communities. Through the aforementioned methodology, Animacy Matters interrogates the following questions: Can twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, specifically, function as a source of effective liberatory strategies for Black and Brown folk operated on in the sovereign sphere? What theoretical interventions, and practical applications, need to be animated in order that strategies found in literary-based cultural production can positively influence Black and Brown material conditions and mobilize their liberatory action “off the page”? How can art-based counterpublics, and the people who inhabit them, animate Black and Brown liberatory thought and action? Ultimately, in this present historical moment when racialized bodies are increasingly under violent attack by the State and the need is ardent for alternative solutions, this study affirms and seeks to build on Erica R. Edwards contention that “Literature is a repository for counter stories and alternative visions… narrative is a dialogic site for reimagining possibilities.”

In this dissertation, I explore several key works in the fields of Black Literature and Black theology that highlight the rich and complex nature of Black religious and spiritual traditions in the U.S. I focus on studies that show how Africans and African Americans postslavery were able to mount serious resistance to white supremacist efforts to dehumanize and assimilate Black lives politically, economically, and socially by way of Western theology's claims and Protestant Christianity's influence. I term the multifarious spiritual traditions and belief systems that offered Black folks healing, and the space in which to redefine and create new meaning heterodox Black religiosities. I then place my inquiry of minor or heterodox Black Christianities within a larger conversation about the politics of recognition, where the desire to be seen and treated as human within a state to which the appeals for recognition are directed and from which they are denied often prove inadequate or limited as modes for liberation.

This dissertation is an effort to think through the complexities of how African American literature interacts with what I am terming the notion of uncalling made visible by the heterodox Christianities that fall out of the scope of the Black. In other words, I analyze Black religiosity as an enactment of radical Black collectivity in counterdistinction to a politics of recognition. I argue it is this figure of the uncalled, operating out of heterodox Black religiosities, that can offer an alternative model for liberation and healing that is not bound up in outward cries for recognition―a redirected and more productive form of protest that already exists but that is underutilized. This alternative strategy aims to shift Black protest efforts away from desiring settler-colonial, patriarchal, non-mutual state-based recognition, and toward the freedom found in wholeness and strength through internal journeys, supported by radical Black sociality after the emotional and spiritual battles are waged, in the quiet victories of peace, and with the guidance, insights, theories and writings of the Black feminist tradition.

Keywords: recognition; recognition-based protest; liberal politics of recognition; patriarchy; capitalism; heterodox Black religiosities; figure of the uncalled; settler-state sovereignty; freedom, protest, Black church, conjurer, Conjure, Christianity; white supremacy; justice, healing, wholeness, frequency