The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic

Abstract

LACK community and literary formation in the 178os and 1790s constitutes a distinctive intellectual history of the early Republic. Historians Joanne Pope Melish, Patrick Rael, Shane White, and Craig Steven Wilder have contributed to our understanding of the social, legal, and political histories of free blacks in the early national era. However, we have yet to understand how blacks theorized and enacted through print culture their presence in the early Republic. More than a decade ago, Michael Warner virtually dismissed the possibility of early black print culture in his landmark Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. For obvious reasons, historians know little about what colonial blacks thought about print, Warner wrote. The texts of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley are the exceptions that prove the rule, since they define their public voices as white, even if only proleptically. They understand their literacy to prefigure their celestial assimilation. His account uncritically assumes the racialized structuring assumptions of the privileged public sphere he documents: that printing constituted and distinguished a specifically white community, that printed artifacts were property and thus inappropriate to blacks and Indians, and that Hammon, Wheatley, and other black authors who attempted to establish a print presence did so as an expression of desire for the privileges of whiteness.1