The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas Expansion

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments My thought process, research, and writing have been significantly shaped and greatly enriched by my participation in the activities of several professional associations and scholarly communities. These include not only large organizations such as the American Literature Association (led by the indefatigable Alfred Bendixen) and the Modern Language Association but also regional and more specialized groups such as the New Jersey College English Association , the Collegium for African American Research, the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and the Poe Studies Association, as well as small, narrowly focused intellectual communities and initiatives such as the Pauline Hopkins Society, the Sutton Griggs Project (organized by Ken Warren and Tess Chakkalakal), the 1990 neh summer seminar on the problem of race in American and Afro-American literature from 1860 to 1930 held at uc Berkeley and directed by Eric Sundquist, the 1994 neh summer seminar on literary history in theory and practice held at Princeton University and directed by Earl Miner, and the 2007 neh summer seminar on hemispheric American literature held at Columbia University and directed by Rachel Adams and Caroline Levander. Over the past five years, parts of this book have been presented in sessions and symposia organized under the aegis of the ala, mla, njcea, caar, aglsp, sssl, and the Griggs Project, and I have greatly profited from audience responses to these panels. What follows is very much a partial list of the people I have been fortunate enough to get to know through and in some cases work closely with in these scholarly associations and communities during the past two decades: Elizabeth Ammons, Claudia Tate, Jennie Kassanoff, Lois Brown, Jill Bergman, viii Acknowledgments Richard Yarborough, Maryemma Graham, Daylanne English, Stephen Knadler, Jonathan Eburne, Houston Baker, Paul Lauter, Mary Balkan, Kelly Shea, Burt Kimmelman, Susannah Chewning, Ed Shannon, John Wargacki, Claude Julien, Isabel Soto, Tish Crawford, Kim Phillips, Ira Dworkin, Cindy Hamilton, Jean Yellin, Martyn Bone, Keith Cartwright, Holly Stave, Beth Sweeney, Kelly Ross, David Schmid, Kate Nickerson, Susan Amper, Barbara Cantalupo, Jerry Kennedy , Scott Peeples, Richard Kopley, Alisha Knight, Eric Gardner, Dorri Beam, Mary Frances Jiménez, Carla Peterson, Tanya Clark, April Logan, John Ernest, Giulia Fabi, Carole Doreski, Joe Alvarez, and Aldon Nielsen. I am grateful to Jennifer James and Keith Wailoo for their helpful advice and to Rudolph Byrd, the researchers at the U.S. Army Military History Institute, and the librarians at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and the U.S. Army War College Library at Carlisle Barracks for answering my questions. The people at the Nancy Thompson Library and many fellow faculty members at my home institution, especially Richard Katz, Mia Zamora, Bert Wailoo, Alan Robbins, Holly Logue, Carole Shaffer-Koros, and Terry Golway, have been very supportive. I owe a profound debt to Colleen O’Brien, Nirmal Trivedi, Ira Dworkin, Hanna Wallinger , and Paula Seniors for reading parts of the manuscript and to John Ernest , Ken Warren, and MJ Devaney for reading all of it and offering sage advice for improving it. Some of the material in this book appeared in different form in American Literary History and Revue Afram: Publication Semestrielle du Cercle d’Etudes Afro-Américaines et Diasporiques, and in the section on Frank R. Steward in chapter 3, I draw on the ideas and in some places the eloquence of Gretchen Murphy with whom I collaborated in editing and writing an introduction to Steward’s Laguna stories, published in the May 2011 issue of PMLA. Beth Snead, Jon Davies, and the amazing Nancy Grayson at the University of Georgia Press and my most patient and generous e-mail correspondents Malin Pereira and Hanna Wallinger offered me much appreciated encouragement during the whole course of this project. By no means can I fail to mention the support of my old friends Mike, Phil, Joe, and Tim, my in-laws the Spilmans, various Cullen and Fandel cousins and uncles, my parents John and Eileen, my sister Jenny, my son Jack, my daughter Sarah, and, most of all, my wife Susan. ...