Reviewed by: Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice Teresa A. Goddu (bio) Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice. Philadelphia March 18–20, 2010. Organized by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein and cosponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Temple University Libraries, and the University of Pennsylvania Center for Africana Studies, the conference “Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice” brought together scholars from the fields of African American literary and cultural studies and print culture studies to theorize and to map the emerging field of African American print culture.1 In joining together two “vibrant areas of American Studies scholarship” that “are rarely considered in relation to one another,” the conference explored what the questions of print culture studies—questions of the materiality, production, dissemination, and consumption of print forms—could teach us about early African American literature and how the particular examples of African American literature have “the capacity to transform our understanding of print culture.”2 While the conference focused more on the new interpretive frameworks that print culture studies can offer African American literature rather than the reverse, the conference’s uniformly strong papers (which were precirculated) and its intimate setting (all the participants attended all the sessions) allowed for a complex and wide-ranging conversation to develop over the course of the meeting. The conference—and the volume of essays that will emerge from it—mark a watershed moment in the field. Frances Smith Foster opened the conference with a keynote address that articulated the particular challenges that African American literature poses to print culture studies. Part of the reason that print culture studies has been slow to embrace African American literature is because of its incomplete and often uncertain archive. Foster noted, “With African-American [End Page 733] texts, as with other cultural materials produced by and for other devalued groups, so much has already been lost, gone astray, or been stolen that complete restoration is impossible.”3 The African American print archive is full of gaps, traces, and frustratingly partial inventories and histories. It is marked, as Joanna Brooks argued, by the “conditions of chronic discontinuity and disruption endemic to communities of color by reason of political and economic exploitation.”4 Scholars, Frances Smith Foster maintained, need to be cautious—but not stymied—when facing this fragmented archive. Rather than rush to judgment naming a text as the “first” or “the only,” scholars need to practice patience. They should also create collaborative models of scholarship that lead to cooperative ventures among themselves as well as with wider communities (everyone from the information specialist to the church secretary) and diverse archives (the online archive as well as the attic). A model of consultation, Foster contended, is crucial not only for working productively across the gaps in our communal knowledge about African American print culture and for weaving together its bits and pieces but also for processing and assimilating the rapidly mounting documents that digital archives (such as the African American newspaper collection available through Accessible Archives) are making readily available. As the conference papers made clear, the African American print archive, despite its gaps, is also robust and rich, offering a diverse body of works. Conference papers focused on a wide array of textual, visual, and material forms: poems, letters, journals, narratives, convention proceedings, and newspapers; broadsides, graphic pictorials, and wood engravings; paper, type, and book. By taking a print culture approach to African American texts, and thereby troubling the stricter category of the literary, the conference papers produced, in Eric Gardner’s words, a “wider and more varied sense of Black letters.” Most important, the conference papers moved beyond the book, the privileged form of literary studies, to address a range of textual expressions and forms. As Gardner observed, “Bound books of poetry and autobiography. . . were only part of the story of the beginnings of African American literary cultures.”5 By categorizing newspapers as nonliterary, for example, critics ignore the cache of short-form genres (everything from letters and editorials to travelogues, poetry, and historical essays) they contain. When books were addressed, the papers [End Page...
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Jun 1, 2013
S N Roth 
Open Access