One aim of emancipatory social movements is to make political communities more inclusive. The way in which a movement pursues transformative political change depends on its account of how political actors understand one another as members of a shared community. Drawing on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, I argue that acknowledgement is a mode of practical understanding that effectively combats exclusionary ideas of political community. I acknowledge you as a fellow member of my political community because you enact a commitment to the community's fundamental principles; enacting such a commitment is what makes you a member of the community. My acknowledgement itself consists in a responsiveness to the fact—independent of my own judgment— that you are a member of the community. This responsiveness manifests in how we comport ourselves in relation to one another in daily political life, which is the primary locus of intervention for effective efforts at making political communities more inclusive.

This dissertation interprets how two antebellum American works of fiction, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and Martin R. Delany’s Blake, represent the relationship between conjuring and resistance to oppression. It is unclear how we should conceive of this relationship: on the one hand, historical slave conspiracies and revolts in the Atlantic world demonstrated the unequivocal power of conjuring for assembling collectives; on the other hand, many slaves who turned to conjuring to ease their suffering later dismissed the practice as nonsense in their autobiographies. My close-readings of these two texts are supported by a wide-range of historical and cultural materials, including the vast literature on conjuring, the Peruvian discourse on the saya y manto, and the discourse on fetishism. I conclude that acts of conjuring drive plot and explain a character’s actions or inactions under circumstances in which resistance to oppression involves obtaining or preserving freedom for presently or formerly enslaved people. In addition, this dissertation provides a method for reading conjuring in Benito Cereno and interprets a form of conjuring in Blake that readers have neglected.

This dissertation examines interactions and circuits of exchange between Anglophone and Hispanophone literary cultures in the wake of the Mexican-American War, particularly those involving African-American, Indigenous, Latin American, and proto Latina/o-American communities. My dissertation grapples with the breadth of multilingual Americas, examining the stakes of U.S. territorial expansion and empire through a range of translations, adaptations, and literary borrowings that enabled the transit and transmutation of texts in the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I focus on works by a range of writers, poets, activists, politicians, and translators, including Carlos Morla Vicuña, John Rollin Ridge, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, José Martí, Helen Hunt Jackson, Martin Delany, and Willa Cather. I draw upon letters, periodicals, novels, and poems that circulated in the Americas, arguing that choices and practices of translation were in dialogue with shifting frameworks of race and ethnicity in these different contexts. My analysis of these textual forms depicts some of the distinct ways that authors employed translation as a mode of political activism. Ultimately, this dissertation examines the relation between translation and national belonging in these different contexts, unveiling the varied forms by which transgressive translation strategies were harnessed as forms of anti-imperialist work even as they often initiated or replicated neocolonial and imperialist practices.