by Derrick R. Spires

Reading and responding to the essays presented here was a delight, both in Spring 2022, when the contributors delivered them and now with some time for reflection. A few generative thru-lines emerge from this collected work, no doubt aided and abetted by Dr. Crystal Donkor’s mentoring and the synergies that happen when scholars write in community. These essays call and riff on each other’s discussions around innovations on form, the excitement of discovery (or rediscovery), sentimentalism and its limits, eerie reminders about how calls to ban or burn books often arrives as backlash against social progress, and above all, how attention to the materiality of texts enhances our ability to read meaning in the words and images on the page, while also giving us new ways to attend to the people behind the works.

Adrianna Kandeel’s “Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Emigration and Black Nationalism” gives us an account of Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s early print activism, noting “She deployed direct, ambitious, and compelling language that was effective, but often placing her at odds with many of her male contemporaries.” Indeed, she did. Kandeel’s attention to form and genre—the way Shadd Cary melds the quantitative and the qualitative, the almanac-like feel to her Notes on Canada West mixed with a sentimental edge are especially generative. It makes me wonder if and how Shadd Cary might have engaged with the antislavery almanac tradition more directly. At the same time, this genre mix would have resonated with proceedings from contemporaneous the Colored Conventions, both those with emigrationist bents, such as the 1854 convention in which Shadd Cary participated and more local conventions that often wrestled with (or denied outright) Black women’s voices. It’s worth noting here that Shadd Cary’s father, Abraham Shadd presided over the 1833 national convention, so Shadd Cary herself had a front row seat to see what was working and not working. In that sense, Notes on Canada West signifies on works ranging Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, the almanac tradition, and the Addresses issued from the conventions Shadd Cary oft-critiqued. Kandeel’s emphasis on data also resonates with Teresa Goddu’s account of abolitionist literature in Selling Anti-Slavery, something that other papers take up, too. At the same time, Kandeel’s attention to the limits Shadd Cary’s image of Canada West reminds us that she and other activists were focused on much more than abolition, and Kandeel’s essay prompts us to think about how that broad umbrella obscures work on education, voting, desegregation, and the like.

Bri Castagnozzi’s “Black Spiritual, Classical Body: How Printing African American Folk Music Follows and Subverts White Paradigms” invites us to think about what gets lost in the transition from oral vernacular to print. The spirituals are a fraught case on this point because, as Castagnozzi notes, they were transcribed then set to classical music. Here, the difference between the oral and print is less in the words themselves—as Castagnozzi notes, spirituals draw from the Bible, Wesley’s hymns, and other common sources—and more in the performance and collectivity generated through that performance. As performance theorist Diana Taylor invites us to ask, what are the differences between the repertoire and the archive? As important, there’s a class and regional element that might be central: the representations of vernacular on the page provide visual interpretations of regional languages tied to class that then get circulated and reinterpreted as direct transcriptions of the African American voice, and then gets re-interpreted and repackaged as various groups take the show on the road. Douglas Jones’s recent article in Theater Journal, “The Black Below”: Minstrelsy, Satire, and the Threat of Vernacularity,” offers one avenue for approaching this question through his account of how Black audiences used Black minstrelsy as a space to “celebrate themselves through laughter, tears, and sexuality with no qualms about how others would receive or register their delights” (139). And then again, I think about the implications of this work for contemporary appropriations of Black cultural forms in new media spaces, such as Tik-Tok or Catherine Knight Steele and André Brock’s discussions of how Black vernacular travels beyond the communities that produced them—without giving them access to the economic benefits that transmuted culture garners.

Where Castagnozzi and Kandeel invite us to think about public cultural production, Lizzie Hill-Caruso’s “Frances Harper in Print: Sexism and the Black Feminine Cultural Ideal” merges two loves of my scholarly life—newspapers and Frances Harper—to examine Black women’s intellectual history. Hill-Caruso develops a reception history of Harper that also reveals anxieties around and attempts to fix gender in a moment when activists like Harper were upending those norms. Here, we have a pre-history of the kinds of public intellectualism Brittany Cooper outlines in Beyond Respectability. Hill-Caruso joins other scholars like Eric Gardner in trying to get a sense of who Harper was in the absence of an autobiography, especially in the important mid-century years. In so doing she touches a central issue in Black women’s history and recovery work—from enslaved women to famous lecturers—how do we develop wholistic and fulfilling narratives around Black women when our primary sources reflect sexism and racism? Saidiya Hartman’s notion of critical fabulation comes to mind—the labor of working through both creative and theoretical means to recover Black lives.

Lizzy Sobiesk’s “‘Saw you the sad, imploring eye?’: Rhetorical Devices in Poems on Miscellaneous Subject”s adds to the nuancing Hill-Caruso provides for Harper’s life by giving a fine-grained reading of Harper’s second poetry collection, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), to examine how “publishing a pamphlet of primarily sentimental poetry” allowed “Harper to mobilize format, genre, and style as rhetorical devices to advocate for abolition.” Sympathy is a dangerous thing—people cry as readily for a trapped fly, eighteenth-critics would argue, as for an enslaved woman—or not feel a thing for her—or feel for her, but really feel for the fact that they have to see her—or feel for her in a way that’s not really about her at all, but rather about feeling good for feeling bad. Sobiesk offers an image of Harper as a master conductor, cannily pulling invoking and subverting sentimental tropes in the service of an antislavery agenda that forces her largely white readers to face their own complicity. For every image of the brutalized enslaved woman, Harper gives us an accusing I/eye—or a judging you. I’ve taken to reading the first lines of her “Slave Mother,” “Heard you that shriek, it rose/so wildly on the air?” as, “y’all heard that right?” There’s the suggestion that Harper would have read these poems aloud, and Castinozi’s essay in conjunction with Sobiesk’s has me thinking about these pamphlets not just as literary texts, but as scripts or scores for reenactment and performance.

Eugen Margariti’s “Genre, Suspense, and Illustration: Gothic Femininity in Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter” builds on this concern with form and publication context as Margariti lingers with how Hopkins manipulates “magazenial content” (love that phrase), which Margariti defines as “form, and the inclusion of illustrations to simultaneously reject” racialized imagery and to intervene in the tragic mulatta narrative. I especially appreciate the focus on Hopkins’s editorial practices—it’s one of the few instances where we can make strong claims about how a narrative—Hagar’s Daughter in this case—interacts with the surrounding periodical, because we know the writer is directly responsible for the composition of the whole. Mark Shoenfield’s concept of “institutional heteroglossia” offers a useful paradigm for reading this interaction. For Shoenfield, periodicals, like novels are internally heteroglossic—they are built on multiple languages, styles, and, in the case of illustrated magazines, ways of reading and seeing that engage with each other. And yet, the editor generates meaning out of the whole in much the same way as a novelist produces meaning out to the clashing glossias. And, as Margariti reminds us, we can also think of Hopkins using Colored American to curate literary histories, as well. So, we get a Hagar’s Daughter serialized in a space where readers would have been trained to read for the gothic, the romance, and the tragic mulatta plot through her accounts of William Wells Brown, Frances Harper, and others.  And then, as Margariti beautifully outlines, Hopkins uses the novel to layer these forms and genres as a meta fictive commentary not just on sexuality, but also on the generic boxes Black women characters are often forced into.

So, disclosure, I was Teresa Goddu’s research assistant while she was finishing Selling Antislavery, so it was really cool to read Sarah Parrish’s “The American Anti-Slavery Almanac: Rural 19th Century Liberation” and to think about how work on the business of antislavery printing has traveled. At the same time, I couldn’t help getting flashbacks to long hours in front of a microfilm reader and commiserating with the level of attention and labor Parrish marshalled to make sense of these eclectic documents. Like the magazine, the almanac is institutionally heteroglossic—maybe even more so. Parish helps us see the craft behind organizing these texts—the interplay between the popular almanac form, the visual possibilities new print technologies afforded, and the shaping of what would become the most popular form of sentimental anti-slavery—the very tropes and forms against which Shadd Cary and Harper would contend. Here, we find another source for slave narratives—mainly as-told-to narratives—that give us insight into the tastes the American Antislavery Society thought readers possessed and at the same time sought to cultivate. These are images of African Americans for white consumption with all the complications and benevolent racism that can entail. At the same time, and here we come full circle back to Kandeel’s talk on Shadd Cary, Black writers picked up on and adapted these strategies for their own purposes. In this vein, even as we see the image from Parrish’s 1844 almanac, we also hear Harper’s poetic voice—”y’all heard that, right?”

Taken together, these essays signal a bright future for African American print culture studies in general, and Black women’s intellectual history in particular. They raise important questions that bear further examination: How do women like Harper and Shadd Cary negotiate the limits on nineteenth-century gender politics and what lessons do they offer for those of us facing misogynoir (Moya Bailey’s term for misogyny against Black women) in today’s media landscapes? What lessons can we draw from Harper’s poetics as Black death becomes increasingly ubiquitous in our media and social worlds? This work on nineteenth-century print resonates with contemporary scholarship on social media and public history, so much so that I can envision drawing on these writers to shape courses in commemoration, activism, and the public intellectual. I’ll carry these scholars’ attention to form, context, and critical genealogies into my own scholarship and teaching, and I look forward to seeing where their work takes them in the coming years.