Early African American Print Culture (Material Texts) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812244257 ISBN 13: 9780812244250

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012

Synopsis

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both the consolidation of American print culture and the establishment of an African American literary tradition, yet the two are too rarely considered in tandem. In this landmark volume, a stellar group of established and emerging scholars ranges over periods, locations, and media to explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off.

The book's chapters consider domestic novels and gallows narratives, Francophone poetry and engravings of Liberia, transatlantic lyrics and San Francisco newspapers. Together, they consider how close attention to the archive can expand the study of African American literature well beyond matters of authorship to include issues of editing, illustration, circulation, and reading—and how this expansion can enrich and transform the study of print culture more generally.

About this title

About the Author:

Lara Langer Cohen teaches English at Swarthmore College and is author of The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Jordan Alexander Stein teaches English at Fordham University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction
Early African American Print Culture
Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein

The present volume takes its cue from a historical convergence. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the consolidation of what historians have come to know as "print culture" in the United States. Spurred by technological improvements to the printing press, innovations in papermaking and binding, increasing divisions of labor and automation, and the expansion of distribution networks enabled by railroad and steamship, print shops turned out a huge variety of printed goods in unprecedented quantities. These goods included recognizably literary items such as books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and broadsides, as well as nonliterary items such as stationery, lottery tickets, currency, and ledgers. Printed matter became a part of everyday life, mediating and reshaping the already fluctuating social relations of the early United States.

At the same time, these years also mark the inauguration of what scholars have identified as an African American literary tradition. Despite the fact that education was often explicitly prohibited for slaves, and effectively placed out of reach for many freepersons, publications by African American authors appeared in increasing numbers. The year 1760 saw both the first published poem by an African American, Jupiter Hammon's broadside "An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penetential Cries," and the first published prose text, Briton Hammon's A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man. (The first known poem by an African American, Lucy Terry's "Bar's Fight," probably composed in 1746, was transmitted orally before being committed to print in 1855.) The first black publishing house, the African Methodist Episcopal Book Concern, was founded in 1817. The first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, appeared in 1827, and over the next thirty years, black periodicals from Albany to Cleveland to New Orleans to San Francisco followed suit. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, African Americans also established numerous literary societies, circulating libraries, political conventions, and church organizations, all of which articulated themselves through print media. African Americans worked alongside whites as compositors in print shops, as sailors transporting both raw and printed materials, and as educators instructing with books.

Yet despite this historical convergence, print culture and African American literature have rarely been considered in relation to one another. As Leon Jackson observes in a recent state-of-the-field essay on African American print culture, although the trope of the "talking book" remains one of the standbys of African American literary analysis, "we know very little about the production, dissemination, or consumption of the books that deployed that trope, and still less of the books that were begged, borrowed, stolen, owned, or encountered by the authors who wrote them"—to say nothing of African Americans' engagements with forms of print other than books. To the extent that scholars of African American literature have addressed the matter of print, they have generally done so with a dependence on critical models that assume that print is a stabilizing technology that subtends the establishment of African American identity. Such models understand literature as a primary tool with which African Americans articulated their personhood, forged bonds of racial solidarity, and laid claims to history. These models have performed immensely valuable work for the study of African American literary history—not least, of course, by underwriting its formation as a field of study. But such models hit their limits in many of the earliest African American texts, whose meandering plots, numerous plagiarisms, and multiple rewritings defy nearly any notion of textual stability. These texts instead beckon to much recent scholarship in book history, which has shown how abstract concepts central to literary study—authorship, readership, intellectual property, textual integrity, literary professionalism, and, indeed, literature itself—were very much in flux during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

For their part, however, book historians have been slow to incorporate the evidence of African American literature into these theoretical interventions. As a result, if scholars of early African American texts have ignored much theoretical work in book history in favor of stable notions of identity and print, it is equally true that scholarship in book history has often ignored African American literature, however broadly conceived. Jackson, for one, combs the archives of book history and bibliography periodicals for essays on African American topics, with sparse results. This neglect is all the more surprising given the abundance of potential material. In colonial and antebellum America, African Americans figured prominently in literary production both on the page (as writing subjects as well as subjects of writing) and off (as readers, editors, printers, engravers, compositors, papermakers, librarians, and so on). The sheer breadth and diversity of their experiences has a great deal to tell us about American print culture, while their omission from critical accounts renders even the freshest reconsiderations of the field inevitably partial.

Moreover, the rewards of studying African American print culture appear especially clear in light of growing efforts to consider how print culture studies and critical race studies might fit together. This conversation has produced excellent work on Hispanophone print archives (including studies by Anna Brickhouse, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, and Rodrigo Lazo) and early American communications media (including the work of Matt Cohen, Jeff Glover, Andrew Newman, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, and Phillip Round), but as yet it has not produced an equivalent body of work on the eighteenth and nineteenth century's rich history of African American print culture. To be sure, the field of African American literary studies boasts a long history of bibliographic scholarship and exceptional archival work, but these have, until very recently, tended to be more descriptive than critical.

Scholarship of the last decade or so suggests that book historians and critics of African American literature are beginning to turn this tide. Recent methodological essays by Frances Smith Foster, Xiomara Santamarina, and Leon Jackson have paired illuminating genealogies for African American print culture and its critical analysis with suggestions for new paths of inquiry. Important books and articles by scholars including Sarah Blackwood, Michael Chaney, Jeannine Marie DeLombard, Marcy J. Dinius, John Ernest, Eric Gardner, Beth A. McCoy, Elizabeth McHenry, and Edlie Wong have taken a materialist approach to African American texts, with enlightening results. Similar interdisciplinary work by historians such as Janet Duitsman Cornelius, David Waldstreicher, and Heather Andrea Williams has enhanced our understandings of African Americans' experiences with, uses of, and educations in print and literacy. The second and third volumes of A History of the Book in America (covering the period 1790¬-1880) have each included a chapter devoted to African American print culture. Vincent Carretta's controversial biography of Olaudah Equiano has urged scholars to see Equiano's Narrative as a book whose story is very different from that of its author, and it has in turn sparked new scholarship on the publication history of the narrative. At the same time, critical investigations at the intersection of race and performance studies by scholars such as Daphne Brooks and Tavia Nyong'o have expanded our knowledge of African American representational practices and the methodologies we might use to understand them. Such work brings together archival methods and African American literature in fresh ways that have helped sharpen this volume's focus on sustained textual and material analysis, as well as propel it toward an elaboration of the theoretical frameworks proper to such investigations.

Inspired and challenged by this scholarship, Early African American Print Culture focuses on bridging early African American literature and print culture studies. The essays that follow do not take a single approach to this project; nor do they attempt to map its contours comprehensively. Rather, they showcase the variety of discoveries scholars might make when they ask what early African American literature looks like when read with an attention to its material conditions, and what print culture looks like when it turns its attention to African American archives.

Definitions

If this volume thus proceeds from an understanding of how investigations into early African American print culture might be focused, it does not proceed from a single, agreed-upon understanding of what early African American print culture is. The following essays subject each of the terms in our titular phrase "early African American print culture" to some reflexive scrutiny. Nevertheless, readers of these essays will notice the following definitional tendencies for each of the volume's key terms.

"Early," in the present usage, refers to African American print culture before the Harlem Renaissance. This aesthetic movement—along with an attendant constellation of developments in American culture, critical practices, and the literary marketplace—established an undeniable place for African American writing in the United States. But it did so in part by crystallizing a set of concepts, including "author," "literature," and even "black." These categories subsequently helped carve out claims for African American literature in the canon (including those made by post-1960s critics); but, conversely, their fixity seems to have hampered scholars' abilities to understand the terrain of African American print during a period before these definitions gained purchase. Viewed from the time following the Harlem Renaissance, the archives of earlier periods—with their often unknown authors, limited audiences, baffling narratives, and dubious claims on identity and plausibility—are consequently understood to be artless, immature, desultory, partial, unreadable, fraudulent, fragmentary, or, simply, unstable. As a result, the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance have ironically tended to obscure the more disparate racial, political, and cultural formations that existed before. While critical attention to print culture may tell us a great deal about the entire history of African American literature, then, such an interpretive task is especially pertinent with regard to the periods before the Harlem Renaissance's perceived high-water mark of African American writing.

This definition of "early" may strike some readers as quite late. However, its apparent dislocation reflects one of this volume's historiographic challenges: the periodization of early African American print culture does not necessarily coincide with more conventional (which is also to say, whiter) narratives of American literary history. Focusing on "early" African American print culture, our contributors have located surprising flash points in the convergence of African American print culture and racialization: the late eighteenth-century surge of gallows literature by the black condemned (DeLombard); John Marrant's immensely popular 1785 conversion narrative (Brooks, Dillon); the 1825 publication of The Life of William Grimes, the first book-length narrative of a fugitive slave written and copyrighted by the fugitive himself (Ashton); the black state conventions of the 1840s (Spires); the 1855 U.S. reprinting of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (Hack). Other contributors take a radically nonlinear approach to temporality, emphasizing historical loops, gaps, and repetitions (Cohen, Jackson, Scruggs, Gillman). The diversity of these events (from publication to reprinting to citation) leads us to conclude that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African Americans' experience of what Joanna Brooks calls "disrupted social fields" created temporalities whose significance has been underappreciated by the conventions of American literary history (Chapter 2). However, rather than arguing for an alternative set of events that might anchor early African American print culture within the time of literary-historical convention, these essays seek instead to open the issue to questions: what are the periodicities of African American print culture, when do they come into focus, and how do they relate to other periodicities?

The definition of "African American" that emerges across this volume's essays is similarly capacious, spanning hemispheric and transatlantic locations, and giving critical attention to editors, readers, printers, and distributors, as well as authors. In this respect, the volume resonates with Kenneth Warren's recent contention that African American literature is defined not by race but by racialization, such that, "[a]bsent white suspicions of, or commitment to imposing, black inferiority, African American literature would not have existed as a literature." While Warren locates the mechanisms of racialization operative in the era of Jim Crow segregation as key for the production of African American literature as such, the following essays nevertheless also find varieties of racialization at work in earlier periods, but find them productive of a greater range of print and literary forms. In these accounts, the "African American" texts examined achieve that designation by virtue of their participation in a wide range of ideological and material ways that blackness becomes culturally "legible," from visual representations of the distinction between blackness and whiteness (Senchyne, Capers, Scruggs) to the legally "mixed character" of the slave as both person and property, which made criminality the clearest basis of early black personhood (DeLombard). The cultural process of racialization both does and does not overlap with the more biographical details of race, and thus some of the following essays posit that it might make heuristic sense to designate a text as African American even if its author was not (Gillman, Clytus), or to argue that a text might usefully be considered so despite its failure to conform to expected generic protocols of African American literature (Ashton, Pratt). The very difficulty of pinning down the category "African American" reflects one of the volume's key goals: to recognize print's role in the process of racialization. Placing the emphasis here, rather than on race and racial identity, means that the present volume requires of its reader a willingness to engage the possibility that Early African American Print Culture might unmake identity as plausibly as make it, as this volume posits that the richness of African American history can be told with recourse to moments where identity diffuses as much as moments where identity consolidates.

Many of the essays that follow treat the "American" in "African American" as a further site for investigation, for early African American print culture is not always confined by na...

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0812244257
• ISBN 13: 9780812244250
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Cohen Lara Langer, Stein Jordan Alexander