Emancipation’s Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body by Riché Richardson (review)

themselves, as opposed to the latent possibilities found within Puritanism? Second, to what extent could this latter-day Puritan self-description compete with and perhaps displace contemporaneous formations of whiteness? This is an undertaking that could reveal affinities or antagonisms between religious and racial taxonomies. Differentiating the abolitionists’ Puritan genealogy from the whiteness of American nationalism may also require further reframing of and distance from the familiar Americanist narratives of American literary nationalism on which the book relies, its nod to Nietzsche’s concept of critical historiography notwithstanding. Perhaps the greater ongoing challenge and opportunity for abolitionist scholarship in this period of abolitionist incandescence is to recognize the constructs through which we reconstruct the antebellum abolition movement—in this case, print-mediated public culture—as “color-blind” liberal frames for inclusion, despite their value to our recovery of African American literary and political life. Indeed, the interest that drives students and scholars to modern abolition in its contemporary context may well call us to demystify the role of print and to ask not just what people were reading or even who was reading but also what people were doing with what they were reading. No doubt students interested and engaged in abolitionist social movements are asking the same questions of readers of today’s abolitionist scholarship. The dynamic, socially productive function of an abolitionist literature within African American and white reform cultures—paired with a scholarship that tracks and projects its reorganization of gendered and racialized social relations into our own time—remains the legacy of a movement that continues to unsettle us.