Der Sammelband basiert auf dem 1999 in Münster abgehaltenen Collegium for African American Research. "The sixteen essays in this volume were selected from forty-eight papers submitted as potential contributions, and then they were rewritten. They now combine to make a continuous statement about black agency from the earliest slavery times through the end of the twentieth century." (III) Inhalt: Fritz Gysin / Christopher Mulvey: Liberating the Black Americas (1-11). I. Beyond Servitude: Strategies for Advancing and Reducing Identity and Agency: John Michael Vlach: "Out of That Black Skin": Agency and Attitude in the Landscape of Slavery (15-23); Cynthia S. Hamilton: A Is Not for Agency: The Politics of Benevolence in Abolitionist Children's Literature (25-37); Boris Vejdovsky: Bodies of Resistance: Bodies of American People, American Texts, and the American Nation (39-55). II. Revolt and Respect in Reconstruction: Heiner Bus: Trading Slavery and Liberation in the Americas: The Spanish-American Connection in the Works of Olaudah Equiano, Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, and Sutton E. Griggs (59-69); Walter Hölbling / Justine Tally: The 1898 Wilmington Massacre in History and Literature: An Essay on the Discourse of Power (71-93); Stephanie Browner: "Social Surgery": Medicine and Race in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (95-103); Christine Gerhardt: Conflicting Politics of Liberation: The Reconstruction Period in Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892) and Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966) (105-117). III. Resistance and Release: Liberating Women: Hanna Wallinger: Alice Dunbar-Nelson and the Color Line (121-132); Helene Christol: Militant Autobiography: The Case of Assata Shakur (133-142); Veronica Watson: Incorporating Metaphors: Victimization and Empowerment in Gayl Jones's Eva's Man (143-152); Johanna X. K. Garvey: A Dream Deferred? Languages and Spaces of Resistance in Caribbean Women's Fiction (153-171). IV. Transition and Transformation Through the Verbal Arts: Hermine Pinson: African/American Transformations in Melvin B. Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (175-190); Lorenzo Thomas: "Stuck in the Promised Land": African American Poets at the Edge of the Twenty-First Century (191-201); Günter H. Lenz: The Politics of African American Literary and Cultural Critique: From the Black Arts / Black Aesthetic Movement to a Black Postmodern Multiculturalism (203-218). V. Sites and Silences in the Visual Arts: Iris Schmeisser: Liberating Views / Views of Liberation: The Photographic Side of the Black Consciousness Movement (221-240); Sabine Sielke: The Discourse of Liberation, the Deployment of Silence, and the "Liberation" of Discourse (241-257).