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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.
Introduction: 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