Early African American Print Culture

Lara Langer Cohen, Jordan Alexander Stein

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812206296
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both the consolidation of American print culture and the establishment of an African American literary tradition, yet the two are too rarely considered in tandem. In this landmark volume, a stellar group of established and emerging scholars ranges over periods, locations, and media to explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off.The book's chapters consider domestic novels and gallows narratives, Francophone poetry and engravings of Liberia, transatlantic lyrics and San Francisco newspapers. Together, they consider how close attention to the archive can expand the study of African American literature well beyond matters of authorship to include issues of editing, illustration, circulation, and reading—and how this expansion can enrich and transform the study of print culture more generally.

PART I

Vectors of Movement

CHAPTER 1

The Print Atlantic: Phillis Wheatley,
Ignatius Sancho, and the Cultural
Significance of the Book

JOSEPH REZEK

TO BE SOLD. A Parcel of likely NEGROES, imported from Africa, cheap for Cash, or short Credit with Interest; enquire of John Avery, at his House next Door to the White-Horse, or at a Store adjoining to said Avery’s Distill-House, at the South End, near the South Market: – Also if any Persons have any Negro Men, strong and hearty, tho’ not of the best moral Character, which are proper Subjects for Transportation, may have an Exchange for small Negroes.

—Boston Evening-Post, August 3, 1761

PROPOSALS. For Printing in London by SUBSCRIPTION, A Volume of POEMS, DEDICATED by Permission to the Right Hon. the COUNTESS of HUNTINGDON. Written by PHILLIS, a NEGRO SERVANT to Mr. WHEATLEY of Boston, in New-England.

Terms of Subscription.

I. The Book to be neatly printed in 12mo. on a new Type and a fine Paper, adorned with an elegant Frontispiece, representing the Author.

II. That the Price to Subscribers shall be Two Shillings sewed, or Two Shillings and Six-pence neatly bound.

II[I]. That every Subscriber deposit One Shilling at the Time of subscribing; and the Remainder to be paid on the Delivery of the Book.

Subscriptions are received by COX & BERRY, in Boston.

—Massachusetts Gazette; and the Boston
Weekly News-Letter, April 16, 1773

These advertisements are drawn from the print archives of two institutions that shaped the culture of the Anglophone Atlantic: the trade in enslaved Africans and the trade in books. The first advertisement, fairly typical of its time, indicates a number of that culture’s defining features. These include tensions within commercial networks defined both by local knowledge (“enquire of John Avery, at his House”) and a wide transatlantic reach; the use of multiple devices for the exchange of goods (cash, credit, exchange); and the radical contradictions of the slave economy, apparent in this advertisement’s description of Africans in both the stark language of commodification (“parcel,” “imported,” “cheap”) and the language of subjectivity (“strong and hearty,” “moral Character”). The advertisement also suggests one way that print, in this case the newspaper, was used “to establish or reestablish confidence in slavery and servitude,” as David Waldstreicher writes of another group of advertisements, those for runaway slaves. It produces such confidence not only as it constructs Africans as salable goods, but also as it projects its imagined audience as a slaveholding public with expertise about “Negroes,” one that can judge for itself whether or not certain individuals are “proper Subjects for Transportation” and therefore unsuitable for the particular kind of household slavery then prevalent in Boston.¹

Household slavery in Boston enabled the production of another transatlantic commodity, announced in the second advertisement: the London-printed book of poems “Written by PHILLIS, a Negro Servant to Mr. Wheatley.” In 1761, this poet was a young girl of seven or eight years of age, one of the “small Negroes” brought from Africa to America that John Avery advertised for sale in the Boston Evening-Post. The first advertisement sent Susanna Wheatley, the poet’s future mistress, educator, and promoter, to the market for a slave. The second advertisement put that slave back in the marketplace, this time as an author who, exclusively through the mediation of her identity in print, became a specimen for knowledge production and opinion about Africans and their descendants. Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), in contrast to the first advertisement, was an early example of how print lessened confidence in slavery and servitude, notably in Wheatley’s own master, who freed her at the suggestion of the book’s first readers.²

It was precisely the relationship between Wheatley’s poems and their capacity to affect a reader’s confidence in slavery that preoccupied her most notable early critic, the London shopkeeper and Afro-Briton writer Ignatius Sancho. Like Wheatley, Sancho was a victim of the slave trade—he was born on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic—whose only book, his posthumously published Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (1782), also made him a flash point in discussions about the intellectual capacity of Africans. Sancho encountered Wheatley’s Poems along with a number of antislavery texts that Philadelphia Quaker Jabez Fisher sent him in 1778. In a letter to Fisher that appeared in the published Letters, Sancho criticizes the eminent Boston individuals who are listed in the famous “attestation” that was printed in Wheatley’s volume and guaranteed the authenticity of her poems. He finds it appalling that none of them freed her from slavery: “[T]he list of splendid—titled—learned names, in confirmation of her being the real authoress.—alas! shews how very poor the acquisition of wealth and knowledge are—without generosity—feeling—and humanity.—These good great folks—all know—and perhaps admired—nay, praised Genius in bondage—and then, like the Priests and the Levites in sacred writ, passed by—not one good Samaritan amongst them.” Elsewhere Sancho mentions less rarified conditions than “Genius” that make slavery unjust, including the “cruel carnage and depopulation” of the slave trade and the “diabolical usage of my brother Negroes,” but in discussing Wheatley he is struck by what appears to be her ironic situation. Sancho thinks that “genius” is a trait that epitomizes freedom, while Wheatley, to the disgrace of her white patrons, remains “in bondage.” Her case makes slavery seem particularly indefensible.³

The appearance of the first books by black writers forced readers in the Anglophone world to decide if they agreed with Sancho that there was a necessary irony in the enslavement of an author. This essay foregrounds the role that materiality could play in influencing such opinions. I argue that eighteenth-century print culture, and specifically the meanings readers assigned to the printed book as a class of material texts, helped determine the way writers like Wheatley and Sancho were received and how their work influenced debates about slavery. The dissemination of printed books by black authors presented readers with the unprecedented fact made clear by the two advertisements with which I began: black authors, unlike any others, were in their persons subject to commodification, just like the books they published. Book publication intensified the drama of this conjunction, as Sancho’s comment about Wheatley suggests. Book publication also catalyzed aesthetic judgments that led readers to believe in a text’s ability to represent the talents of an entire race. The cultural significance of the book helped make this leap of logic possible.

While scholars have consistently explored the political implications of early black writing, they have been less interested in how materiality carries a politics of its own. The politics of materiality can best be examined through considering Wheatley and Sancho together as writers of what Paul Gilroy has termed “the black Atlantic.” A number of factors can explain the lack of serious scholarly comparison of these two authors, including the influence of nationally defined boundaries in literary study. Other differences separate the two writers: Wheatley was a female domestic slave who eventually died penniless in New England, while Sancho was a free black business owner in London who met gender and property qualifications to vote for Parliament as a resident in Westminster. However, the link between Wheatley’s Poems and Sancho’s Letters was obvious to eighteenth-century readers and should interest us now. Their books gathered meaning as objects in what I propose to call “the print Atlantic”—a term that emphasizes the role of print in connecting the English-speaking publics of the Atlantic into a single, though internally various, culture. I borrow the grammar of Gilroy’s influential term to stress the importance of a media-specific approach to the writing of early black writers. In describing Wheatley and Sancho as writers of “the print Atlantic,” then, I hope both to emphasize print’s connective role in the Atlantic world and also to suggest a new way of talking about the black Atlantic that foregrounds print as a central concern.⁴

In what follows I will first explore readers’ reactions to Wheatley and Sancho as the formats of their texts changed. Both authors were well known for their printed works before their books appeared—Wheatley for her elegy to George Whitefield and Sancho for his correspondence with Laurence Sterne. Yet only when their books appeared did readers begin to link their aesthetic judgments to claims about representativeness. Book publication, as distinguished from other kinds of printing, made these writers uniquely available to white readers as “specimens,” as sites for the discussion of racial hierarchy, and, ultimately, as evidence either to support or to oppose the institution of slavery. Following this discussion, I proceed to a close reading of the textual history of Wheatley’s famous poem to the Earl of Dartmouth to demonstrate that the cultural hierarchies that shaped the print Atlantic are apparent on the level of the word. I argue that Wheatley’s poem encodes its material history as it links its reflections on the slave trade to the aesthetic experience books could produce.

The Politics of Format

In discussing early modern print culture, and the significance of Wheatley and Sancho in particular, it is imperative to speak carefully about format.⁵ I therefore use the term “book” to mean a bound codex volume of a significant length, heft, and commodity status. Wheatley’s Poems and Sancho’s Letters have long been acknowledged as the first books published by black writers. Rather than assuming we know what we mean when we talk about books, however, we should historicize the cultural meanings that such objects would have had for the first readers who encountered them. Betsy Erkkila assesses the political implications of Wheatley this way: “the fact of a black woman reading, writing, and publishing poems was itself enough to splinter the categories of male and female, white and black, and undermine a social order grounded in notions of sexual and racial difference.”⁶ How much of Wheatley’s potential as a disruptive political force depended on the existence of her poems in book form? The material and economic features of Wheatley’s Poems intensified its potential as a politically disruptive object. The Massachusetts Gazette advertisement for Wheatley’s Poems, for example, suggests the role that book publication played in accruing to her writing a claim to the status of art. The book has an aristocratic patron, the Countess of Huntingdon; it will be “neatly printed” with a “new Type” on “fine Paper”; it will include an “elegant Frontispiece” of the author; it will arrive as an object to be held in your hand and read, either “sewed” or “bound,” and therefore also prepared for the shelf of a library; it will cost a significant amount of money, at least two shillings; and, finally, it will require submission to the “terms” of a contract—subscription publishing—which in this case requires the buyer to provide capital in advance and the seller to guarantee the printing and transatlantic importation of the book. Such details invoke all the agents involved in the production of this kind of commodity, from the manufacturing of type to its delivery to readers, and set this object apart from more ephemeral media that transmitted texts. In this regard, the advertisement for Wheatley’s Poems invokes those aspects of a book that are designed to establish the cultural capital of a literary work. Its only unique feature, of course, remains the information it provides about the race of the author, “PHILLIS, a Negro Servant,” which to most readers would have been incompatible with cultural capital of a familiar kind.

The disjunction between racial identity and cultural capital would have been apparent as well to readers of Sancho’s Letters, which also was published by subscription and contained a frontispiece of its author. Sancho’s book was even more impressive than Wheatley’s volume in size and price: its first two-volume edition cost six shillings and totaled more than 500 pages, compared to Wheatley’s 124 pages. Generally speaking, if we use distinguishing criteria like those highlighted in Wheatley’s advertisement, we can count only three books of similar stature among the more than fifty discrete titles published by black authors in English before 1800, and they were all published first in London: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems (1773), Ignatius Sancho’s Letters (1782), and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789).⁷ These books contain more than 120 pages each; they were sold as single texts, either already bound or meant to be bound separately from other texts; they were printed with large type and with ample space between each line of text; they were advertised widely and published by subscription; and, significantly, they included frontispieces depicting the author. These books are thus distinguished from shorter, occasional, and more ephemeral texts by Jupiter Hammon, Briton Hammon, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Lemuel Heynes, Benjamin Banneker, Prince Hall, Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and Venture Smith, as well as Wheatley’s earlier pamphlets and broadsides, John Marrant’s widely reprinted Narrative (1785), and Quob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Early African American Print Culture
• Part I. Vectors of Movement
• Part II. Racialization and Identity Production
• Part III. Adaptation, Citation, Deployment
• Part IV. Public Performances
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments