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The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic
Joanna Brooks
| BLACK community and literary formation in the 1780s and 1790s constitutes a distinctive intellectual history of the early Republic. Historians Joanne Pope Melish, Patrick Rael, Shane White, and Craig Steven Wilder have contributed to our understanding of the social, legal, and political histories of free blacks in the early national era. However, we have yet to understand how blacks theorized and enacted through print culture their presence in the early Republic. More than a decade ago, Michael Warner virtually dismissed the possibility of early black print culture in his landmark Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. "For obvious reasons, historians know little about what colonial blacks thought about print," Warner wrote. "The texts of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley are the exceptions that prove the rule, since they define their public voices as white, even if only proleptically. They understand their literacy to prefigure their celestial assimilation." His account uncritically assumes the racialized structuring assumptions of the privileged public sphere he documents: that "printing constituted and distinguished a specifically white community," that "printed artifacts" were "property" and "thus inappropriate to blacks and Indians," and that Hammon, Wheatley, and other black authors who attempted to establish a print presence did so as an expression of desire for the privileges of whiteness.1 |
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Such assumptions no longer seem tenable when examined in the light of a remarkable decade of growth in early African American literary studies. During the last ten years, we have developed a new appreciation of the extent and importance of black writing before 1800. Thanks to a host of new anthologies and new editions of early black texts, early Americanists are just now recognizing what groundbreaking black archivists such as Arthur Schomburg (1874–1938) and Dorothy Porter Wesley (1904–95) discovered decades ago: that the early national era was a time of significant and vigorous literary production among English-speaking blacks of the diaspora. We now have a better understanding of the strategies black authors employed to access the print public sphere: for example, how Phillis Wheatley cannily manipulated transatlantic networks of white evangelicals to secure the publication of her Poems in 1773 and her manumission shortly thereafter. We also have a better sense of how published writings by Richard Allen, Olaudah Equiano, David George, Prince Hall, Absalom Jones, Boston King, John Marrant, and Venture Smith connect with the efforts of early African American and Afro-British communities to achieve emancipation and self-determination in the Age of Revolution. Given this new knowledge, it is no longer possible to theorize about the eighteenth-century American public print sphere without acknowledging the emergence in this era of a distinctly black tradition of publication informed by black experiences of slavery and postslavery, premised on principles of self-determination and structured by black criticisms of white political and economic dominance.2 |
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