Early African American Print Culture

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.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013"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

• Introduction: Early African American Print Culture-Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander SteinPART I. VECTORS OF MOVEMENTChapter 1. The Print Atlantic: Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and the Cultural Significance of the Book-Joseph RezekChapter 2. The Unfortunates: What the Life Spans of Early Black Books Tell Us About Book History-Joanna BrooksChapter 3. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry-Meredith L. McGillChapter 4. Early African American Print Culture and the American West-Eric GardnerPART II. RACIALIZATION AND IDENTITY PRODUCTIONChapter 5. Apprehending Early African American Literary History-Jeannine Marie DeLombardChapter 6. Black Voices, White Print: Racial Practice, Print Publicity, and Order in the Early American Republic-Corey CapersChapter 7. Slavery, Imprinted: The Life and Narrative of William Grimes-Susanna AshtonChapter 8. Bottles of Ink and Reams of Paper: Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Culture of Print-Jonathan SenchynePART III. ADAPTATION, CITATION, DEPLOYMENTChapter 9. Notes from the State of Saint Domingue: The Practice of Citation in Clotel-Lara Langer CohenChapter 10. The Canon in Front of Them: African American Deployments of "The Charge of the Light Brigade"-Daniel HackChapter 11. Another Long Bridge: Reproduction and Reversion in Hagar's Daughter-Holly JacksonChapter 12. "Photographs to Answer Our Purposes": Representations of the Liberian Landscape in Colonization Print Culture-Dalila ScruggsChapter 13. Networking Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Hyper Stowe in Early African American Print Culture-Susan GillmanPART IV. PUBLIC PERFORMANCESChapter 14. The Lyric Public of Les Cenelles-Lloyd PrattChapter 15. Imagining a State of Fellow Citizens: Early African American Politics of Publicity in the Black State Conventions-Derrick R. SpiresChapter 16. "Keep It Before the People": The Pictorialization of American Abolitionism-Radiclani ClytusChapter 17. John Marrant Blows the French Horn: Print, Performance, and the Making of Publics in Early African American Literature-Elizabeth Maddock DillonNotesList of ContributorsIndexAcknowledgments