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Going Underground

Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Going Underground

Book Pages: 288 Illustrations: 8 illustrations Published: January 2023

Author: Lara Langer Cohen

Subjects
Literature and Literary Studies, American Studies, Cultural Studies

First popularized by newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s, the underground serves as a metaphor for subversive activity that remains central to our political vocabulary. In Going Underground, Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of this now familiar idea while seeking out versions of the underground that were left behind along the way. Outlining how the underground’s figurative sense first took shape through the associations of literal subterranean spaces with racialized Blackness, she examines a vibrant world of nineteenth-century US subterranean literature that includes Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. Cohen finds that the undergrounds in this literature offer sites of political possibility that exceed the familiar framework of resistance, suggesting that nineteenth-century undergrounds can inspire new modes of world-making and world-breaking for a time when this world feels increasingly untenable.

Praise

"A fascinating book . . . that shines an important light on the building of an established concept." — Omari Averette-Phillips, World History Encyclopedia

“Lara Langer Cohen ingeniously weaves together a capacious range of underexplored materials to bring alive the concept of ‘the underground’ in its many instantiations. We descend with Cohen to new depths as she deftly shows these undergrounds to be at once place, practice, and cultural formation, all of which gesture to the powerful potential of the unknowable and unfathomable to undermine the world as we know it and lead us to new paradigms of existence.” — Jayna Brown, author of Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

“When was the last time you saw spelunking, sex magic, the Underground Railroad, secret societies, and political subversion all in the same book? In this fascinating and delicious study Lara Langer Cohen offers a genealogical tracing of the origins and impact of the now commonplace trope of the underground and a stunning archival exhumation of the broad array of political fantasies animated by it. Cohen’s political instincts are nothing if not commanding, and her suggestion that her book might inspire its readers to summon associations with other undergrounds for activation in the present is a mark of her generosity and contemporary commitment.” — Eric Lott, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism

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Author/Editor Bios Back to Top

Lara Langer Cohen is Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College, author of The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture, and coeditor of Early African American Print Culture.

Table of Contents Back to Top
Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction: A Basement Shut Off and Forgotten during the Nineteenth Century  1
1. The “Blackness of Darkness” in Mammoth Cave  25
2. Early Black Radical Undergrounds  46
3. The Underground Railroad’s Undergrounds  74
4. The Depths of Astonishment: City Mysteries and Subterranean Unknowability  104
5. “To Drop beneath the Floors of the Outer World”: Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Undergrounds  133
6. Subterranean Fire: Anarchist Visions of the Underground  166
Epilogue: Staying Underground  198
Notes  205
Bibliography  245
Index  267
Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional InformationBack to Top
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1948-0 / Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-1684-7 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-2412-5
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