At the heart of America's slave system were confined, controlled and exclusive spaces. Slaves’ placelessness began with the Middle Passage, continued with a system that moved them ceaselessly south and west, and embodied itself in the spatial order of plantations that enabled surveillance and denied unobserved space to its enslaved inhabitants. Enslaved people confronted what Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) names as the apparent “boundlessness of slave territory,” with its deliberately “vague and indistinct” geography. But against slavery's enforced placelessness, slaves and abolitionists created a geography of dissent that encompassed what Vincent Harding in There Is a River (1981, 114) has termed the “microcosmic new societies” of escaped slaves in surrounding forests and swamps; the Great Dismal Swamp that after Nat Turner's uprising became what Daphne Brooks in Bodies in Dissent (2006, 105) terms a symbolic site in slavery's cultural imaginary, “synonymous with radical black subterfuge and resistance efforts”; and an antislavery visual and literary culture filled with fences, walls, ruined buildings, damaged landscapes, holes, ditches, hidden havens and sites of refuge. As Melvin Dixon notes in Ride Out the Wilderness (1987, 2), slaves’ own literary and musical culture created “alternative landscapes … apart from any marginal, prescribed ‘place’” (ibid.), a “literary and figurative geography” that included “the wilderness, the underground, and the mountaintop” (ibid., 3).

Martha Schoolman's Abolitionist Geographies builds on this previous work about slavery's spatial dynamics but takes us in an important new direction, via diasporic and hemispheric studies towards the political and aesthetic concern of anti-slavery writers with the country's spaces, divides, borders and territories. Schoolman charts a geography of dissent in the interrelated work of Martin Delany, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among other figures, exploring their spatial language and imagery as political critique. Literary abolitionists saw the anti-slavery battle as one for space and issued an experimental challenge to slavery's own spatial practice. Their abolitionist politics of form – a complex spatio-symbolism – examined anti-slavery's ethical contractions and acknowledged abolitionists’ own spatial remove from slavery's sites and scenes.

Schoolman's book is important for its theorization of this key abolitionist aesthetic. The “geography of dissent” is the latest in a few excellent recent theories of abolitionist aesthetics: Linda Grasso's argument in The Artistry of Anger (2002, 4) for an anti-slavery mode of “literary discontent”; John Stauffer's discussion in “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review, 25, 1 (2005), 117, of an “aesthetics of freedom” that created a “performative self [to] … help usher in a new world of interracial equality”; Daphne Brooks's “aesthetics of escapology” in Bodies in Dissent (116), whereby a “formalistically challenging abolitionist project” (68) tried to defeat subjugation and social death; and Joe Lockard's proposal in Watching Slavery (2008, xxvi) that one of abolitionism's central rhetorics was “witnessing,” which involved both observation and action, as opposed to the more passive, observational “watching.” Schoolman now advances this shift, asking us to approach literary abolitionism with the same care and attention as recent generations of historians have afforded to abolitionism's history.

Abolitionist Geographies is also important for its attention to a spatial language that until now scholars have only discussed in detail with reference to civil rights literature and visual culture. Perhaps it seems more obvious that the desegregation movement was, at its heart, a battle for space – the material space of schools, public transportation and restaurants, and the figurative space of the public sphere, the ballot box and history books. But as Schoolman shows in detail, the abolitionists were no less spatio-symbolic than their political descendants. A century before Ralph Ellison's “Harlem Is Nowhere” (1948), Langston Hughes's “Restrictive Covenants” (1949), James Baldwin's “My Dungeon Shook” (1962) and Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” (1963), anti-slavery writers had offered their own geography of dissent. They reimagined America's politics of location around a new philosophy of outsiders and insiders, and turned the marginal no-place into a site of resistance.

This is a new – almost unrecognizable – map of the mid-nineteenth-century United States, one that points forward to the desegregation era and sideways to a freshly charted territory of literary abolitionist aesthetics. It is a map that Schoolman has drawn around abolitionist spatial expressions rather than the usual shapes of sectionalism and Manifest Destiny, one filled with temporal dislocations, reversals, contradictions and transnational exchange. In Schoolman's skilled reading of its geographies, we now have a map to the abolitionist imagination too.