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

The familiar twentieth-century notion of underground as a subversive realm, Lara Langer Cohen writes in Going Underground, originated in nineteenth-century developments: from archeology to geology to the explosion of mining and drilling set off by the industrial revolution. It seems that when radicals such as Karl Marx tapped into that realm, the stable and oppressive order was threatened by upsurges from powerful forces below. Moreover, Cohen argues, those “ideas of underground were often racialized” (p. 8), both because Black liberation movements starting with the Underground Railroad embraced the metaphor and because of the “subterranization of Blackness” through “racist hierarchies.” With those key insights, Cohen embarks on an entrancing tour of nineteenth-century underground-themed literary and political writing and cultural production. Going Underground commences with Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, which emerged as a tourist attraction in the 1830s. From that subterranean vantage point, enslaved guides mapped Black geographies captured by an eclectic group of white writers who absorbed the irresistible influence of their talented underground chaperons. The book next turns to “Early Black Radical Undergrounds,” successively exploring David Walker's Appeal (1829), Frederick Douglass's speech “Slavery, the Slumbering Volcano” (1849), Martin Delany's serial novel Blake (1859, 1861–1862), and William J. Wilson's serial “Afric-American Picture Gallery” (1859), all of which employ underground imagery. In turning to the volume's namesake movement, Cohen captures something essential about the Underground Railroad—its psychological impact based on the “extraordinary fantasies it animated.” To illustrate the point, Cohen adduces the remarkable multitalented Black artist Joshua McCarter Simpson, who, through songbooks such as The Emancipation Car (1854), contributed significantly to the mythic quality the movement attained that was part of its unparalleled effectiveness. Chapter 5 takes up the Black spiritualist Paschal Beverly Randolph as a builder of “otherworldly undergrounds,” a rereading Cohen acknowledges to be “less obvious” as it does not involve “an actually existing underground” (p. 136).