Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (review)

Abstract

McHenry, Elizabeth. 2002. Forgotten Headers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham and London: Duke University Press. $59.95 hc. $18.95 sc. 423 pp.Elizabeth McHenry's Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies does exactly what literary and historical scholarship should do: it draws upon foundational scholarship, redresses limitations of current scholarship, explores vital new questions within the field, and opens up fascinating new terrain for scholarly inquiry. In this compelling work, McHenry seeks out the certain absences within discussions of African American and deftly makes visible the heretofore historically marginalized black readers of 1830-1940 (4).While there has been considerable attention to the legacy of legally enforced illiteracy of enslaved African Americans, McHenry examines the literate and literary activities of free blacks in the antebellum North and black Americans after the Civil War. The recurrent scholarly focus upon black illiteracy, she writes, has prevented us from seeing what is also undeniable- [African Americans'] literate practices (4). Her carefully researched and meticulously crafted study shows the range, complexity, and diversity of African Americans' and literary practices.The impulse behind McHenry's five chapters is, in part, to make visible the multiple forms and sites of African American and literary practices: she has chapters on the origins and rise of African American literary societies, the cultural work of the black press, literary coalitions in the age of BookerT.Washington, literary activities in the women's era, Georgia Douglas Johnson and the Saturday Nighters, and the building of community in contemporary reading groups. Each of these chapters is informed by McHenry's belief that scholars need to dispense with the idea of a monolithic black community and replace it with a more accurate and historically informed understanding of a complex and differentiated black population (14). Moreover, each chapter contributes to redressing what she regards as another scholarly limitation: What is called for at this critical juncture in the development of African American historical, cultural, and literary studies is a greater understanding of the common forms of oppression faced by black Americans, as well as a more complex vision of what constitutes (17). African American literary societies, she argues, were formed not only as places of refuge for the self-improvement of their members but as acts of resistance to the hostile racial climate of the United States (17). While McHenry ostensibly sets out to examine African American and literary between 1830 and 1940, she also chronicles a compelling history of resistance; in so doing, she reclaims a vital part of American history.What is perhaps most incisive about McHenry's study is her attention to the multiple and nuanced ways in which and literary were used as multi-layered forms of resistance. Many African American literary societies worked under the assumption that African Americans' future in the United States depended upon creating for themselves the educational and cultural opportunities that would prepare them to understand the demands of democracy (19). Because literacy was closely linked with the ideals of 'citizenry,' many literary societies attempted to help members develop skills that were essential to fulfilling the responsibilities of citizenship and achieving the promise of American democracy (19). …