African American Literary Societies Research Articles

Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical CultureThe Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation

Black Print Unbound: The <i>Christian Recorder</i>, African American Literature, and Periodical CultureThe Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation

To Make an Old Century New

To Make an Old Century New Tess Chakkalakal (bio) Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. By John Ernest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 336 pages. $59.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. By P. Gabrielle Foreman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 280 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $25.00 (paper). Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. By Eric Gardner. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009. 258 pages. $50.00 (cloth). A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. By Stephen G. Hall. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 334 pages. $65.00 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel. By Edlie L. Wong. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 337 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $24.00 (paper). A decade has passed since Elizabeth McHenry declared in this journal’s pages that “the more we know about the range of activities and strategies of resistance used by early black Americans as they worked toward a society that was both multiracial and equal increases the accuracy and sophistication of American cultural history.”1 McHenry’s 2002 book, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, elaborates upon her earlier claim and now five new studies of nineteenth-century African American literature and history continue to broaden our knowledge of early black Americans and African American culture through the recovery of forgotten or neglected writings.2 All five, in different yet compatible ways, document and supplement the turn away from vernacular and oral forms of African American expression that were once central to the formation and study of African American culture. [End Page 1001] It was after all the “discovery” of black spirituals in the mid-nineteenth century, as Jon Cruz explains in Culture on the Margins (1999), “that helped to install the modern hermeneutical orientation toward cultural practices” (3). Although it was Frederick Douglass who first noted the importance of the spirituals to the formation of the black community, it was not until the twentieth century that they became the focus of cultural study. Renaming the form “sorrow songs” in his 1903 study The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B Du Bois situated them at the center of American history and culture. That claim would be echoed by the unnamed protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, who devotes himself to recovering and transcribing the songs of rural southern blacks in his attempt to “catch the spirit of the Negro in his relatively primitive state.”3 Though developed during the nineteenth century as a response to the social and economic conditions of slavery, black religious music as an authentic form of African American culture was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Most notable is the work of Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates, which has illuminated both the meaning and significance of the black vernacular to African American literature and cultural production. Partially influenced by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Baker and Gates’s theories of African American literature rely on oral forms, particularly music, to understand not only the meaning of what Gates calls “the black text,” but also the relationship between white and black forms of American culture. While relying on written texts, these critics helped to broaden the idea of literature to include vernacular forms of cultural expression rooted in slave experience. Hence, the formation of an African American literary canon that begins with spirituals, slave narratives, sermons, and folktales. That twentieth-century idea of the black vernacular has been slowly eclipsed in the twenty-first century by an emphasis on print culture, or what Wilson J. Moses calls “a literate tradition.”4 Focusing instead on a wide variety of forms of print culture that include not just novels, poems, and plays but also periodicals and legal cases, all five authors reviewed here share McHenry’s desire to dispel “the myth of the monolithic black community” by expanding our knowledge of early forms of black print culture (15). Recovering and...

Reading and Reckoning in a Women’s Prison

�� ��� It’s my time to come out of the wilderness now, and I saw all that in this book. —Denise, incarcerated in a Midwestern women’s prison Since the prisoners’ rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the retributive justice framework of the 1980s and beyond, prisoners’ opportunities for reading, education, and rehabilitation have steadily declined. This decline bespeaks an increasing dehumanization of incarcerated men and women and a disavowal of their capacity for deep thought, growth, and transformation. Some critics argue that penal custody “is incompatible with real rehabilitation” (Sullivan, Prison Reform, 2) and that one should not expect prisons to provide genuine opportunities for change. Yet in conducting individual interviews and group discussions with incarcerated women, I have discovered that reading plays a central role in some imprisoned women’s efforts to begin freeing themselves from state-imposed, other-imposed, and self-imposed forces—including racism, poverty, abuse, and addiction—that have kept them in literal and figurative states of detention. 1 Despite significant limitations on the reading materials available to them, these women engage in reading practices that help them to come to terms with their pasts, contextualize their experiences in relation to larger frameworks, and gain inspiration from others as they learn to imagine—and create—new ways of being in the world. Because African American women constitute the fastest-growing population in the U.S. penal system, prisons merit particular attention as a site in which African American women’s literacy practices have flour ished. As Elizabeth McHenry argues in Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, scholarship about reading has tended to obscure the complex history of African Americans’ literacy and literary engagements (5), thereby contributing to the “historical invisibility of black readers” (4). Indeed, from Janice Radway’s groundbreaking Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984/1991) to Elizabeth Long’s Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (2003), studies typically feature white, middle-class women in exploring the

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

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

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

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). …

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

Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation as a means to assert their civic identities and intervene in the political and literary cultures of the United States from which they were otherwise excluded. Forgotten Readers expands our definition of literacy and urges us to think of literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members. She examines particular literary associations, including the Saturday Nighters of Washington, D.C., whose members included Jean Toomer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. She shows how black literary societies developed, their relationship to the black press, and the ways that African American women’s clubs—which flourished during the 1890s—encouraged literary activity. In an epilogue, McHenry connects this rich tradition of African American interest in books, reading, and literary conversation to contemporary literary phenomena such as Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853; Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies

Book Review| June 01 2004 American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853; Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies By Meredith L. McGill. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. viii, 364 pp. $39.95.By Elizabeth McHenry. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 2002. xiv, 423 pp. Paper, $18.95. Melissa J. Homestead Melissa J. Homestead Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2004) 76 (2): 398–400. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-76-2-398 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Melissa J. Homestead; American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853; Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. American Literature 1 June 2004; 76 (2): 398–400. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-76-2-398 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews of Books:Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies Elizabeth McHenry

Reviews of Books:Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies Elizabeth McHenry

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

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

Heather Murray. Came, Bright Improvement! The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 320 pp. Cloth $60.00. - Elizabeth McHenry. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African-American Literary Societies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 352 pp. Cloth $54.95, paper $18.95.

Heather Murray. Came, Bright Improvement! The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 320 pp. Cloth $60.00. - Elizabeth McHenry. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African-American Literary Societies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 352 pp. Cloth $54.95, paper $18.95.

Arriving at a History of Reading

36Historically Speaking · January 2004 Arriving at a History of Reading Jonathan Rose In ourline ofwork, nothing is more gratifying than to lay outan agenda forfuture scholarship, and then see it fulfilled well before one reaches retirement age. On that count, RobertDarnton has a rightto feelvindicated . In his 1986 essay"First StepsToward a History of Reading," he suggested (with due caution) that "it should be possible to develop a history aswell as a theory ofreader response. Possible, but not easy," for how could the historian recapture something so private, so evanescent as the mental experience of the "common reader"? As Darnton warned, "the documents rarelyshowreaders atwork, fashioning meaning from texts, and the documents are texts themselves, which also require interpretation. Few ofthem are rich enough to provide even indirect access to the cognitive and affective elements of reading, and a few exceptional cases maynot be enough for one to reconstruct the inner dimensions ofthat experience."1 In fact, in less than two decades, the historiography of reading has advanced more quicklythan either Darnton orI expected. It constitutes one-third ofthe mission ofa new scholarly organization, the Society for the History ofAuthorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), founded in 1991. Using some of the methods that Darnton suggested —and sometimes inventingnewtechniques for recovering reading experiences— scholars have sketched in some of the blank spaces on this vast empty map. They have constructed and debated historical models. And theyhave produced a remarkable string ofsurprising discoveries, often quite different from what literary theorists predicted. The great obstacle to a history ofreading , as Darnton acknowledged, was a lack of sources. But laborers in this field have, with considerable ingenuity, located and used a wide range ofraw materials that offer some insight into the mental world of ordinary readers: Police records should be mentioned first and foremost. Say what you like about inquisitors and secret policemen: no one has been more helpful to historians ofreading. They asked precisely the questions we want to ask: Whatdidyou read, andhow didyou read it? Where didyou obtain this book? Didyou discuss it with anyone? How didyou interpret this particularpassage? The proceedings of the Inquisition were famouslyused to investigate the reading of a 16th-century Italian miller in Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheeseandthe Worms (1980)—and Ginzburg is by no means the only historian to rely on that kind of documentation . Probate and booksellers' records ofcourse cannot reveal how or even whether a particularbookwas read, buttheycan generate useful statistics ofbookownership and distribution . Wills in particular are one of the few records we have of readers in medieval Europe. In ReadingBecomesa Necessity ofLife: Materialand CulturalLife in RuralNew England , 1?80-1835 (1989), WilliamJ. Gilmore used these sources to reconstruct in astonishing detail the literaryculture ofaVermont backwater in the earlyAmerican republic. Sociological surveys ofreading go back much farther than you might imagine. The StatisticalAccount ofScotlandwas compiled in the 1790s, and it is a mother lode of information on reading habits and local libraries. The USSRmade a large academic investment in the sociologyofreading, and as long as one allows for its ideological biases, one can use these studies to recover the Soviet common reader, as Stephen Lovell did in The Russian ReadingRevolution: Print Culture in the Soviet andPost-SovietEras (2000). Reading groups and literary societiesseem to have been ubiquitous in modern Western societies among all races, all social classes, and both sexes. And fortunately, they often keptminutes. Forherprize-winningForgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of AfricanAmerican Literary Societies(2002), Elizabeth McHenry drew on these records to rediscover a literarytradition thatwe scarcely knew existed. Memoirs and diaries of ordinary people have been collected and used bysocial historians to illuminate family life, work experiences , gender roles, and popular mentalities. It is significant that when the "inarticulate masses" write their own history, they have quite a lot to say about their reading. These documents made possible David Vincent's Bread, Knowledge, andFreedom (1981), as well as my own The Intellectual Life ofthe British Working Classes (2001). Of course, some literary cultures produced more autobiographies than others. Britain seems particularly well-favored in this respect: for my book, I was able to draw on about 900working-class memoirs for the 19th century alone, whereas Martyn Lyons could only locate...

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

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

Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Elizabeth McHenry

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsForgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Elizabeth McHenry Christine PawleyChristine Pawley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Library Quarterly Volume 73, Number 3Jul., 2003 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/603424 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright 2003 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Forgotten readers: recovering the lost history of African-American literary societies

Forgotten readers: recovering the lost history of African-American literary societies