Description
Book SynopsisEarly African American Print Culture presents seventeen original essays that demonstrate how the study of African American print culture might enrich the study of print culture, while at the same time expanding the terrain of African American literature beyond authorship to editing, illustration, printing, circulation, and reading.
Trade Review"A must-read for scholars of African American literature and those who study the development of print culture in the early American republic. . . . The book's seventeen chapters admirably illuminate the multifaceted ways African Americans engaged with the world of print between the mid-eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries." *
Journal of American History *
"Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein have fashioned seventeen well-conceived and -executed works into an anthology that advances our understanding of how early African American literature fits into the historical landscape of communication arts." *
African American Review *
"Illustrated by engrossing and, at times, disconcerting visual images, [the book] productively brings together the work of established critical figures." *
Modern Language Review *
"
Early African American Print Culture reads like a manifesto, a call to action-sometimes directly, by cataloging the work that remains to be done, and sometimes simply by offering models of scholarship on familiar and unfamiliar authors and texts. The central point, of course, is that we need to attend to the whole of American print culture if we are to understand the complexities of African American writing throughout the nineteenth century." * John Ernest, West Virginia University *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Early African American Print Culture
—Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein
PART I. VECTORS OF MOVEMENT
Chapter 1. The Print Atlantic: Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and the Cultural Significance of the Book
—Joseph Rezek
Chapter 2. The Unfortunates: What the Life Spans of Early Black Books Tell Us About Book History
—Joanna Brooks
Chapter 3. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry
—Meredith L. McGill
Chapter 4. Early African American Print Culture and the American West
—Eric Gardner
PART II. RACIALIZATION AND IDENTITY PRODUCTION
Chapter 5. Apprehending Early African American Literary History
—Jeannine Marie DeLombard
Chapter 6. Black Voices, White Print: Racial Practice, Print Publicity, and Order in the Early American Republic
—Corey Capers
Chapter 7. Slavery, Imprinted: The Life and Narrative of William Grimes
—Susanna Ashton
Chapter 8. Bottles of Ink and Reams of Paper: Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Culture of Print
—Jonathan Senchyne
PART III. ADAPTATION, CITATION, DEPLOYMENT
Chapter 9. Notes from the State of Saint Domingue: The Practice of Citation in Clotel
—Lara Langer Cohen
Chapter 10. The Canon in Front of Them: African American Deployments of "The Charge of the Light Brigade"
—Daniel Hack
Chapter 11. Another Long Bridge: Reproduction and Reversion in Hagar's Daughter
—Holly Jackson
Chapter 12. "Photographs to Answer Our Purposes": Representations of the Liberian Landscape in Colonization Print Culture
—Dalila Scruggs
Chapter 13. Networking Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Hyper Stowe in Early African American Print Culture
—Susan Gillman
PART IV. PUBLIC PERFORMANCES
Chapter 14. The Lyric Public of Les Cenelles
—Lloyd Pratt
Chapter 15. Imagining a State of Fellow Citizens: Early African American Politics of Publicity in the Black State Conventions
—Derrick R. Spires
Chapter 16. "Keep It Before the People": The Pictorialization of American Abolitionism
—Radiclani Clytus
Chapter 17. John Marrant Blows the French Horn: Print, Performance, and the Making of Publics in Early African American Literature
—Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
