Course Description
This course will focus on early African American print culture in the United States during the nineteenth century. We begin with an overview of American print culture studies generally, focusing our attention on early African American print production and form as the sessions move forward. In examining print as both a cultural form and a marketable commodity, we will situate objects within a variety of distributional, technological, consumerist, and cultural networks. Indeed, our sessions will spend equal time discussing the “print” (material infrastructures) and the “culture” (the cultural and political movements surrounding and working through print technology) in African American print culture. This focus means thinking critically and intersectionally about processes of racialization, gendering, class formation, and literary culture. The class will be run as a seminar where we will collectively develop working definitions and frameworks for studying nineteenth-century African American print culture. Above all, we will think about the ways African Americans used print to engage each other on issues of import to Black life in the United States. Our case studies will be drawn from three forms spanning the century: the pamphlet (David Walker’s Appeal), Black newspapers (Frederick Douglass’s Paper), and the records of the Colored Conventions movement (via coloredconventions.org). While discussing the pamphlet and the newspaper will help ground our discussions in nineteenth-century print technologies and Black artistic and activist histories, the final session on the Colored Conventions movement (1830–1890s) will combine these discussions to think about the relationship between print and social movements. Topics include: The Pamphlet Tradition Black Periodicals The Colored/Black Convention (of the Black People [of Color] Movement)Faculty
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
Primary Readings
The Colored Conventions Project: Bringing 19th-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life, https://coloredconventions.org
Frederick Douglass’ Paper via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84026366/?st=calendar
Jones, Absalom, and Richard Allen. A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793: And a Refutation of Some Censures Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications. Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1794. https://lccn.loc.gov/02013737; https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N20688.0001.001?view=toc
Walker, David. Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles: Together with a Preamble to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America. Boston: 1829 and 1830. 3 editions.
Lee, Jarena. The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A Colored Lady. Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel. Revised and Corrected from the Original Mss., Written by Herself. 2nd Edition. Cincinnati: Printed and Published for the Author, 1839. https://books.google.com/books?id=I0w6abTkGe8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Lee, Jarena. Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, Revised and Corrected from the Original Manuscript Written by Herself. Philadelphia: 1849. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.319510011634661&view=1up&seq=7
Garnet, Henry Highland. Walker’s Appeal: With a Brief Sketch of His Life. New York: J.H. Tobitt, 1848.
Secondary Readings
Bassard, Katherine Clay. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1999. [Selections to be provided.]
Clytus, Radiclani. “Visualizing in Black Print: The Brooklyn Correspondence of William J. Wilson aka ‘Ethiop’.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 6, no. 1 (2018): 29–66. doi:10.1353/jnc.2018.0006
Dinius, Marcy “‘Look!! Look!!! at This!!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal.” PMLA 126, no. 1 (2011): 55–72. doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2011.126.1.55
Ernest, John. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Fagan, Benjamin. The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016.
Fanuzzi, Robert. Abolition’s Public Sphere. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Foreman, P. Gabrielle, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson. The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. [Selections to be provided.]
Leavell, Lori. “Recirculating Black Militancy in Word and Image: Henry Highland Garnet’s ‘Volume of Fire’.” Book History 20 (2017): 150–187. doi:10.1353/bh.2017.0005
McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African-American Literary Societies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. [Selections to be provided.]
Peterson, Carla L. “Mapping Taste: Urban Modernities from the Tatler and Spectator to Frederick Douglass’ Paper.” American Literary History 32, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 691–722. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajaa028
Course Evaluations
Course History
- 2022
Derrick R. Spires teaches this course online (12 hours).
- 2021
Derrick R. Spires teaches this course online (6 hours).