The reuseable past

Zoe Frances Trodd

This dissertation examines protest memory in the literature of the Long Civil Rights Movement. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, anti-lynching and desegregation writers and artists found in abolitionism a reusable past. Used in anti-lynching literature, used again in desegregation literature, abolitionism was an activist muse. I examine explicit invocations of abolitionism and show writers' and artists' deep familiarity with 19 th -century abolitionist literature and history. Anti-lynching and desegregation artists and writers turned abolitionism into a living protest legacy. But they also adapted the protest aesthetics of literary abolitionism. Identifying an abolitionist "politics of form," I trace two elements of that aesthetic across the literature of anti-lynching and desegregation, arguing that writers and artists fused protest memory and the politics of form. Part One theorizes...