What explains why these groups take on the practice of intersectional advocacy? In Chapter 5, this question is answered from an organizational perspective. Drawing again from the qualitative analysis of interviews with organizational leaders, the chapter presents the features of organizations that practice intersectional advocacy. There are four constitutive features of their organizations that were related to their engagement in intersectional advocacy. Despite a commitment to intersectional feminism, one of these organizations did not have all of these features and it also did not fully participate in intersectional advocacy. By discussing this case, the chapter demonstrates how an analysis of the four organizational features also help identify why groups such as these do not fully take on this practice. It then ends with how organizations with commitments to intersectionally marginalized groups but have not actualized them through intersectional advocacy, can change their varying organizational structures to take on this approach. This chapter is written in a way that scholars and organizational practitioners can both understand and appreciate the practice of intersectional advocacy.

The book opens with the story of Mariella Batista, a woman who was unable to access essential services through the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994 because of her immigration status and who tragically died from intimate partner abuse. Her experiences with VAWA reveal the ways in which policy institutions are rigidly confined to one primary issue area (i.e., gendered violence) and as such these laws fail to serve women with other marginalized identities (i.e., Latinx, noncitizen, low-income women). Her story illuminates the institutional inequalities that lie within U.S. policy institutions. The remainder of this introduction chapter explains the history behind these institutions and the ways in which women have resisted them for centuries. These historical moments set the contemporary landscape for advocacy within today’s movement to address gendered violence. This chapter then introduces the concept of “intersectional advocacy” led by organizations that are reimagining and reconfiguring policies to better represent women like Mariella.

At a time in U.S. politics when advocacy groups are increasingly relying on supporters to help advance their agendas, this chapter considers how intersectional advocates are mobilizing their supporters in Chapter 6. While membership in women’s advocacy organizations has decreased over the years, supporters that volunteer their time to advocacy organizations to advance their policy goals has been largely overlooked. Yet, these supporters are important contributors to intersectional advocacy. In Chapter 6, two original survey experiments are presented with the supporters from this organization that also engages in intersectional advocacy. Each experiment contain authentic policy platforms that either present an intersectional advocacy approach or a traditional single issue policy approach to supporters. The findings from these experiments answer the final question: does intersectional advocacy resonate with the intersectionally marginalized populations it aims to serve, and if so, to what extent does it mobilize them to participate in the policymaking process? This chapter highlights the role of supporters in advancing these policy efforts while showcasing tangible

Kate Chilton’s chapter explores the unique experience of women in the District of Columbia and argues that Black women drew on women’s strong position in the urban economy to choose work that allowed them to help support their families and demand respect and reciprocal obligations from their husbands. The strategies practiced by African American women during and after emancipation reveal the continuities between the prewar and post–Civil War periods that made urban freedom in the District of Columbia different and distinct. Despite the dislocations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction and the attempts of agents of the Union Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau to impose Republican ideals on Black women, emancipation ultimately served to reinforce prewar patterns of gendered behavior in former slave households. While Black men experienced great demand for their labor during the war, the resumption of a peacetime employment market meant that the majority of Black women would have to work in freedom.

Through a focus on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem “Praise Song for the Day,” and Amiri Baraka’s 9/11 poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” this chapter analyzes the twenty-first-century African American literary mood of melancholic hope (an inseparable fusion of melancholy and hope). When Citizen, “Praise Song for the Day,” and “Somebody Blew Up America” are read alongside each other, a profound tension emerges between the stasis of the afterlife of slavery and the movement of Black life that is not overdetermined by the afterlife of slavery. New ways of thinking about African American citizenship are one of the central focal points in the first decades of twenty-first-century African American literature. The simultaneity of the era of the first Black president (and the larger symbolism of a loosening of institutionalized antiblack racism) and the era of the Black Lives Matter movement continues to lead writers, working in the traditions of African American literature, to depictions of melancholic hope. This chapter ends with a focus on how the melancholic hope of twenty-first-century African American citizenship can produce a feeling of black transnational citizenship (the feeling of black collective unbelonging and a refusal of the imagined communities created by national borders).

The modern lyric, emerging in the late eighteenth century, is the genre par excellence of the private individual alone with their thoughts. The construction of material and psychic interiority for the normative bourgeois subject has relied on the violent dispossession of Black people through slavery, colonialism, and other forms of exploitation. This chapter first considers the possibilities of re-marking the lyric as Black – reading the claims of Theodor Adorno’s account of lyric’s social character through a history he does not consider – before turning to contemporary questions regarding the emergence of the lyric as the preeminent genre of African American poetry since the 1980s.

In the 1980s, a theoretical turn in African American literary criticism helped institutionalize the study of African American literature by insisting on its formal complexity and distinctiveness. The racial text could no longer be read as reducible to its social context. In that same decade, a materialist line of inquiry sought to reconcile formal and contextual analysis by examining the ways black-authored books were published by major companies and received by the critical establishment. Drawing on methods from book history and print culture studies, a sociology of African American literature developed as the academic field of study took shape around canon-building projects. Two approaches to African American literary sociology emerged out of the 1990s: skepticism about the book’s capacity to represent racial experience, and optimism about the commercial success of diverse authors. Over time, these approaches merged into general studies of the racial text’s shifting status in the literary marketplace. With that expanded focus, the sociology of African American literature today sheds light on the way culture and commerce intersect in the making, selling, and reading of black-authored books.

This chapter is an overview of the problems and uses that affect theory offers the study of African American literature. Defined as aside from the traditions of thought that made black literary fields thinkable in an institutional context, it is not difficult to surmise, in generous faith, why the turn to affect has been inhospitable to lines of inquiry that presume a racial subject. Meanwhile, questions regarding the transmission of affect have remained central to the project of African American literature since before its advent as literature. This chapter considers how the work of the critic in the field necessarily presumes the relevance of affect, arguing that consciously reading for affect wards off duller accounts of what African American literary texts signify in favor of vivacious dialogue on what they do and how.

This chapter discusses Afrofuturism with reference to a wide range of literary works, influential critical and theoretical accounts, and artistic manifestos, identifying its overlaps and distinctions from the broader speculative turn apparent in African American literature from the 1980s onward. The chapter focuses on two rubrics that lend cohesion to the array of genres, styles, and aesthetic principles associated with the label of Afrofuturism: the politics of time and the idea of race as technology. Through various devices of temporal dislocation, Afrofuturist works invent revisionist histories, shatter consensus narratives about the present, and challenge prevailing discourses of futurity. In addition, the chapter argues that Afrofuturist literature at its best defamiliarizes established ways of reading race through its innovative engagement with race-making techniques and technologies ranging from genre conventions to genetic engineering.