Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793–1845

"An irreplaceable cultural history, Criminal Genius delivers a toolkit for us to see how those who resisted our disreputable past can light a pathway towards our contemporary abolitionism"

"Criminal Genius examines the dethroning of liberal agency in early America. Forbes excels at showing how the conjoined processes of racialization and criminalization transmogrified the liberal subject into the convict, the fugitive, the zombie, and the rebel."

"Forbes guides us through the unexpected heart of American culture by exploring the ways in which racialized concepts of criminality led to deployments of creative genius that expose the fractures in both white liberal and white supremacist fantasies about the national project. A strikingly creative and illuminating study."

"Revisiting discourses of genius and criminality sullying Lockean personhood, including the rhyming of criminality with Blackness, Forbes brilliantly unearths an alternative form of agency."

"Criminal Genius accomplishes what real scholarship is supposed to. Its radically new and entirely surprising account of liberal individualism results from synthetic thinking across multiple conversations and sub-fields, with far-reaching implications for all of them."

"Forbes offers a provocative new account of genius, attending to its transgressive potential in surprising ways and proposing its agencies as shared, rather than exceptional or limited. An important contribution to ongoing conversations about racialization, liberalism, and the antiracist futures we might create."

"This erudite book is an acrobatic work of historically and philosophically informed scholarship. Criminal Genius compels us to reckon with the very foundations of how we interpret literary culture, and opens up new possibilities for thinking through the elisions and inequities of America's past."

"Drawing on a rich archive and performing incisive readings, Erin Forbes offers an urgently needed and incredibly compelling reevaluation of criminality that should command the attention of nineteenth-century Americanists and law and literature scholars alike."