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

by Lara Langer Cohen

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

288 pages, Hardcover

Published January 20, 2023

Reviews

[Daphne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is less of a review and more of a reflection on reading this book at the same time as processing the recent movie I Saw the TV Glow but here goes nothing

15 years ago, José Estaban Muñoz published Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity largely heralding the arrival of the the temporal turn within the Queer Academy. As prominent Queer Geographers (like Elizabeth Freeman or Karen Tongson) elucidate in taking up Muñoz's call is that space-time can not be separated neatly. The "then" and "there" of Cruising Utopia become the "when" and "where" of queer temporogeoraphies. While interesting, I have always found queer temporality to be lacking in political commitments (especially in the face of Jack Halberstam's virulent transmisogyny).

Lara Langer Cohen's Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States resounds sort of like a clarion call for me in imbuing queer temporalities and geographies with radical political commitments (sort of). She never differentiates out how the Southern Aristocratic abolitionism of Mattie Griffith is different from the Black Settler-Colonial aspirations of Martin Delany or any other burgeoning political traditions of the emancipation moment. That said, I do not think that if you're not familar with the disaggregate ideologies of various groups differed from one another than this book is not meant to be a jumping off point (Cohen is an academic literary critic writing for other 19th century literature scholars after all). I do find, however, that her archive amply shows how Uncle Sam wasn't seen as the only valid polity -- there were groups looking to slay the "Great Dragon" after all. Where Cohen shines is introducing the Underground-as-Geography in a doubled way. The Underground exists under Urban Centres as a place of (usually Black) radicalism, but at the same time Black populations of cities are kept under racial apartheid usually in neo-reservations within Amerika (these are dialectical).

Perhaps then, the problem with Queer Studies is not, then, its alleged "metronormativity" (the idea that queer people are better off in cities -- see: In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives), but rather that White Queer Geographies, urban, suburban, and rural structure racial apartheid in Amerika? In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman coins the concept of "Temporal Drag" but more and more we are seeing young white lesbians "fall out of time" (so to speak) into emulating 1950s butchfemme aesthetics (racism included). What does it mean to have queer chronopolitics if your slipping among the timestream only serves to shore up the contradictions inherent in racial apartheid to homonationalist ends?

idk. Going Underground is a really good book though.

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

a wide ranging and creative exploration of both figural and literal 'undergrounds' in 19th c literature and media. Cohen is deft at teasing out the differing stakes of quite material undergrounds like caves, and more fantastical, or imagined ones, like the underground railroad or of pulpy 'city mystery' novels, to deeply fantastic undergrounds like occult writing and practice. the contribution is extended further by Cohen's simultaneously cohesive and expansive mobilization of a variety of theories of the underground--on the one hand, Marx's and Marxists' (Bataille, Benjamin) explorations of deep critique and revolutionary movements, and on the other, contemporary Black theory's sonic undergrounds (Moten, especially). the book ends as the meaning of 'the underground' had shifted from literal secret spaces to figural insurrections to, finally, a metaphor for the individual psyche (sub/un conscious); i wish there was a sequel that connects these dots from this perspective! (the very popular rosalind williams book 'notes from the underground', which picks up fin de sicle science fiction, doesn't quite do it for me). maybe a niche interest/audience, but i loved it and can't wait to write with this text and its ideas.

[University of Chicago Magazine]

From our pages (Spring/23): The metaphor of the underground—an image of clandestine, subversive activity—was popularized in newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s. Bringing together a variety of 19th-century American texts—Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensational city mystery novels, sex-magic manuals, secret society initiation rites—Lara Langer Cohen reveals the layers that the image of the underground contained at the time. This expanded notion of the underground, she suggests, can help us imagine new worldviews and modes of political activity today.

https://mag.uchicago.edu/university-n...