by Crystal Donkor
The 34th Annual English Department Graduate Symposium, Cultures of African American Print, honors a history of African American contributions to printed text including the circulation, dissemination, and reception of materials in print. In the Fall 2021 course leading up to this event, students studied how African Americans used print culture as a vehicle to build literary traditions, to fight for racial justice, and to organize politically and socially. While we interrogated how these efforts challenged racism, we also expanded beyond that exploration to examine Black self-fashioning and identity formation, community building, and creative production in the long nineteenth century. Working in such an interdisciplinary field of study required the employment of a wide range of methods and skills to be able to ask, confront, and research the very kinds of compelling questions we were undertaking. At first, this was a bit of a heavy lift for the students, who were more accustomed to traditional methods of literary study and analysis. African American print culture was a new area of inquiry for them, as they had not had much of a formal foundation for the course content when they began, including the particular histories which inform and surround this tradition. The students were transparent and vocal about their apprehensions, but as you will see, they met this challenge with such enthusiasm and intellectual curiosity that each class was a genuine source of pleasure and discovery—that process continued as they began to prepare and refine their papers for the symposium and eventually, for publication. The final result are six excellent student graduate papers that uniquely and originally touch upon some aspect of the following questions that sit at the heart of the field:
What does the study of African American contributions to printed text and the creation and circulation of those texts reveal about African American life and literature? How did cultures of African American print shape the social and political milieu of early African America? In what ways did African American print culture expand beyond resistance and the refusal of mainstream racial logics and, instead, highlight Black innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, and being.
Adrianna Kandeel’s paper on Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s pamphlet, Notes on Canada West, opened the first panel by presenting Shadd Cary as a pioneering Black protofeminist situated at the outer limits of popular nineteenth century debates: emigration and abolition. Kandeel keenly argues that Shadd Cary’s controversial yet progressive politics articulated in the pamphlet and hotly debated with some of the most influential Black men of the era in the press, set the stage for Shadd Cary’s influential stewardship of her own newspaper, The Provincial Freeman. Highlighting a different genre of print culture entirely, Brianna Castagnozzi’s essay delves into African American folkloric musical traditions to interrogate how the transition of the spirituals from orality to printed classical music facilitated processes of adaptation, circulation, and reception. Castagnozzi credits H.T. Burleigh’s documentation of the spirituals as culturalist preservation that challenged American literary and musical paradigms, even in the midst of critique from prominent Black artists. Finally, Elizabeth Hill-Caruso closed out the first panel with an insightful study of Frances E.W. Harper’s public persona as stylized in Black newspapers through typesetting, write-ups, and placement. Hill-Caruso concludes that Harper’s stylization reveals alternatively sexist and celebratory notions of the feminine that contended alongside Harper’s own crafting of her public image through her speeches and public writing.\
The second panel began by continuing conversations on African American women’s stewardship in the Black press through Eugen Margariti’s essay on Pauline Hopkin’s editorship of The Colored American Magazine and her novel serialized therein, Hagar’s Daughter. Margariti thoughtfully uncovers synergies between Hopkins’s serial, J. Alexandre Skeete’s illustrations for the novel (which were strategically placed throughout the publication), and generalized magazine content as a challenge to racialized imagery and the tragic mulatta trope. Lizzy Sobiesk returns us to a study of Frances E.W. Harper and the pamphlet tradition, turning an eye toward Harper’s rhetorical techniques. In theorizing Harper’s mobilization of the pamphlet’s sentimentality, poetics, and style as stratagem in service to the abolitionist cause, Sobiesk prompts us to critique our understanding of political pamphlets in order to make room for less recognizable but equally effective models of protest. Finally, Sasha Parrish’s essay invites us deeper into abolitionist discourse through a once ubiquitous and multigeneric text, the American Anti-Slavery Almanac. Parrish highlights how antislavery arguments rendered through art, literature, and opinion pieces coalesced around astronomical data, calendars, and advertisements to tacitly tie the common cause of abolition to other common discourses of everyday life in the nineteenth century.
The symposium concluded with a keynote address from Dr. Derrick Spires, Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Dr. Spires’s energizing, fascinating, and humorously inflected talk “[took] the form of a series of sketches in keeping with nineteenth century forms.” At the heart of his discussion of cultures of African American print being fueled by “a spirit of inquiry” lay an exposition of his own research methods, questions, and discoveries. Another important and meaningful aspect of Dr. Spires’s remarks was its striking example of scholarly generosity. While Dr. Spires provided a formal response to the student presentations before his address, his keynote seamlessly and thoughtfully infused our students’ inquires and findings beside his own, stitching both them and their research subjects into his “own evolving understanding of the cultures of African American print.”