Virtual Book Talk: "Going Underground" 

Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States with Lara Langer Cohen
Presented on: Thursday, April 25, 2024
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 this talk, Lara Langer Cohen discusses how her recent book, Going Underground, excavates the long history of this now-familiar idea, while seeking out versions of the underground that got 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 U.S. 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.