| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Elizabeth McHenry. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. (New Americanists.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 423. Cloth $59.95, paper $18.95.

In exploring the rich associational life of African-American readers during the century between the end of slavery in the urban North and the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance, Elizabeth McHenry faces a surprising challenge. Despite the centrality of literacy and print to a generation of studies of African-American culture and literature during the nineteenth century, many of the institutions, movements, practices, and actors uncovered in her research remain unfamiliar. This oversight, McHenry points out, has less to do with the availability of evidence and more to do with the way scholars have approached reading and writing in nineteenth-century black life. Since over ninety percent of enslaved African Americans in the antebellum era were illiterate, studies of black culture have emphasized oral modes of identity formation and cultural transmission, both before and after emancipation. And when historians or literary critics have considered the power of reading among the literate minority, they have typically followed the cues of abolitionist writers such as Frederick Douglass in emphasizing the triumphant acquisition of literacy as the singular achievement of conscientious, self-possessed individuals. To read slave narratives as keys to the history of black reading is to focus on the threshold of literacy rather than its uses, on the isolated reader rather than the community. On top of all of that, African-American literary societies have suffered from the scholarly neglect of elite segments of the black community.

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