The coining of the term “intellectuals” in 1898 coincided with W. E. B. Du Bois’s effort to disseminate values and ideals unbounded by the color line. Du Bois’s ideal of a “higher and broader and more varied human culture” is at the heart of a cosmopolitan tradition that Color and Culture identifies as a missing chapter in American literary and cultural history. The book offers a much needed and startlingly new historical perspective on “black intellectuals” as a social category, ranging over a century—from Frederick Douglass to Patricia Williams, from Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt to Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke, from Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin to Samuel Delany and Adrienne Kennedy. These writers challenge two durable assumptions: that high culture is “white culture” and that racial uplift is the sole concern of the black intellectual.

The remarkable tradition that this book recaptures, culminating in a cosmopolitan disregard for demands for racial “authenticity” and group solidarity, is strikingly at odds with the identity politics and multicultural movements of our day. In the Du Boisian tradition Ross Posnock identifies a universalism inseparable from the particular and open to ethnicity—an approach with the power to take us beyond the provincialism of postmodern tribalism.

An examination of early American literature that highlights how racial divides exacerbated—and were exacerbated by—the spread of infection

In April of 1721, the HMS Seahorse arrived in Boston from the West Indies, causing a smallpox epidemic that would plague the city for the next year. Of its 12,000 inhabitants, nearly fifty percent were infected, and 900 people died. Like the coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020, the outbreak also brought to the surface deep divides in the social fabric of colonial New England and laid the groundwork for racialized political inequities that we continue to grapple with today.

In Contagion’s Wake examines a range of American outbreak narratives, both historical and fictional, written between the early 1700s and the early 1900s—from the rise of inoculation through the advent of germ theory. Author Kelly L. Bezio argues that during this period, literature about communicable disease was dominated by white authors, such as Cotton Mather and Edgar Allen Poe, who tended to privilege white suffering and survival while obscuring Black suffering and vulnerability. Black authors, however, such as Olaudah Equiano and Frances E.W. Harper, developed variations on plot structures, metaphors, and imagery that drew upon contagion to represent racial injustice and further the cause of Black liberation.

The diverse texts Bezio analyzes vary extensively in genre and geographical location, and in the illnesses that feature in their pages. Significant disorders from the era, including yellow fever, smallpox, consumption, and cholera, make frequent appearances, as do less culturally dominant diseases such as St. Anthony’s Fire. In Contagion’s Wake contends that representations of communicable disease should not be understood only as within their own historical moment; rather, they function more like a DNA code for our present time.

An examination of early American literature that highlights how racial divides exacerbated—and were exacerbated by—the spread of infection

In April of 1721, the HMS Seahorse arrived in Boston from the West Indies, causing a smallpox epidemic that would plague the city for the next year. Of its 12,000 inhabitants, nearly fifty percent were infected, and 900 people died. Like the coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020, the outbreak also brought to the surface deep divides in the social fabric of colonial New England and laid the groundwork for racialized political inequities that we continue to grapple with today.

In Contagion’s Wake examines a range of American outbreak narratives, both historical and fictional, written between the early 1700s and the early 1900s—from the rise of inoculation through the advent of germ theory. Author Kelly L. Bezio argues that during this period, literature about communicable disease was dominated by white authors, such as Cotton Mather and Edgar Allen Poe, who tended to privilege white suffering and survival while obscuring Black suffering and vulnerability. Black authors, however, such as Olaudah Equiano and Frances E.W. Harper, developed variations on plot structures, metaphors, and imagery that drew upon contagion to represent racial injustice and further the cause of Black liberation.

The diverse texts Bezio analyzes vary extensively in genre and geographical location, and in the illnesses that feature in their pages. Significant disorders from the era, including yellow fever, smallpox, consumption, and cholera, make frequent appearances, as do less culturally dominant diseases such as St. Anthony’s Fire. In Contagion’s Wake contends that representations of communicable disease should not be understood only as within their own historical moment; rather, they function more like a DNA code for our present time.