Nineteenth-Century African American Literature Research Articles

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...

Letters from the People: A Response to Radiclani Clytus

Letters from the People: A Response to Radiclani Clytus Benjamin Fagan (bio) It is a real pleasure to compose this letter in response to Radiclani Clytus’s invigorating and absolutely necessary “Visualizing Black Print: The Brooklyn Correspondence of William J. Wilson aka ‘Ethiop’” (Spring 2018). As Clytus notes, Wilson is not exactly unknown to scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, and especially not to those who focus on African American literature and culture. In 2015, for example, Leif Eckstrom and Britt Rusert edited a digital edition of Wilson’s 1859 “Afric-American Picture Gallery” for the Just Teach One: Early African American Print initiative. But while scholars may be aware of Wilson’s earlier correspondence to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, published under the pseudonym “Ethiop,” these missives have gone largely unexamined. That is, until Clytus’s essay. In addition to accomplishing the important work of introducing Wilson and his letters in particular to readers of this journal, Clytus situates these newspaper writings within a series of overlapping cultural constellations and in doing so makes a powerful argument for placing Wilson at the center of our explorations of nineteenth-century African American literature. Clytus devotes much of his article to exploring Wilson’s writings on the spectacle of New York City’s streets. From the 1830s to the 1850s, the promenades up and down Broadway in particular attracted the attention of a host of onlookers, with well-known white authors such as George Foster and Nathaniel Parker Willis offering detailed accounts of the display. Adopting the “urban flaneuring” of such figures, Wilson-as-Ethiop recognized the Broadway strolls as condensed performances of [End Page 17] the antebellum city’s overlapping racial and class anxieties (30). Relaying the scene in an 1852 letter to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Wilson detects in all the “white, ghost-like, motionless face[s],” be they rich or poor, “the same hawk-line nose, and thin, livid lip, and restless wolf-like countenance, indicative of keen scent after what is another’s” (36). By contrast, writes Wilson in the same letter, the scene on Church Street, “alias (black) Broadway,” is one defined by black joy: “Life, vivacity, merriment, mark the faces that now present themselves” (48). This juxtaposition of predatory whiteness to the “refined freedom” of black New Yorkers upends the visions of race and class peddled by writers like Foster, whose 1850 New York by Gas-Light consistently characterizes the city’s black inhabitants as, in Clytus’s crisp phrasing, “insistently proximate to Manhattan’s criminal underworld” (48; 36). Wilson thus emerges as a sophisticated theorist of the ways in which race and class are performed through urban spectacle. Accordingly, for those of us interested in issues of race, class, and the city in the nineteenth century, his missives to Frederick Douglass’ Paper become necessary reading. By reading the Ethiop missives together with a range of visual materials, Clytus also recovers Wilson as a keen reader of nineteenth-century visual culture. As Clytus argues in his essay’s opening, through his letters to the newspaper, “Wilson insisted on nothing less than the graphic reformation of African American subjectivity” (30). While not producing what we might traditionally recognize as visual material, through his manipulation of “the idea of figural vision in print,” Wilson created imaginative illustrations of black life in the city that ran counter to dominant visual representations of African Americans (31). Clytus reads the Ethiop letters together with a selection of images that include Edward Clay’s Life in Philadelphia and Life in New York series, Thomas Benecke’s Sleighing in New York, and illustrations that accompanied an 1848 plan to build an elevated railway along Broadway. Such images tended to either erase black New Yorkers from the city or, more frequently, traffic in racist stereotypes. Countering such misrepresentations, Wilson’s letters suggest a visual register where blackness not only escapes the distorted images of white artists but indeed “embod[ies] the ideal of representative democracy” (49). Scholars who have written on Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery” have similarly focused on his attention to the visual, and Clytus’s attention to his newspaper correspondence cements Wilson’s status as a key critic of visual culture. In...

Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature by Daniel Hack

Reviewed by: Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature by Daniel Hack Hollis Robbins Daniel Hack, Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 304 pp. $35.00. Anyone who works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American literature knows how necessary it is to keep a bookshelf nearby of all of the works of classical, biblical, and British literature that African American authors have cited, critiqued, reworked, or simply alluded to since Phillis Wheatley began the practice in 1773, referencing Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and a host of others. Some writers provide a handy list of authors, as Frederick Douglass did in 1845, directing readers to The Columbian Orator (over two dozen, from Cicero to Franklin!), or as Charles Chesnutt did in 1900, in listing the Great Books on John Warwick’s bookshelf in The House behind the Cedars (a dozen more, including Milton, Cervantes, and Scott). The canon of African American literature is so very rich and was for so very long ignored by literature scholars outside of historically black colleges and universities (who have always read works by black writers now tagged as “little known”), that the work of excavating, uncovering, and republishing literature by African American writers—along with the work of reading these texts in conversation with other African American texts—has been the primary aim of African American literature scholars for the past several decades. As the bookshelves filled with African American literature have expanded, so too has that other bookshelf, the one holding Ovid, Burns, Scott, and other texts black authors have alluded to. The ongoing task of analyzing the ways that these bookshelves are in conversation with each other is increasingly daunting. Accordingly, Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New is warmly welcome, with its detailed readings of African American literary engagement with Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, [End Page 62] and others. Reaping Something New details so many of the myriad ways that African American authors throughout the nineteenth century read, drew upon, deliberately misread, toyed with, signified upon, contended with, dismissed, and admired Victorian works of literature that, perhaps unintentionally, Hack quickly ends up contradicting his own central argument that these engagements were “unlikely” (1). From Wheatley onward, African American literature has been in deep, playful, and abiding conversation with the broader literary canon as key scholars on the category of African American literature from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to Kenneth Warren have argued. One of Hack’s tremendous contributions, in fact, is to gather together the many strands of scholarship on African American literary engagement with (primarily) British texts and present them meticulously, systematically, and thoroughly, arguing for a process he calls the “African Americanization” of these texts. “African Americanizations,” Hack argues, “make newly salient the specific ways and ends to which Victorian novels and poems do or do not represent individuals of African descent (and members of nonwhite races more generally) . . . [and] can also call into question the importance of race in texts in which it has always seemed central” (3). Hack sees African American writers’ engagement with Victorian texts as “close reading at a distance” (3). He offers new ways to look at Victorian texts and new ways to understand African American literature from specific, granular examples. Hack’s chapters reflect his training as a Victorianist and his emphasis on the two-way street of African American and Victorian textual engagement. In his Introduction, he begins to demonstrate his method by looking at the first paragraph of Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892), in which Cooper inserts three lines from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), without attribution but with a provocative italicization: “An infant crying in the night, / An infant crying for the light; / And with no language—but a cry.” Closely reading this fruitful engagement yields a richer understanding of Cooper, of Tennyson, and of the various scholars and critics over the years who have seen, not seen, or misunderstood the allusion (though surely not “suppressed” [6]). Next, chapter one, “Close Reading Bleak House at a Distance,” offers an updated version of Hack’s 2008...

The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the PastBlack Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the PastBlack Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Judith Madera

Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Judith Madera

Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature by Judith Madera

Reviewed by: Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature by Judith Madera Wendy Whelan-Stewart (bio) Madera, Judith. Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Durham: Duke U P, 2015. Judith Madera's Black Atlas begins with mid-nineteenth-century African American writers' keen awareness of the politicized nature of national borders and the race-based ideologies that carve space into place and manage the movements of black bodies and texts. Assembling works whose narratives hinge on characters' navigation, migration, or exploration, she grounds her readings in attending to "black flow" or the repeated movements of fictional and actual black communities, voices, or texts over spaces. A focus on flow flexibly and advantageously connects the fictional worlds of, for instance, Martin Delany's Blake, where interest in Cuba as a future site for African American emigration, revolution, and eventual independence runs against white America's interest in annexing Cuba as a slave state, and Pauline Hopkins's novel about the coalescing of Southern migrants from the Reconstruction South with the existing (and slowly eroding) African American community in literary Boston. She reveals the remarkable strategies five authors use to textually puncture, dismantle, reverse, or reconfigure the ongoing and racialized mapping of regions, states, and territories by nineteenth-century imperialist America. Madera's theoretical scaffolding draws its terminology from the disciplines of literary and cultural geography, cartography, Black Atlantic studies, postnational American Studies, and the exciting, new tradition of Hemispheric American studies. The dizzying combination allows her to reach surprising conclusions about nineteenth-century African American authorship and the use of texts to study how boundaries between, for example, free and slave states or territories are demarcated and devitalized or how public platforms for black men can be rewritten as spaces for black women's voices. Readers unfamiliar with postmodern theories of geography (such as the idea that space is not so much static setting as it is flux or that geography is defined less by material topographies and more by discursive and performative processes) will find Madera conscientiously instructive, and those already familiar with this newest form of criticism will find her work with diasporic African American communities well-suited to studies about space as process. Those who prefer close readings to the wider sweep of the literary geographer will find their footing in discussions of Francis Harper's Contending Forces and Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Goodness of St. Rocque. Madera also thankfully introduces Martin Delany's serialized Blake and James Beckworth's frontier memoir to wider audiences. The arc of the book moves from a study of writers problematizing (inter-)national borders to those writers using intimate regional spaces to probe intranational boundaries. [End Page 155] Chapter One begins with William Wells Brown's Clotel and the way it disturbs Thomas Jefferson's claim that slavery is contained by region and not representative of the larger nation. Rather, Madera argues that Clotel intentionally presents a character who is the enslaved daughter of a nation's president and who troubles the borders of the nation's capital in Washington D.C, which conflates both the slave-holding South and the free soil of the Nation. In the same chapter—Madera also points to Brown's nonfiction to illustrate the larger aim of her work, writers' scrutiny of the "symbolic structures of white territorialization" and the "dominant organizational codes of place" (3). She follows William Wells Brown's private (and later published) meditations on moving beyond Missouri into the North and eventually into Europe. Each of Brown's movements away from pro-slave spaces brings new social encounters that affirm Brown's personhood and reveal to him and to white Americans and Europeans the arbitrary and artificial construct of his supposedly innate inferiority. Brown's movements through place reveal the processes (or repeated "performances") that underpin social codes (5). In the second chapter, Madera selects two works dealing with America's territorial overreach and its attempt to enlarge slave-holding spaces. Martin Delany's Blake looks southeastward to Cuba while James Beckwourth's The Life and Adventures of James Beckwourth pans west of the Mississippi. Blake studies America's interest in Cuba...

Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature by Judith Madera

MADERA, JUDITH. Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 312 pp. $94.95 cloth, $25.95 paperback. Simply put: Black Atlas flows. It is not narratively or conceptually simplistic--far from it. Rather, the flow of Black Atlas surfaces by way of a consistent unmooring of static meanings of geography. Adroitly, Madera conducts readers through fluid valences of locale, terrain at once domestic, international, human, and economic. Indeed, by volume's end, one grasps that territory is discursive and ideological, yet material and felt. In Black Atlas, milieu defies scale, while at the same time directly mediating architecture and aesthetics. Setting is productive and participatory. Further, land articulates a set of relationships in the nineteenth century: between the United States, Mexico, and Central America; in and between Caribbean sites such as Cuba and Haiti; and between West Africa, the Niger Valley, and Canada. Problematizing dominant space versus place binaries as well as exclusionary, temporal attributes of space, Madera traces the ways black authors have troubled normative topographic distinctions embedded in North/South and industry/agriculture, as well as in legal domains such as that created by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Even the boundaries of relatively invariable entities such as antique maps exist in flux. Black Atlas flows. Foregrounding novels, travelogues, black serials, and national maps published in the period from 1849 to 1900, Madera engages process geography and close reading methodologies to interrogate of dissension (following Michel Foucault) and nonrepresentational geographies (following Bruno Latour) as traverse broad cultural debates on diaspora and hemispheric expansionism. Pinpointing how African American intellectual production maps ways of knowing slavery and Native American removal, for instance, Madera exposes cartographic imagining as a mode of complicity and resistance. Ultimately, Black Atlas situates an agile worldview not on the outskirts but as a hallmark of early black literature and performance. Chapter one, National Geographic: The Writings of William Wells emphasizes Brown's attentiveness to the relationship between travel and subjectivity in Clotel; or, the President s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853). To do so, Madera showcases moments of literary counter-transit in Brown's representation of Quaker homesteads and the Ohio River, as well as in panic such as Vicksburg. Virginia. Panic cartographies are spaces of dissimilitude, straining against their containing form. Madera writes: they are alternately sites of eruption and sites of quietude. But in their form house the potential to undo not only what is close or proximate, but the broader collective (26). Nineteenth-century black authors such as Brown mobilize spatial representation--often regional in scope and riddled with conflict--to contest the jurisdiction of North American law and nation. By juxtaposing midcentury Mississippi and Connecticut, the slave pens of Washington, DC, and labor discord in Richmond, VA, and Brown's striking emblems of place including iron collars, Madera captures the stakes of black self-making-as-world-making in the context of slavery and its aftermath. Indigenes of Territory: Martin Delany and James Beckwourth, the second chapter, pairs a text by an African American writer as eminent as Brown, Martin Delany's Blake: or, the Huts of America (1859-62), with one comparatively less well known, James Beckwourth's The Life and Adventures of James P. …

Black atlas: geography and flow in nineteenth-century African American literature

Black Atlas presents definitive new approaches to black geography. It focuses attention on the dynamic relationship between place and African American literature during the long nineteenth century, a volatile epoch of national expansion that gave rise to the Civil War, Reconstruction, pan-Americanism, and the black novel. Judith Madera argues that spatial reconfiguration was a critical concern for the era's black writers, and she also demonstrates how the possibility for new modes of representation could be found in the radical redistricting of space. Madera reveals how crucial geography was to the genre-bending works of writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, James Beckwourth, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. These authors intervened in major nineteenth-century debates about free soil, regional production, Indian deterritorialization, internal diasporas, pan–American expansionism, and hemispheric circuitry. Black geographies stood in for what was at stake in negotiating a shared world.

Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing by Christopher Hager (review)

Reviewed by: Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing by Christopher Hager Travis M. Foster (bio) Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing. By Christopher Hager. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 311. Cloth, $39.95.) Say you're an archivist, and you've been given a box of letters written, you soon come to realize, by enslaved men and women in the antebellum South. After celebrating the gift, what do you do? Where do they go? Do you file the letters in existing subject-specific boxes: those labeled "Slave Religious Practices," for instance, or "Slaves in Kentucky"? Or do you sort them by author, cataloged into categories marked off by names previously unknown? The former, of course, highlights the letters as part of a larger collective history, instances gesturing toward experiences repeated across multiple lives. The latter marks the documents as exceptional, fragments of singular lives and singular moments of composition. In his remarkable Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, Christopher Hager advances the latter option. For him, to treat the letters as distinctly authored documents—as vital instances of composition, expression, and literacy—is to transform them from artifacts into narratives and to, in turn, expand the range of modes through which the documents might speak across time. Hager's interventions are methodological and recuperative as much as historical and critical. He aims "to broaden literary studies (to manuscripts in addition to printed works, marginally literate writers in addition to the well-educated) and inspire new modes of interpreting historical sources" (4-5). A frequently cited and published letter written by Maria Perkins to her husband provides an ideal case study. In the letter, Perkins describes her master's decision to sell her and her children: "I write you a letter to let you know of my distress my master has sold albert to a trader onmonday court day and myself and other child is for sale also . . ." (55). Where previous editors and writers ignore, apologize for, or rectify the letter's imperfections and idiosyncrasies, Hager applies close reading methods, interpreting them instead "as reflections of Perkins's experience" (63). He notes, for instance, that Perkins begins the letter fastidiously, editing her own writing in a way that indicates self-conscious composition over a period of time. By the letter's end, however, she seems to speed up, misspelling words she's already spelled correctly, running out of room as she comes to the end of a line. Moreover, this change in the nature of composition matches a change in the letter's content, which transitions from "an epistolary mode of outreach to her husband and toward a diaristic mode of private reflection" (67). By attending to the letter with such care, Hager approaches something we might otherwise miss in the historical record: [End Page 124] Maria Perkins's private life and rich interiority, indexed here by spelling, handwriting, and self-corrections. While Hager thus suggests the potential value of close reading to historians, he also encourages scholars in my discipline, literary studies, to expand what we typically take to constitute the body of nineteenth-century African American literature. He makes this point effectively when he proposes a new category or genre of autobiographical writing, the "enslaved narrative," written from within the immediacies of slave experience rather than, as with slave narratives, from the perspective afforded by time, distance, and freedom. Such a literary approach to slave manuscripts subtly alters the history of slavery and emancipation. Take, as just one instance, the history of racial belonging and African American community formation. Here such collectivities emerge inductively rather than deductively, shifting even within a single document, and they therefore take form in modes far more provisional and dynamic than scholarship typically allows. In chapter 4, "The Written We," Hager analyzes how men and women, slave and newly free, represented their own affiliations, belongings, and companionships. In particular, he examines the shifting first-person plural in the writing of William B. Gould, who began his diary five days after his self-emancipation during the Civil War and kept it through three years of service in the U.S. Navy. Hager reveals a...

Out of the Kitchen of the House of Fiction

It comes as no surprise that the scholarly hierarchies and professional mar-ginalization that Nellie McKay, Barbara Christian, Ann duCille, and Frances Smith Foster exposed the 1990s and that Gabrielle Foreman addresses eloquently the present have insidious equivalents the realm of textual analysis and interpretation--insidious because the hierarchization and the margin-alization are produced (and reproduced) not through any overt devaluation of the subject but through less visible mechanisms, such as the seemingly disinterested frame of methodological practice itself. That is, I am concerned with actual critical praxis, the reading of specific texts, the aesthetic models implicitly applied, the racialized hierarchies of value one (re)produces, and the amount of time, research, and intellectual effort one invests problema-tizing common conclusion[s] about the literature of historically marginalized groups (Foster xxiii). These concerns are particularly relevant for nineteenth-century African American literature, often still considered valuable as artifact than artistry (Foster xx). Here I will focus on a specific, but not singular, case study: Charles W. Chesnutt. Despite his relatively established status, critical and editorial interest his work coexists with old, problematic interpretive frameworks fraught with ambivalence. My examination will focus on editors' introductions to anthologies of Chesnutt's work and to critical essay collections, where implicitly low expectations and white-centered cultural hierarchies reduce Chesnutt to a second-class dweller the Jamesian house of fic-fion without due critical process. Privileging normative white standards of comparison and, more marginally, evoking the rich context of black literature, editors Joseph R. McElrath, Robert C. Leitz III, and Jesse S. Crisler praise Chesnutt for his acceptance by the contemporaneous mainstream publishing establishment and also blame him for wield[ing] the tar brush so vigorously as to alienat[e] one of the most distinguished white advocates of the African American: William Dean Howells (xxiv). (1) Evoking binary critical categories of earlier decades (art versus protest), they describe Chesnutt as a protest writer (and a decidedly minor player at that) who barks his disapproval, a wording that reveals how intrinsically flawed such a category is the editors' estimation (xxix, xxxii). In ostensibly contrasting but equally problematic ways, they also portray him as a participant in a western humanistic tradition whose 1899 speech made the black Bethel Association ... almost indistinguishable from white America's Chautauqua Assembly (xxiii). less-than-flattering connotations of this seeming praise are reiterated when they conclude that Chesnutt was a talented amateur and marvel that was at all able to do the reading he did and fashion these speeches such a competent manner (xxxvi). It comes, then, as no surprise that, with such blunt tools for analysis, the editors end up confirming the limited literariness that their very definition of protest (elsewhere less euphemistically described by McElrath as literary invective) presupposed (W. D. Howells and Race 499). This assessment apparently entitles them, for instance, to reduce Chesnutt's essays on The Negro Problem to a list of themes ... easily identified, given how frequently they recur (McElrath, Leitz, and Crisler xxx). (2) As the critics project onto the writer the limitations of their own analytic approach, protest functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy of mediocrity, leading the editors to legitimize Howells's (in)famous 1901 accusation of bitterness: since Chesnutt was far from a detached observer of the 1898 race riot Wilmington, Howells had to lament the 'bitter, bitter' tone of Marrow of Tradition (xxiv). Now, as then, the critic(s) (3) disagreement with the author is cloaked under summary aesthetic evaluations. …

Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth Century African American Literature by Eric Gardner,

Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth Century African American Literature by Eric Gardner,

Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (review)

Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (review)

Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

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...

Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Eric Gardner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. x + 258 pages. $50.00 cloth.

Journal Article Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Eric Gardner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. x + 258 pages. $50.00 cloth. Get access Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Eric Gardner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. x + 258 pages. $50.00 cloth. Therese M. Rizzo Therese M. Rizzo University of North Carolina, Pembroke Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 35, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 189–191, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/35.4.189 Published: 01 December 2010

Nineteenth‐Century African American Literature and the ‘New Regionalism’

AbstractWhile the study of nineteenth‐century African American literature has gained a much stronger position in the academy and while authors like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are essentially canonized, the field often remains reduced to the study of stories of the South (especially slave narratives) published in a handful of northeastern urban centers. However, paired with recent recovery efforts, new attention to questions of location and especially to various understudied regions in the nineteenth‐century United States like the Black West may cause a radical rethinking of nineteenth‐century Black textual presences. This essay thus offers a preliminary discussion of the following questions surrounding the ‘new regionalism’ within the study of nineteenth‐century African American literature: How do ‘new regionalist’ scholars define and deploy ideas of ‘region,’ place, and location – especially given the period’s mobility and diversity? How do they engage with the expectations and stereotypes inherent in existing regional labels including those tied to race and racial absence? How do the (sometimes) micro‐historic approaches of ‘new regionalism’ fit in dialogue with seemingly broader conceptions of hemispheric studies and/or a ‘Black Atlantic’? What do ‘new regionalist’ approaches offer the field of African American literature and the broader community?

Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature Michael K. Johnson Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. By Eric Gardner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 258 pages, $50.00. Eric Gardner's latest book continues the task he began in Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West (2007) of documenting the presence of African American literature in Unexpected Places, whether those places be textual (periodicals) or geographic (the American frontier). That we don't expect to find African American literature in these places suggests the narrowness of our approaches, a privileging of the "bound book" in literary studies, an emphasis on northeastern and southeastern population [End Page 211] centers in African American studies, an inflexibility in Western American studies as to what constitutes "the West" and as to which groups' experiences count as representative of westernness (7). Print culture was extraordinarily important to nineteenth-century African Americans. The press provided a means of political activism and served to connect disparate groups of black communities into a "metaphorical black nation within a nation" (18). Gardner's study focuses primarily on black-owned newspapers (and on articles, letters, poems, and fiction published in those periodicals) located in places such as St. Louis, Indianapolis, and San Francisco. The black periodical press in the nineteenth century was "the central publication outlet for many black writers," and ignoring this rich archive of material has led literary studies to "define the landscape of nineteenth-century black literature as much, much narrower than it really was" (10, 7). Gardner also suggests that applying a contemporary understanding of the American West has prevented us from fully considering the western-ness of nineteenth-century texts. Black writers challenged antebellum "depictions of St. Louis as the gateway to the West (and thus to America's future)" via visions of St. Louis as "a 'gateway' to the heart of slavery" (25). Thus, the concept of St. Louis as a specifically western place was an important element of anti-slavery rhetoric. And whether or not we currently think of Indiana as part of the American West, writers for the Indianapolis-based Repository in the 1850s certainly thought of themselves as westerners. In an apostrophe to the newspaper itself, editor John Mifflin Brown writes, "Go thou, then, into every family, and soar not above the humble cabins of thy own native West; visit the frontier settler, and make his home the place of cheer" (63–64). While Gardner may "unexpectedly" place St. Louis and Indianapolis in the West, he also visits more expected western places, including postbellum California newspapers such as the San Francisco Elevator and the Pacific Appeal, which together "articulated a sense of the West as a center of black citizenship" (94). The Elevator in particular brought together "writers spread throughout the state of California, and writers throughout the larger West—from Thomas Detter in the Idaho Territory to a group of correspondents in black British Columbia," joined by the shared task of creating a specifically black western identity, and guided by an editor, Philip Bell, who "placed a clear emphasis on the black West and specifically black California" (113, 114). This chapter alone makes Unexpected Places essential reading for scholars of the American West. [End Page 212] Michael K. Johnson University of Maine at Farmington Copyright © 2010 The Western Literature Association

Unexpected places: relocating nineteenth-century African American literature

In January of 1861, on the eve of both the Civil War and the rebirth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Christian Recorder, John Mifflin Brown wrote to the paper praising its editor Elisha Weaver: It takes our Western boys to lead off. I amproud of your paper.Weaver's story, though, like many of the contributions of early black literature outside of the urban Northeast, has almost vanished. Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature recovers the work of early African American authors and editors such as Weaver who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based Recorder during and after the Civil War.In conversation with both archival sources and contemporary scholarship, Unexpected Places calls for a large-scale rethinking of the nineteenth-century African American literary landscape. In addition to revisiting such better-known writers as William Wells Brown, Maria Stewart, and Hannah Crafts, Unexpected Places offers the first critical considerations of important figures including William Jay Greenly, Jennie Carter, Polly Wash, and Lizzie Hart. The book's discussion of physical locations leads naturally to careful study of how region is tied to genre, authorship, publication circumstances, the black press, domestic and nascent black nationalist ideologies, and black mobility in the nineteenth century.Author: Gardner, Eric Publisher: University Press of Mississippi Illustration: N Language: ENG Title: Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature Pages: 00272 (Encrypted PDF) On Sale: 2009-08-20 SKU-13/ISBN: 9781604732832 Category: Literary Criticism : American African American