African American Print Culture Research Articles

Songs of Reunion: “Information Wanted” Advertisements, Minnie’s Sacrifice , and the Call-and-Response Tradition

Abstract: This article reads Frances Harper’s serialized novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice (1868), as a response to the anxieties of loss and reunion captured in the “Information Wanted” feature of the Christian Recorder . When mutually assessed, each text augments the other, harkening back to the African American cultural tradition of call-and-response. I explore this tradition’s inversion in the periodical, giving way to new forms of understanding how the presence of call-and-response exists beyond the bounds of religiosity, and how it can be a method of literary analysis that helps us better understand African American print culture.

Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi

Reviewed by: Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi Madeline Zehnder Stokes, Claudia. 2021. Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $79.95 hc. 288 pp. Putzi, Jennifer. 2021. Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $69.95 hc. 320 pp. In a 2016 profile of the poet Eileen Myles, journalist Emily Witt coined the "Theory of the Bad Copy"—a distillation of Myles's belief that copying can be a vehicle for artistic and social change. According to Myles, who has suggested that Black Sparrow Press published them "as a bad copy of Charles Bukowski," people often break with the past by presenting as imitations of established figures (Witt 2016).1 Copying may ease difference, but it also allows new artists to slip through the door and shake things up. The Theory of the Bad Copy suggests that as much as contemporary Western society professes to value originality, it more readily cleaves to the familiar. Latent in the concept of a "bad" copy is the critique that failures of imagination cloud audience ability to recognize what is new or original. At the same time, there's something subversive about a copy characterized by its badness. In a culture that outwardly praises innovation while denigrating imitation, the bad [End Page 146] copy disrupts, slyly reframing the act of copying as creative work. Myles themself has described copying as an essential part of their poetic labor: "[copying] is a form of loving the world. … It is a form of chanting and I do it for religious reasons. I mean it's my default position" (Myles 2020). Practices of imitation also offer social and creative resources for the nineteenth-century Americans whom Claudia Stokes and Jennifer Putzi discuss in their respective monographs. Yet while Myles embraces copying as a mode of introspection and individual renewal, these earlier American authors copy and imitate primarily to forge networks and connections—with the past, with the literary establishment, with each other. Challenging the assumption that originality is a timeless artistic value, Stokes and Putzi explicate unoriginality's appeal for particular nineteenth-century American audiences by pairing close readings of texts with attention to material conditions of textual production, circulation, and use. The nexus of the textual and the material has been a generative site for thinking about the role of copying in the nineteenth-century United States. In recent decades, scholarship including Meredith L. McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003), Lindsay DiCuirci's Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (2018), and the Viral Texts Mapping Project (est. 2012) has positioned reprinting as an important heuristic for understanding early American literary culture. Research on nineteenth-century African American literature, including the essays in Early African American Print Culture (2012), has been crucial to recovering the social and political functions of copying, including how practices such as quotation index nineteenth-century Black American authors' orientation toward the collective. While both Stokes and Putzi engage this scholarship to examine how copying organizes material and social practices, their respective studies help connect the study of material texts with questions and methods drawn from aesthetics and poetics. Together, Old Style and Fair Copy invite scholars to take unoriginal texts seriously as literature—and to ask why the unoriginal has become cause for literary dismissal in the first place. In Old Style, Claudia Stokes charts the rise and fall of unoriginality as a "legitimate aesthetic mode" in the nineteenth-century United States (2021, 2). Revisiting a familiar story of the early national period as an era of print expansion, Stokes shows that even as some authors and publishers deployed novelty to compete for attention [End Page 147] in a crowded market, others advocated for treating the borrowed, familiar, and traditional as markers of literary skill and taste. For many early nineteenth-century Americans, Stokes argues, originality was suspect. Being perceived as literary was less about producing iconoclastic newness than showcasing knowledge of literary...

To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship. Elizabeth McHenry

The dominant twenty-first-century critical trend in African American literary studies, perhaps most recognizable in Harlem Renaissance scholarship, has been redefining the meaning of the study and its historiography. The movement’s origins are found in the work of such scholars as Cheryl A. Wall and George Hutchinson, who argued for a deep dive into the archive to present a more nuanced view of the New Negro movement while challenging various critical assumptions about the role of publishing. Meanwhile, a related trend toward research in African American print culture and the history of the book arrived, characterized by the early scholarship of Carla L. Peterson and Todd Vogel, with more recent work by such scholars as Brooks E. Hefner and Kinohi Nishikawa expanding the print culture studies focus. Yet not enough work of this kind has been done on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century period. Like much of the research above, Elizabeth McHenry’s To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship combines the various trends, adding to print culture studies scholarship that seeks to unearth a more comprehensive turn-of-the-century African American literary historiography. To Make Negro Literature impressively illuminates a vast field of African American literary and educational history. McHenry concentrates on material publishing conditions, “authorship’s sustainability and literature’s form and function,” the bond “between Black writing and emerging audiences and agendas,” and “the frameworks that structure ways of organizing how to talk and think about literature and the literary” (14). Among the most intriguing aspects of the study, and likely to invite debate, is McHenry’s application of queer theory to the literary art of Mary Church Terrell.

The Year in Conferences—2020

The Year in Conferences—2020 Rachel Heffner-Burns (bio), E. Dean (bio), Delisa Hawkes (bio), Sam Plasencia (bio), Brianne Dayley, Senior Advisor (bio), Daniella Cádiz Bedini (bio), Mara Curechian (bio), Amanda Louise Johnson (bio), Ali Tal-Mason (bio), Monica Urban (bio), Georgia Walton (bio), and Amanda Louise Johnson, Senior Advisor (bio) The "Year in Conferences" (YiC) accelerates the circulation of ideas among scholars by covering the field's major conferences. Graduate students from across the country collaboratively author an article that appears annually in ESQ's first issue. Now in its twelfth year, this report includes MLA and C19. ________ mla, 9–12 january 2020, seattle, wa written by: rachel heffner-burns, e. dean, delisa hawkes, sam plasencia senior advisor: brianne dayley In their plenary addresses at this year's convention, Gayatri Spivak, Viet Nguyen, Jennifer Wallace, and Charles Johnson called upon our discipline to avoid assuming a shared definition of humanity. Spivak, in particular, instructed us to view the assignment and use of the term "human" as both a medicine against immoral acts and a poison that grants those who are labelled "human" the "right" to committing acts of destruction and hate. Because, as Nguyen similarly observed, our professions similarly support and dismiss—humanize and dehumanize—simply by grouping certain individuals, groups, and ideas under the moniker "the humanities," we have an imperative to develop a more critical understanding of what it means to deploy the term "human." The nineteenth-century scholars this piece examines pose adjacent questions: Is "being human" a question [End Page 279] of individual subjectivity or is it communal? How does "human" function as a value judgment in social and political spheres? How has the attribution of nonhuman or parahuman qualities to certain genders, races, and social classes contributed to social value judgments? Does "human" demarcate a unique set of experiences, character qualities, or abilities? Does the term separate certain creatures as mentally and physically unique, or does it only highlight the conflation of the human, the animal, and the environment? And finally, can studies of nineteenth-century texts help us reevaluate human interactions today? Together, these scholars indicate that such studies can, and they demonstrate methods of doing so. Program Link: mla20.org or https://mla.confex.com/mla/2020/meetingapp.cgi ________ readers, reading practices, and their relationship to race Altering our understanding of race as a socially constructed but subjectively understood discourse, numerous panels explored questions about who reads and how they read. In "Racialized Reading in Nineteenth-Century America," panelists examined how reading practices have reflected and developed social ideas about race. Jackson Truschel argued that Thomas Dixon Jr.'s "Reconstruction trilogy" is central to the development of a distinctively white supremacist aesthetic. Truschel showed how white supremacy functioned through literary language rather than as an effect of writing. Lori A. Leavell then invited scholars to examine reading and news distribution practices in Charles Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition (1901) as racialized. By depicting white characters reading reprinted messages from Wellington's Black newspaper [End Page 280] to the audience rather than reprinting the messages themselves, Chesnutt draws readers' attentions to how racialized reading practices, and not the messages, incite racial violence. Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus reflected on the reception history of Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) to examine issues surrounding authors' self-proclaimed racial identifications and their consequent textual limitations. Daniels-Rauterkus read Toomer's writing as exemplifying what she called "Afro-realism," a counter to culturally monolithic Blackness. In "Race, Recovery, and Early African American Print Culture," panelists examined the various tactics writers implemented to garner readerly engagement. Benjamin Fagan showed how the New Orleans Tribune/La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans' (1864–1870?) editors required Civil War-era readers to read both English and French in order to fully understand the draft process. In this context, Fagan suggested that language acquisition might serve as a racial and class barrier. Sarah Sillin examined how Yankee Notions Magazine (1852–1875) used black and white caricatures in its cartoons to direct feelings about the war, while simultaneously removing Black people's feelings from the conversation. Thus, Sillin questioned how the cartoons' Black caricatures question who can identify with and conceptualize...

Minutes of the Annual Meeting: Friday, 24 January 2020,Convene, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY

Minutes of the Annual Meeting: Friday, 24 January 2020,Convene, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY

Richard Allen and Black Church Disciplines

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes the 1817 Doctrines and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, published by Richard Allen and Jacob Tapsico, to argue for the inclusion of church disciplines in American literary anthologies. Such anthologies currently privilege the genres of life writing and poetry when selecting African American literature. In contrast to this emphasis on works by a single author, the Doctrines and Discipline foregrounds a vibrant African American print culture, practices of collaborative authorship, and coalition-building in the early American republic. A close reading of the AME Doctrines and Discipline demonstrates both the political and the literary stakes of church disciplines. This particular church discipline enacts a revolutionary break with white institutions and constructs a new black national affiliation, and it also lays the foundation for black literary production through much of the nineteenth century.

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

Introduction

Introduction Lucy Caplan (bio) and Kristen M. Turner (bio) In Panel 34 of Jacob Lawrence’s iconic Migration Series (1940–41), a man stands with his back to the viewer and his head cast down, immersed completely in what is before him. He is reading the newspaper. A woman sits near him, motionless and attentive: is he reading aloud to her? Is she waiting for her own chance to rifle through the pages? With characteristic understatement, Lawrence captions the panel simply: “The Negro press was also influential in urging the people to leave the South.” This influence is a theme he returns to elsewhere in the series: Panel 20, for example, features groups of readers, each clustered together around a single copy of a newspaper, accompanied by the heading, “In many of the communities the Negro press was read continually because of its attitude and its encouragement of the movement.” In Lawrence’s visual imaginary, the newspaper is made into a material sign of its historical moment, a locus of communal activity, and a forum for creativity. In their emphasis on the role of the Black press in catalyzing the Great Migration, Lawrence’s images convey the centrality of the press to African American life during the first half of the twentieth century. His caption emphasizes that the press was itself a historical actor: not simply a record of what was happening in Black America, but also an institution that itself shaped historical change. Further, as works of art, Lawrence’s images also speak to—and embody—the multifaceted nexus and mutually constitutive relationship between the press and the world of the arts during this era. As such, they invite a number of questions that are fundamental to this special issue. How did artists and the Black press interact with one another during the age of Jim Crow? How did the press function [End Page 5] as an agent of social and cultural change? How did artistic content in the Black press relate to the Black public sphere more broadly? The authors whose work is featured in this issue of American Studies answer these questions alongside other, even more expansive ones: in what ways did arts coverage in the Black press figure into transnational networks of intellectual exchange? How did this content interact with other types of African American and American print culture? How did it function as a site of racial formation, especially in conjunction with questions of class, gender, and sexuality? Significantly, the page that Lawrence’s central figure ponders in Panel 34 appears blank; Lawrence lets the viewer imagine what words, images, and ideas it might include. Perhaps it was a straightforward call to southerners to migrate north. Or perhaps it was something else entirely—a review of a concert, an illustration of an eminent person, or a work of speculative fiction. To peruse the pages of a Black magazine or newspaper was—and is—to encounter an astonishing variety of content related to the arts. Usually considered to have originated with the 1827 founding of Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first Black-owned and -published newspaper, the Black press became a key site for political discourse in the post-emancipation era, from the landmark anti-lynching exposés of Ida Wells-Barnett to the mobilization of Black communities in opposition to racial segregation.1 Many of the earliest Black newspapers also featured fiction and poetry within their pages and facilitated vigorous debates about Black cultural production.2 As the press expanded, so did its coverage of and engagement with the arts. By the early twentieth century, specialty publications like the Negro Music Journal (est. 1902) and generalist literary magazines like the Colored American Magazine (est. 1900) offered extensive coverage of arts-related topics. For their part, newspapers featured cartoons, illustrations, fiction, poetry, arts criticism, and advertisements for upcoming cultural events. When the African American weekly newspaper emerged as a transformative cultural force around the turn of the twentieth century, Black journalists gained an unprecedented opportunity to reach a broad public. In 1890, there were between fifty and 150 Black newspapers in the country; most were small-scale, reaching fewer than 10,000 subscribers across limited...

Prejudice for Profit: Escaped Nun Stories and American Catholic Print Culture

Prejudice for ProfitEscaped Nun Stories and American Catholic Print Culture Kara M. French (bio) During the sweltering summer of 1834, a gang of working-class men—brickmakers, sailors, apprentices, and firemen—surrounded the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The crowd, acting on rumor that Sister Mary St. John Harrison "has been secreted or abducted" to Canada against her will, threatened to burn the convent to the ground unless she was released. When Harrison did not come forward, they set fire to the convent and school with "twelve nuns, and fifty-seven female scholars" inside. Newspapers from Maine to Maryland reported how the rioters stole the Mount Benedict ciborium, smashed the sisters' expensive musical instruments, and converted the personal library of Boston's Bishop Fenwick into fuel for a bonfire. As a final act of desecration, the mob "burst open the tomb, and ransacked the coffins" of dead nuns, searching for the bodies of Sister Harrison and the Ursulines' young Protestant pupils, rumored to have been murdered behind the convent walls.1 Tales of illicit sex and abused women rose from the ashes of the Charlestown riot. Just as the Charlestown rioters were being brought to [End Page 503] trial in 1835, ex-novice Rebecca Reed's autobiography, Six Months in a Convent, detailed a life of horrors. According to Reed, the sisters of Mount Benedict heaped slavish devotion on their Mother Superior and were subjected to bizarre and cruel penances. The convent was a place of unmentionable sexual deviance, where confession with the Bishop led to "various improper questions" regarding the novices' sexual habits and where Superior Mary St. George Moffat was inclined to "bestow presents and caress" the sisters who were her "great favorites."2 The burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts was and is a well-known tale, in its own time and in ours. For scholars of the early republic, the burning of the convent represents an object lesson in anti-Catholic prejudice, a perfect storm of religious intolerance, gender trouble, and class conflict. For citizens of the early republic, the event served to confirm their worst fears—either about the nefarious lives of nuns and priests or about the limits of religious toleration. For early republican publishers, it created an opportunity. With the riot at the Ursuline convent in 1834, the relationship between print and protest worked in reverse of what one might expect. Rather than the publication of an explosive text provoking an outbreak of violence, the burning of the convent was an occasion of violence that provoked an outbreak of print. The two anti-Catholic "escaped nun" narratives that became bestsellers in antebellum era, Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent and Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu, would not be published until more than a year after the convent lay in ashes. While the political, social, and gendered implications of the Charles-town riot have been explored, the way the burning of the convent was exploited by publishers for financial gain deserves closer examination. Though Reed's and Monk's narratives have the distinction of being the best-selling and most well-known "escaped nun" tales, the burning of the convent encouraged the flourishing of an anti-Catholic print genre that promised to expose the secret lives of nuns and priests. A feeding frenzy of anti-Catholic literature ensued at every level of the literary marketplace, from cheaply printed dime novels to ornate gift books. These "escaped nun" stories capitalized on the horror the perceived gender and sexual deviance of nuns provoked in the Protestant imagination. Antebellum publishers spent thousands manufacturing lithograph illustrations of novices cutting their hair to take the veil and mass-printed [End Page 504] stories that featured cross-dressing "female Jesuits" and Machiavellian lady superiors.3 Commercial print and the whims of the publishing marketplace not only drove a boom in anti-Catholic publishing but also sparked American Catholics to mount a vigorous defense in print. Given the ubiquity of print in the early republic, it is perhaps not surprising that a religious minority would develop their own print sphere. As the recent outpouring of scholarship on African American print culture has...

On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading

Entering Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one still passes through the “catalog room,” an antechamber filled with rows of card drawers. Inaugurated in 1930 by the librarian Dorothy Porter, this catalog of the “Negro Collection” served for much of the twentieth century as one of the only portals to African American print culture. This article reconstructs the creation of that catalog in order to chart the relation between infrastructure and racial imaginaries of reading. Porter contravened the routine misfiling of blackness in prevailing information systems by rewriting Dewey decimals, creating new taxonomies for black print, and fielding research inquiries from across the African diaspora. She built public access to books “by and about the Negro” at a moment when most black readers were barred from libraries. In so doing, she fueled a broader sense of what a black archive—or what Porter called a “literary museum”—might afford.

Before The Brownies’ Book

Before The Brownies’ Book Brigitte Fielder (bio) Long before I was assigned any piece of African American literature in any classroom (in which Black writers would be few and far between for the first twenty years of my formal education), it was my own father who put Black literature into my hands.1 My experience is not unique, but representative of a long history of African American people’s attention to the study of Black people and Black writing, an interest that has always extended beyond the bounds of academic institutions and formal education. Black parents (and some nonblack parents of Black children) of every socioeconomic class have long sought out texts, images, and other media that would affirm and celebrate, rather than ignore or disparage, their children’s existence. As we celebrate the trajectory of African American children’s literature from The Brownies’ Book to #BlackLivesMatter, I want to contemplate the important place of Black children in the African American literary tradition more broadly. The importance of Black children extends beyond African American children’s literary studies, illustrating what we know in theory about the necessarily interdisciplinary work in this genre, but which still bears repeating: that children’s literary studies has much to gain from conversations with African American studies, and vice versa. For each of these fields, attending to Black children allows us to read more rigorously, as we consider racialized readers, perspectives, and methodologies for understanding the texts we study. The focus on Black children I suggest here is not meant to choose sides in the differences in disciplinary orientation between what Peter Hollindale has referred to as “book people” and “child people” (26). Rather, I mean to argue that even “book people” (in all fields of literary studies) need to pay closer attention to how questions of racialized readership affect our textual analyses. Moreover, to do this within African American children’s literary studies is not to explore new methodologies, but to better understand historical practices of authorship, editorship, and literary analysis. Attending to Black children allows us to [End Page 159] extend our readings toward readerships that are often ignored, allowing for more rigorous reading in and beyond children’s literary studies. Before The Brownies’ Book The Brownies’ Book represents not a beginning, but a continuation of Black print culture’s engagement with Black children. An important milestone in this longer tradition of African American literature that recognized and cared about Black children, The Brownies’ Book nevertheless employed familiar tactics to that of earlier Black cultural work. Technological developments in and Black access to the infrastructures of print and visual culture had long been turned toward various strategies of racial uplift. In this, they would often also be oriented toward Black futures, and thus toward the Black children who would occupy that future. As an early twentieth-century periodical, The Brownies’ Book was not the first Black periodical to have had (and acknowledged) a child readership. The children’s sections of early African American newspapers such as the Colored American and the Christian Recorder recognized the need to address Black children in the larger context of nineteenth-century African American print culture. Nazera Sadiq Wright shows how the selections published in the Children’s Department of the Colored American between 1840 and 1841 “demonstrate early evidence of a devoted black child readership in the early black press” (148). In this, only the second known African American newspaper to be published in the United States, child readers were already acknowledged and taken seriously. Wright’s and the other essays in Katherine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane’s collection Who Writes for Black Children? show that, even in the earliest moments of the written record that would later be called “African American literature,” Black authors and editors considered Black children among their readers. When African American literature appeared in the Black press, newspapers included accounts of racial violence that children very well may have read as parts of the paper circulated among family members. Black child readers also encountered writing by white authors that was never intended for them but that was reframed by editors who placed this writing in the larger context of Black newspapers...

Tangled Threads: Zara Wright and the Uses of African American Print Culture

Tangled Threads: Zara Wright and the Uses of African American Print Culture

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

Author

Author Joseph Rezek KEY WORDS History of Authorship, African American Literature, Black Atlantic, Early American Literature, John Marrant, Early American Print Culture, African American Print Culture, Book History, Textual History, Race, History of Print, Religion, Slavery, George Whitefield, Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon The author is not dead, for book historians, but she has been desacralized. From the Latin auctor—one who approves or sanctions, provides evidence or expertise; a prime mover; a progenitor of a race or nation; or one who creates a work of art—the English term author came to signify the sole originator of a literary text long after its association with God, the “Author of Nature.”1 Its literary meaning acquired a hallowed, quasi-mythological connotation only after the mutual imbrication of bourgeois individualism, professional authorship, and proprietary copyright in the eighteenth century. It was the modern, deified Author (capital “A”) that Roland Barthes sought to demystify. “We know now that the text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”2 Writing in Barthes’s immediate wake, Michel Foucault defined authorship exclusively through its function in discourse.3 These famous refusals of an author’s originating power and autonomy remain influential in literary studies. They also helped legitimize book history’s commitment to embedding authors within a “communications circuit,” a “field of cultural production,” or other contingent historical, personal, and economic relationships.4 And yet most book historians believe, contra Barthes and Foucault, that authors (lowercase “a”) play active if not [End Page 599] autonomous roles in constructing their texts. Authors, for us, are historical actors who compose texts, not works of mystical genius; they are embedded in and susceptible to historically specific circumstances and influences; they are directly beholden to the numerous individuals who control and distribute media technology (and not only print); and they are just as strategic in their navigations of the world of media and communication as any of their equally historically embedded and actively engaged readers. Despite this general commitment to author-as-actor, one Foucauldian insight continues to resonate. The “author function,” Foucault writes, “does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization.”5 This has been especially generative for early Americanists, who have labored to differentiate the story of authorship in early North America from familiar European narratives. They have emphasized early America’s fragmented and provincial print industry; its dependence on trans-Atlantic material, interpersonal, and cultural networks; the absence of copyright monopolies; indigenous media practices; and the consequences of slavery, settler colonialism, radical Protestantism, and republicanism. A unique picture of early American authorship has emerged from all this. Important studies have considered oral, non-alphabetic, and community-oriented authorship in Native American materials (Weaver, Round, Cohen, Mt. Pleasant et al.); the mutual imbrication of literary authorship and provincial moral and social life (Amory and Hall); the performative aspects of Puritan authorship (Neuman); the anonymity and pure negativity of republican authorship (Warner); African American participation in and resistance to dominant modes of white authorship (Foster, Brooks, Cohen and Stein); the belated rise of professional authorship (Charvat); the rise of female authors, especially in the nineteenth century (Kelley, Homestead); the persistence of amateur authorship (Jackson); and antipathies to authorship itself as a rubric for organizing literary culture (McGill).6 [End Page 600] While enumerating such distinctiveness, early Americanists have also attended to the way authors faced conditions not all that different from those in Europe—with a shared technology of the letterpress, a print culture similarly affected by orality and manuscript practices, and a media landscape shaped by some of the same cultural, economic, and ideological forces. John Marrant’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings (1785) is both distinctively American—composed by a member of the African diaspora who lived in the colonies—and materially European, as it was a popular religious pamphlet published in London. This makes it an ideal text to help us think about the meaning of the keyword author in early American studies...

The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation by Benjamin Fagin

Reviewed by: The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation by Benjamin Fagan Joseph Rezek (bio) The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation benjamin Fagan Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016 186 pp. Benjamin Fagan has written a thorough account of five black newspapers from the early and mid-nineteenth century, devoting one chapter to each: Freedom's Journal (1827–29), the first African American newspaper, founded by Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm; Colored American (1837–41), founded by Phillip Bell; North Star (1847–51), founded and edited by Frederick Douglass; Provincial Freeman (1853–57), the Canadian paper founded by Mary Ann Shadd Cary; and Weekly Anglo-African (1859–65), founded by Thomas Hamilton. Each chapter traces the origins of a newspaper from within the social and intellectual world of its founders and editors and highlights a common theme: the idea of "black chosenness," drawn from a millennial view of history, that "black Americans would lead the world to universal emancipation" (3). Each newspaper, Fagan argues, sought to define and redefine how to promote freedom for African Americans as an oppressed nation destined for liberation. There was little consensus about this, and Fagan deftly weaves in and out of various ideological clashes, from the assimilationist position of Freedom's Journal to editors who rejected the United States and affirmed diasporic affiliations, to the vehement Anglophilia of Provincial Freeman, to the Weekly Anglo-African's embrace of enlisting in the Union army after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Fagan argues strongly that we cannot divorce the study of print from the life stories of those who surrounded the press: including writers and readers, as well as printers, editors, illustrators, correspondents, and agents for distribution. He thus links together the newspapers under consideration not only by their medium (as large-format, serially published, widely distributed, and politically engaged papers) but also by the rich social fabric of black activist and religious communities in the northern United States and Canada—many of which were connected to each other across time and geographical distance. Like Jacqueline Bacon in her groundbreaking study of Freedom's Journal (2007), Fagan shows that we need to understand the emergence of early black newspapers as a function of the beliefs, aspirations, and political strategies of the individuals who brought them into [End Page 285] existence. In making this argument Fagan aligns himself with scholars of early African American print culture who take a social and biographical approach, as opposed to others—coming from the field of book history—who find that print's media specificity destabilizes traditional notions of authorship and racial identity. "Human relationships," Fagan writes, "knit the newspapers in this study together, and make this book as much about people as it is about print" (19). It is a methodology well suited to his goal of understanding the fraught and inspiring visions of racial solidarity and freedom black editors explored in the antebellum period. Fagan begins in his first chapter by chronicling the "middle class" aspirations and ideologies of Freedom's Journal, which advocated "black propriety" as a strategy to convince whites that African Americans were deserving of freedom (23). While advertising a readership that stretched from Boston to England to Haiti to the southern United States, Cornish and Russwurm tried to discipline the sometimes unruly behavior of their black compatriots, convinced that conventional morals, education, respectability, piety, and righteousness were central to the priority of "acting chosen," as Fagan puts it (32). This agenda "emerged out of the contests and concerns of local black communities" (23) and was tested as black New Yorkers paraded in the street to celebrate the passage of New York's gradual emancipation law in 1827. Whites in the North had been ridiculing and violently opposing black celebratory parades since they began with the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, and elite writers like Cornish and Russwurm wanted to discontinue them—an unpopular stance that "shattered [the] illusion" that Freedom's Journal could "speak for black Americans across the country" (38). Fagan demonstrates both the limits of the paper's politics and its importance as a trailblazing publication. Fagan begins chapter 2 by noting that before Phillip A. Bell founded...

Sexuality at the Northern Border of Early African American Print Culture

This essay attributes an 1815 condemnation of fornication, published in Vermont, to Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833). Redressing a deficit of scholarly attention to sexuality in early African American print culture, it contextualizes Haynes's document within a spectrum of similar texts, and notes the variety of print culture instruments available to early African American authors, including anonymous publication, financial subscription, and publishing under a white author's name.

Response

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...

"Making Good Use of Our Eyes": Nineteenth-Century African Americans Write Visual Culture

In his 1854 speech “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” Frederick Douglass critiques the use of illustrated portraits in scientific works of mid-nineteenth-century ethnology. He describes how images of the “European face” are calculated to convey “beauty, dignity, and intellect,” while “The Negro, on the other hand, appears with features distorted, lips exaggerated, forehead depressed—and the whole expression of the countenance made to harmonize with the popular idea of Negro imbecility and degradation” (510). Douglass provides a unique glimpse into his own experience of nineteenthcentury visual culture when he concludes that while “[t]he importance of this criticism [of images of African Americans] may not be apparent to all;—to the black man it is very apparent. He sees the injustice, and writhes under its sting” (514). Douglass’s address engages directly with mid-nineteenth-century visual culture and its depictions of black life and selfhood. His commentary on the experience of viewing the images of blacks that appeared in newspapers and popular books at mid-century is part of a rich and complicated tradition of African American textual engagement with visual culture. Recent scholarship has begun to attend to the intersections between African American literature, material culture, print culture, and visual technologies, usefully troubling a set of artificial critical boundaries that often led text, image, and object to be considered in isolation from one another. Marcy J. Dinius, for example, has shown the necessity of approaching nineteenth-century visual culture through the textual, emphasizing what she calls the “cycle of mediation and influence between print and daguerreotypy” (5), or how a public came to know daguerreotypy, and later photography, in large part through what was written about these technologies. Specifically addressing the mutual influence of nineteenth-century visual culture and African American imaginative traditions, important recent volumes by Michael

Early Black American Writing and the Making of a Literature

Early Black American Writing and the Making of a Literature Douglas A. Jones Jr. (bio) Early African American Print Culture. Edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 432 pp. Bonds of Citizenship: Law and the Labors of Emancipation. Hoang Gia Phan. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 272 pp. What Was African American Literature?. Kenneth W. Warren. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. 192 pp. In the first and apparently only article for an exploratory series in Frederick Douglass’ Paper (FDP) that promised to carry out “glances at our condition,” a contributor writing under the penname Dion took up the state of African American literature as his subject. Although he commended the work of slave poets Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton and praised “the eloquent breathings” of black orators, Dion ultimately concluded, “Still, colored American literature exists only, to too great an extent, in the vast realm of probability” (4). Writing for the September 23, 1853, issue of FDP, thus anticipating the publication of William Wells Brown’s so-called novel Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter in London by only a few weeks, he based this judgment on the interrelated encumbrances of slavery and its socio-cultural aftereffects, the lack of financial and technological wherewithal within black communities, and the shortage of institutions that trained African Americans in the virtues of belletrism. [End Page 553] Despite these impediments, Dion maintained hope that the “coming literary glory of colored Americans” would arrive, but only if black writers, critics, and readers endeavored concertedly, as “a great number of co-workers,” to eradicate the racism of both the state and civil society as well as to facilitate the emergence of a sort of widespread black American “literary excellence” that would “remind the world of the days when dark-browed Egypt gave letters to Greece, and when the songs of Ethiopia—‘black skinned and wooly-haired’—[were] … at once the originators and conservators of science” (4). In other words, Dion called on African Americans “to produce and to consider their literature as a corporate enterprise” that was at once “instrumental” and “indexical,” as Kenneth Warren would describe it (What Was 18, 10–11). “Corporate enterprise” is the key phrase, here, because it suggests that the “literature” Dion sought could only materialize from the efforts of a collective both conscious of their collectivity and dedicated to their particular aims and sensibilities above those of everyone else. Thus, following Dion’s logic, a Wheatley or a Horton was too isolated to initiate a “literature” and too easily dismissed as exceptional, while texts such as slave narratives—which are notably absent from his essay—were too overdetermined by the affective and ideological demands of white readers to constitute a “colored American literature” (Dion 4). Of course, it would be analytically and pedagogically faulty to dismiss the whole of black writing from before the 1850s as somehow unrelated or inconsequential to the production of an African American literature. Dion himself made sure to cite these efforts as evidence that the “lamp” of black literary genius that once “burned so brilliantly, had not yet entirely died out,” despite the “baleful maps of oppression [that] have sought to extinguish its flame” (4). Indeed, early black writers, both slave and free, modeled forms of authorial subjectivity that later African Americans would draw on to appeal to readers and audiences across racial difference. Within and from their works a “voice and a persona imbued with authority and standing” emerged, as historian Dickson D. Bruce argues, “taking a place in larger realms of discourse in American society” (ix). Bruce’s historicist study of black American writing before Emancipation is particularly suggestive vis-à-vis Dion’s “glance” at the same body of writing because both seem to be making a distinction, however unwittingly, between the origins of an enterprise (in this case, the making of a literature) and its beginnings. [End Page 554] (Bruce titles his book The Origins of African American Literature, 1680–1865.) An origin, as Edward Said has usefully conceptualized it, “is a latent state from which the beginnings of action move forward,” a “condition or state that permits beginning” (316...

Early African American Print Culture

Early African American Print Culture