African American Print Cultures in the Nineteenth Century

Course Description

This seminar will explore the relationship between African American print and activism during the long nineteenth century, focusing simultaneously on African American print practices and the ethics of studying African American print and life. How did African Americans use a variety of print forms to share and advance issues of import to Black life in the United States? How did the specific print forms they chose to work in and with influence such issues? We will concentrate on a small number of authors (e.g., Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Jarena Lee, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper) and collectives (e.g., colored conventions, committees, newspapers) to trace how they engaged with multiple forms of print. Drawing on the American Antiquarian Society’s extensive collection, we will focus our attention on four primary formats: the pamphlet, the serial, the records of the Colored Conventions, and the book. Throughout, the seminar will engage with how we define these formats for different purposes (e.g., book history, literary history, cataloguing, archiving).

In addition to offering an opportunity to work closely with primary materials, this seminar will provide participants with an introduction to Black Print Culture Studies. The study of African American print culture is also an inquiry into citational practices, the institutional forces that have tended to obscure African American print and elide African American scholarship, and the processes and ethics by which Black Studies compels us to change these structures. Our archival work will be supplemented by scholarship, some of which may be quite recent, but much of which is foundational to this well-established field. We will also learn from scholars in the field through guest lectures. All of the writer/activists we will learn from, be they working in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first, require readers to reckon with a series of ethical concerns that remain deeply relevant to our world and our work. Through our readings and discussions, we will not only explore fascinating materials produced by a community of powerful writers, but also cultivate the practices required for engaging with these communities with an eye towards archives, power, and our relation to them.

This seminar will be of interest to graduate students, librarians, archivists, curators, and college and university faculty. Topics include:

• The Pamphlet Tradition
• Black Periodicals
• Book History
• The Colored/Black Convention (of the Black People [of Color] Movement)
• Scholarly Editing

Faculty

Benjamin Fagan

Benjamin Fagan is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University. He specializes in early African American literature and culture. He is the author of The Black Newspaper and the Chosen …

Derrick R. Spires

Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in American Studies, Visual Studies, and Media Studies at Cornell University. He specializes in early African American and American print …

Advance Reading List

Required Reading

Andrews, William L. “Editing ‘Minority’ Texts.” In The Margins of the Text, edited by D. C. Greetham, 45–56. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Bassard, Katherine Clay. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. (Chapter 5)

Black, Alex W. “‘A New Enterprise in Our History’: William Still, Conductor of The Underground Railroad (1872).” American Literary History, 668-90, 32, no. 4 (2020).

Burgher, Denise. “Recovering Black Women in the Colored Conventions Movement.” Legacy 36, no. 2 (2019): 256–62.

Cole, Jean Lee. “Theresa and Blake: Mobility and Resistance in Antebellum African American Serialized Fiction.” Callaloo 34, no. 1 (2011): 158–75.

Dinius, Marcy J. “‘Look!! Look!!! At This!!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal.” PMLA 126, no. 1 (2011): 55–72.

Earhart, Amy. “An Editorial Turn: Reviving Print and Digital Editing of Black-Authored Literary Texts.” In The Digital Black Atlantic, edited by Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, 69–95. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Ernest, John. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. (Chapter 5)

Fagan, Benjamin. “The Fragments of Black Reconstruction.” American Literary History 30, no. 3 (2018): 450–65.

Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “A Riff, A Call, and A Response: Reframing the Problem That Led to Our Being Tokens in Ethnic and Gender Studies; or, Where Are We Going Anyway and with Whom Will We Travel?” Legacy 30, no. 2 (2013): 306–22.

Foreman, P. Gabrielle, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson, eds. The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Foster, Frances Smith. “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture.” American Literary History 17, no. 4 (2005): 714–40.

———. “Intimate Matters in This Place: The Underground Railroad of Literature.” Legacy 36, no. 2 (2019): 245–48.

Gardner, Eric. Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. (Introduction)

Goddu, Teresa A. “The Slave Narrative as Material Text.” In The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, edited by John Ernest, 149–64. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Harper, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted. Edited by Koritha Mitchell. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 2018.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Frances Smith Foster and Richard Yarborough. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2019.

McGill, Meredith. “Books on the Loose.” In The Unfinished Book, edited by Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch, 79–93. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

———. “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry.” In Early African American Print Cultures, edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Stein, 53–74. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. (Chapter 2)

Peterson, Carla L. “Literary Transnationalism and Diasporic History: Frances Watkins Harper’s ‘Fancy Sketches,’ 1859-60.” In Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, edited by Katherine Klish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, 189–208. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Roy, Michaël. “Cheap Editions, Little Books, and Handsome Duodecimos: A Book History Approach to Antebellum Slave Narratives.” MELUS 40, no. 3 (2015): 69–93.

Sinche, Brian. “The Walking Book.” In Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print, edited by Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne, 277–97. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019.

Soderberg, Laura. “One More Time with Feeling: Repetition, Reparation, and the Sentimental Subject in William Wells Brown’s Rewritings of Clotel.” American Literature 88, no. 2 (2016): 241–67.

Suggested Reading

Bacon, Jacqueline. Freedom’s Journal: The First African-American Newspaper. New York: Lexington Books, 2007. (Introduction)

Bilbija, Marina. “‘Dear Anglo’: Scrambling the Signs of Anglo-Modernity from New York to Lagos.” American Literary History 32, no. 4 (2020): 645–67.

Brooks, Joanna. “The Unfortunates: What the Life Spans of Early Black Books Tells Us About Book History.” In Early African American Print Cultures, edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Stein, 40–52. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Chiles, Katy. “Within and Without Raced Nations: Intratextuality, Martin Delany, and Blake; or the Huts of America.” American Literature, 323-52, 80, no. 2 (2008): 2008.

Foster, Frances Smith, ed. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. New York: Feminist Press, 1990.

———. “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Theresa?” African American Review 40, no. 4 (45 631): 2006.

Freeman, Joanne B. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. (Chapter 3)

Gardner, Eric, and Joycelyn Moody. “Introduction: Black Periodical Studies.” American Periodicals 25, no. 2 (2015): 105–11.

Goddu, Teresa A. Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. (Chapter 7)

Jackson, Leon. “The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian.” Book History 13 (2010): 251–308.

Leavell, Lori. “Recirculating Black Militancy in Word and Image: Henry Highland Garnet’s ‘Volume of Fire.’” Book History 20 (2017): 150–87.

McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. (Chapter 1)

Moody, Joycelyn. Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. (Chapter 2)

Moody, Joycelyn, and Howard Ramsby II. “Introduction: African American Print Cultures.” MELUS 40, no. 3 (2015): 1–11.

Newman, Richard, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky. “Introduction: The Theme of Our Contemplation.” In Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of African American Literature, 1790-1860, edited by Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Porter, Dorothy B. “Early American Negro Writings: A Bibliographical Study.” Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 39, no. 3 (1945): 192–268.

Sawallisch, Nele, and Johanna Seibert. “Trajectories in Black Atlantic Print Culture Studies: A Virtual Roundtable.” Atlantic Studies 18, no. 4 (2021): 560–70.

Spires, Derrick. “‘I Read My Mission as ’twere a Book’: Temporality and Form in the Early African American Serial Sketch Tradition.” In A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction, edited by Cindy Weinstein, 48–74. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

———. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. (Chapter 1)

Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Course Evaluations

Course History