Tilling Two Cultures Irene Tucker (bio) Daniel Hack's Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2017) is a book in two parts, notable for its coherence. Over the course of his book, Hack traces "the citational and appropriative" acts by which nineteenth-century African American writers and activists recycled and transformed some of the central texts of their British Victorian contemporaries. In an opening half that follows the literary repurposing of writings by central Victorian figures including Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and George Eliot as they cross the Atlantic, Hack engages in what he calls "close reading at a distance," a practice of granular juxtaposition in which he reads local moments of British canonical texts in relation to the occasions in which they are recontextualized, edited, and rewritten by African American writers who stand beyond the Victorian writers' envisioned audiences. Hack is careful to distinguish his methodology from both reception studies and scholarship on the "Black Atlantic," even as he acknowledges his indebtedness to both. While reception studies often abandon engagement with the local details of literary texts in order to offer contextualizing descriptions of their reception, Hack commits himself to textual afterlives that are themselves literary texts. Positioning himself in relation to discourses of the "Black Atlantic," he "seeks to nuance and move beyond two common ways of describing, and implicitly justifying, a Victorian—or, more broadly, British or European or white—presence [End Page 80] in African American literature" (8). The justifications beyond which he seeks to move are those that would understand canonical British texts merely as occasions for "subversive appropriation," as well as those that would seek to use white literature as an opportunity for "politically symbolic acts of cultural positioning" of the sort designed to refute the notion that black cultural expression is necessarily inferior to that produced by whites (8). For Hack, the force of these encounters lies in the fact that their use of canonical British texts is not predictable in advance. "The gap between original and new contexts serves as a measure of creative agency," he explains (10). Nowhere is the complexity of these relations of agency on better display than in the book's second chapter, "(Re-)Racializing 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,'" in which Hack examines the surprisingly heterogeneous and often internally contradictory African American afterlives of Tennyson's poem. Nestled between chapters on Bleak House (1852–53) and Eliot's often-ignored poem, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), the history Hack offers takes up the question of the historicity of literary production itself. The central issue driving the use and re-use of "The Charge" is the degree to which a poem inspired by a specific historical event—in this case, the Crimean War—must remain legible in terms of that event. British Poet Laureate Tennyson first published his poem in the London Examiner on 9 December, 1854, a mere five weeks after the catastrophic event it evokes. When abolitionist Frederick Douglass reprinted the poem early the following month in his eponymous Frederick Douglass's Paper he positioned it as one among a series of poems and essays about the Crimean War. In Douglass's framing, the Crimean War ought to be understood as a world-historical event akin to the anti-slavery movement: a front in the international battle for human rights. Douglass presents "The Charge" as relevant to his own paper's anti-slavery readership "not because the poem transcends its occasion," Hack explains, "but rather because its occasion, properly understood, transcends the particular time and place of its setting" (49–50). Moreover, elsewhere in the same January 1855 issue of Douglass's paper, Tennyson's poem is subjected to an even less anticipatable historical recontextualizing. In the piece in question, "Our New York Correspondent," James McCune Smith, writing under the pen-name "Communipaw," makes the case that the poem's refrain, "Cannon to the right of them, / Cannon to the left of them, / Cannon in front of them / Volleyed and thundered," is itself an unacknowledged rhythmic and sonic appropriation of a Congo chant, "'as old as—Africa': 'Canga bafio te, / Canga moune de le, / Canga do ki la, / Canga li'" (qtd. in...
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Jan 1, 2023
Martin Danahay 
Open Access