This chapter traces the process by which villages became cities and city-states, which grew in some places into larger-scale states and empires, with a focus on the social institutions and cultural norms that facilitated these developments, including hereditary dynasties, hierarchical families, and notions of ethnicity. Writing and other means of recording information were invented to serve the needs of people who lived close to one another in cities and states. Oral rituals of worship, healing, and celebration in which everyone participated grew into religions, philosophies, and branches of knowledge presided over by specialists, including Judaism and Confucian thought. Social differences became formalized in systems that divided enslaved and free, or that grouped people into castes or orders, distinctions that were maintained through marriage and cultural ideologies. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity were created and then expanded in the cosmopolitan worlds of classical empires, shaping family life and social practices.

Most of the classical empires collapsed in the middle of the first millennium, but despite this collapse various regions of the world became more culturally, commercially, and politically integrated in the millennium that followed, a process traced in this chapter. Mercantile and religious networks, including Islam, linked growing cities and glittering courts, where hereditary rulers and their entourages of elites developed institutions and ceremonies that strengthened royal authority, and created courtly cultures with distinctive codes of behavior. All of these relied for their wealth on a spread and intensification of agriculture, which happened in both the eastern and western hemispheres, and was interwoven with changes in social and gender structures. Cites such as Constantinople, Tenochtitlan, and Hangzhou grew into large metropolises, and religion, trade, and diplomacy motivated people to travel, creating regional and transregional zones of exchange in goods and ideas.

The references to liberty and equality in the Declaration have been contested from the very beginning. Although some have argued that they had no application to slavery, many people in the late eighteenth century perceived them as clearly inconsistent with slavery. These references have triggered equally conflicting responses from courts, where judges have relied on them to abolish minimum wage laws and to strike down regulations of businesses. Other judges have invoked these references in support of more equal legislative chambers and same-sex marriage. Supporters of every conceivable position have relied on this part of the Declaration. These references have become in effect a national Rorhschach test – one sees in them what one is already inclined to see. Given this contested history, courts invoking this language should do so with caution.

This chapter analyzes Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), arguing that the Supreme Court’s rulings – that free persons of African descent were not constitutional “citizens” and that the Missouri Compromise violated the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause – were grievous interpretive errors. It examines Chief Justice Taney’s majority opinion, which denied Dred Scott’s citizenship based on a flawed historical claim and invalidated Congress’s power to prohibit slavery in territories by inventing “substantive due process,” asserting a fundamental right to slave property. The chapter contends that these holdings misread the Constitution’s text, structure, and history, as Justice Curtis’s dissent demonstrated, showing free African Americans were citizens in 1787 and Congress had long regulated territorial slavery. It argues the Constitution was not inherently proslavery and it defends the Founders against the Court’s calumny that they intended to exclude African Americans from the principles of the Declaration and the benefits of the Constitution. It argues the Dred Scott Court misused originalism, improperly projecting the ideological views of Chief Justice Taney’s intellectual milieu back onto the Founders. The case sets the stage for exploring Lincoln’s response and underscores the limits of judicial review in a constitutional democracy.

Phillis Wheatley Peters’s America was both a place and an idea, a reality and an aspiration. Through her writings she transformed herself from being a victim in the actual America into a voice for the America she envisioned. Wheatley Peters’ works should be considered diachronically, recognizing the significance of when she wrote what and to whom, rather than synchronically, as if her positions were unchanging over time. Anyone who attempts to identify her political beliefs must consider how free she was to express them, as well as whether the voice we hear is that of the author, rather than that of a persona she has created. Her image of America evolved radically during the 1770s, as did her vision of her place and role in it. The many ways in which Wheatley Peters subtly and indirectly confronted the issues of racism, sexism, and slavery are increasingly appreciated. Her ambition to be recognized as America’s unofficial poet laureate should be undisputed. Considered a remarkable curiosity during her lifetime, Wheatley Peters is now recognized as a major historical, literary, and political figure, whose significance transcends her ethnic, gender, and national identities.

The roots of American narcissism can be traced back to its beginnings. European whites fled to North America to escape repression. Once settled, they assumed a posture of superiority toward Native Americans, black slaves, Chinese immigrants, and others. After the Civil War, American narcissism expressed itself differently through the forced assimilation of Native tribes and the influence of white supremacists, robber barons, eugenics, and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Despite advances in civil rights, the United States in the twenty-first century evidences a great deal of support for a narcissistic posture.

This chapter establishes the spirituals as the bedrock of African American poetry to characterize the tradition as inherently innovative from its origins to the present. It challenges the standard claim that African American poetry begins with texts written by enslaved persons reflecting familiarity with canonical British poetry. In this approach, criticism has generally considered African American poetry in dialogue with the mainstream canon, whether emulating or criticizing its values. Privileging written texts in conventional forms has resulted in devaluing poetry reflecting characteristics such as orality, performance, anonymity, and communal collaboration. It also results in wide acceptance of an African American poetry canon that historically has overlooked the innovative nature of this genre from its origins and an ensuing tradition of avant-garde poetry. From this biased perspective, the spirituals have been overlooked as the genesis of African American poetry, even though that is their rightful place. Viewing the spirituals as the true foundation of this tradition implies shifting some assumptions not just about these poems, but about the place and meaning of originality.

Between World War II and independence, roughly 1945 to 1960, anticolonial activists successfully elucidated a link between the spread of Europhone education and freedom from colonial rule. This chapter frames African decolonization as also a Black Atlantic emancipation to reveal why educational aspirations were so central to mid twentieth-century anticolonial imaginings.

Whereas male poets such as Coleridge and Keats used the figure of the witch to explore the connections between the shapeshifting powers of the female demonic and (male) creativity, the third chapter reveals how women novelists like Charlotte Smith and Maria Edgeworth remapped contemporary cultural anxieties in Britain surrounding witches and transgressive female energies onto the colonial landscape of Jamaica. These two authors position the female practitioners of Obeah as an intriguing alternative to the degradation of women in England and the enslaved populations in the colonies.

This chapter examines a form of racialization at Rome that declared certain non-Romans to be innately suitable to enslavement. In an instance of racecraft through stagecraft, Roman comedy contributed to the naturalisation of this noxious ideology by presenting a cast of characters whose visual appearance and social or legal status corresponds directly to predictable sets of character traits. At the same time, the enslaved and freed themselves wrote and performed Roman comedies, so the fabula palliata also pushes back in important respects against their times’ racial formations. The discussion concludes with an analysis of the life of the comic playwright Terence whose authorship of his plays was called into question because he allegedly lacked the innate ability for impressive literary production.

This essay reflects on the challenges and intentions behind translating Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. He examines the delicate balance between fidelity to the original and fluency in English, striving to preserve Carpentier’s baroque style and powerful themes of colonialism, slavery and racism. The chapter delves into the cultural and historical layers of the novel, especially its foundation in lo real maravilloso – a Latin American lens where the marvelous and real coexist. Through personal insight, the author portrays translation as both an impossible and an essential act that revitalizes meaning for contemporary readers.

This chapter uses the theoretical frameworks of racial formations, racecraft, and intersectionality to analyse the racial dimensions of the two accounts of the massacre of the Pelasgian men of Lemnos and their enslaved Thracian concubines by the Pelasgian women of Lemnos in Apollonius’ Argonautica. The chapter argues that the epic presents the Lemnian women’s actions as driven by their sense that the Pelasgian men had overturned the racial hierarchy of the island that had previously benefitted them. The Lemnian women’s violent resistance to their change of status is presented by the narrator as an overreaction prompted by sexual jealousy new sentence. But it is presented by Hypsipyle as the restoration of the ‘proper’ racial order. Intersectionality helps to tease out the different racial destinies of the two groups of non-Greek women on Lemnos. The free Pelasgian women are to be the mothers of racially superior sons, whereas the Thracian girls, as mothers of the racially inferior sons of the Pelasgians, are to be exterminated with them so that that Lemnos can fulfil its destiny to become the source of the Greek founders of Cyrene.

The revisionist school has asserted that pre-colonial indigenous polities were fluid shadow entities and that pre-British South Asian regimes had no law. This line of argument claims that unique conditions of India prevented the emergence of states with well-defined contiguous territories possessing centralised governments. Ironically this view is reminiscent of colonial British scholars’ argument about pre-colonial India. The argument that pre-British India had no laws and that the ruler’s will was the ultimate authority is incorrect. Rulers of pre-British indigenous polities did not operate in a vacuum, but had to take into account long-established practices, existing procedures and the presence of local powerbrokers. Arabic discourse for the Delhi Sultanate and Turko-Mongol conventions for the Mughals, along with local custom, shaped the legal history of medieval India’s militaries. Overall, the political theorists of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire and the ‘Hindu’ dynasties accepted the pivotal role of the monarchy and the army in shaping the structure of interpolity relationships.

Classical linguistics and racecraft have an intertwined history, in that Indo-European linguistics arose concurrently with scientific racism, and shares many of the same metaphors and conceptual frameworks. This chapter touches on this shared history, before exploring some aspects of the metalinguistics and sociolinguistics of race in the ancient world. In particular, the concept of ‘linguistic racism’ will be used to look at how ancient texts use lack of (shared) language to imply a lack of humanity, and how non-Greek speakers are compared to animals. It will also look at depictions of foreign-language speakers as the linguistic ‘other’, particularly in depictions of enslaved people.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the book and elaborates on the significance of racial doubt as a category of analysis beyond nineteenth-century Cuba. Given that racism has deep cultural and affective roots, the skeptical analyses that humanistic research centers will remain vital, even as the institutions supporting such research are destroyed by oligarchic, race-baiting forces. Skepticism is a power that the Humanities share with racial doubt. It implies, counterintuitively, a hope – to question in order to get things right – and a pledge to knowledge – to avoid denial, ignorance, and false explanations. No matter how indispensable one’s convictions about race might be, clinging to them would mean forsaking this hope, this pledge, and the broad political alliances required to imagine a world better than our own.

This chapter examines the theological and political ramifications of Sancho’s imaginings of the afterlife. While he doesn’t believe in Hell, Sancho uses the figurative language of infernal character to criticize chattel slavery, religious bigotry, and British colonialism. When he describes Heaven, meanwhile, Sancho projects himself and his readers into an ideal religious collective that includes American Quakers, enslaved West Africans, Roman Catholics, Hindus, and Muslim clerics, as well as fellow Anglican Protestants. Attending to Sancho’s notion of the afterlife reveals the distinctiveness of his religious thought among Black anti-slavery intellectuals. His pluralistic definition of religious virtue allows him to extend belonging further than his contemporaries – beyond co-religionists and even beyond the category of the Christian. Logics of mixture and mingling in Sancho’s letters enable him to enlarge divine love and salvation without universalizing belief, holding a multiracial and trans-denominational community together without eliding differences.

Chapter 1 conceptualizes a primary form of racial doubt: questioning the equation of blackness with slavery. It is built around the testimony of Ben Newton, who declared he was born free in the United States, kidnapped at the age of ten, and subsequently enslaved in Cuba for several decades. It explores the degree to which racial doubt was intrinsic to the tension between racist agnosia (the social practice of actively ignoring exploited, racialized people) and anti-racist recognition (whereby some of these people could make themselves seen or heard). As Ben Newton pointed out when he reached the US consulate in 1853, “almost everybody” knew his story, but neither his owners nor the local authorities had felt pressured to liberate him. When he told this same story in a new context, recognition and freedom became less elusive. Through a focus on Ben’s testimony, the chapter charts the legal, practical, and linguistic terrains in which captives challenged their enslavement.

Ignatius Sancho’s correspondents spanned the British Empire, from India to the Caribbean and North America. One of the earliest reviewers of the posthumous publication of Sancho’s Letters in 1782 remarked that “Sancho may be styled—what is very uncommon for men of his complexion, A man of letters. His commerce with the Muses was supported amid the trivial and momentary interruptions of a shop.” The publication of Sancho’s correspondence revealed him to also be a lettered man. The contents and style of his writings demonstrate that he was truly a man of letters in every sense of the phrase. The demographic, geographic, and social diversity of Sancho’s correspondents ultimately substantiates the observation he made to Margaret Cocksedge on July 31, 1775: “I have lived with the great—and been favoured by beauty.”

Ignatius Sancho described his Letters as the product of an “African sensibility.” This chapter explores what he meant by this, locating the term “sensibility,” and its cognate “sentiment,” in the context of Scottish Enlightenment science of man (David Hume, Lord Kames, Adam Smith). Through close reading, it examines how Sancho, as a sentimental epistolary writer, used his sensibility to affirm his humanity, reinforce friendships, and make political observation. Sancho’s sentimental epistolary practice, shaped by his correspondence with Laurence Sterne in 1766, was notable for his use of the dash to punctuate his writing. The chapter argues that although both writers use the dash for rhetorical effect, Sancho’s “dashing style” is distinct from Sterne’s punctuational practice. The chapter argues also that Sancho’s mode of sensibility was important in his assessment as a sentimental man of letters in the debate on African arts and letters in the 1770s and early 1780s.

The Introduction explains why nineteenth-century Cuba is a particularly rich context for studying racialism (the assumption that social hierarchies are based on the existence of races), racial doubt (those moments when this assumption gets questioned and racial differences seem less clear), and the different groups of racialized people who mobilized doubt as they worked to reinvent themselves and their society. It also shows how the analysis of the notions at the core of each chapter – racist agnosia, farce, passing-as-open-secret, fictions of racial coherence, back talk, and the reappropriation of Blackness – illuminates present-day critiques of color blindness. Finally, it explains why the book is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on enslaved people’s testimonies and abolitionist writing that attacked illegal slavery by denouncing lies, falsification, and farce; the second one, on free people of color who wrestled with two “one-drop” rules (one which rendered a person not-white, the other which made them whiter); and the third one, on the emergence of Black Cuban writing.