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Lara Langer Cohen’s Going Underground offers a genealogy of “the underground” as a space of subversion, tracing its formulation in Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. The author will discuss the book with Daphne Brooks and S.S. Sandhu

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Lara Langer Cohen is the author of Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke, 2023) and Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College.

Daphne Brooks is the author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard, 2021). She is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University.

S.S. Sandhu is the author of Night Haunts: A Journey Through The London Night (Verso, 2010) and Associate Professor of English and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

ABOUT THE BOOK
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.