Response

Abstract

Response Daniel Hack (bio) Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2017) recovers and explores an historical phenomenon that I call "the African Americanization of Victorian literature" (1): the recontextualization, reworking, and repurposing of Victorian poems and novels by African American writers and editors to address the historical situation, political concerns, or everyday lives of African Americans. I argue that these practices were widespread in African American print culture from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, and were undertaken in particularly sustained and provocative ways by such major figures in the African American literary and intellectual tradition as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Thanks largely to the institutional divide between Victorian and African American literary studies, which this book seeks to bridge, this history of transformative engagement has been little studied and poorly understood, with many of the specific cases I discuss previously unidentified. Victorian literature's role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture, I argue, makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature: recovering African American uses of Victorian literature not only increases our knowledge of its dissemination, mobility, and adaptability but also, and thereby, contributes to our understanding of that literature itself. The responses specific Victorian works garnered—and the uses to which they were put by a readership not envisioned by the works themselves—powerfully defamiliarize those works and force a rethinking of their ideological investments and cultural significance. [End Page 92] I anticipated certain forms of resistance to my work, and while I sought to address these in the book itself, I am not surprised to see versions of them on display in this forum. The first of these objections, which Paul Giles and Irene Tucker make central to their responses, is that my work focuses too much on what Tucker calls "the relatively narrow category of the literary encounter" at the expense of what she terms "other sorts of . . . cultural engagements" (82), and Giles calls "the wider cross-currents of the time" (78). The second major objection, voiced by Tucker and Ivy Wilson, is that my argument presumes and/ or reinforces what Tucker calls the "cultural authority" (85) and Wilson the "canonicity" of Victorian literature (90). For Tucker, these two objections are linked: the "focus on the isolated encounters of literary texts" she criticizes is, she claims, "predicated on the presumption (of both the Victorian authors themselves and the critics who analyze their work . . . that Victorian texts possess an obvious and self-evident cultural authority that makes them worth rewriting, makes the fact that they have been rewritten a matter of historical interest in and of itself," thereby minimizing or obscuring the gap between a British culture confident in its authority and an American one coming into being (85). Wilson, by contrast, commends Reaping Something New for "meticulously illustrat[ing] the ways in which African American writers took up the Victorians for the particular needs of their own political conditions as well as the desires of their aesthetic ambitions" (88), but finds nonetheless that "the book's methodological recursivity produces a metacritical conceit that reifies the canonicity of nineteenth-century English literature," a reification he finds troubling (90). To begin with the literary: I consider my attention to formal structures and textual details a feature, not a bug. Appeals such as Giles's to the ubiquitous "spirit of Dickens" obscure rather than explain the nature and the interest of the many African Americanizations that I analyze throughout the book, which are far more targeted, purposive, and textured than has been previously recognized (78). My approach takes its cue from the writers I study, which is why I dub both the object and method of the book "close reading at a distance": that is, sustained, fine-grained, creative engagement conducted across—and attentive to—geographical, national, and racial divides, as well as a corresponding critical practice of granular textual analysis that renders these divides legible through the lens of a work's geographical dispersal and uptake. At the same time, I do not restrict...