Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies) - Hardcover

Gardner, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1604732830 ISBN 13: 9781604732832

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 2009

Synopsis

In January of 1861, on the eve of both the Civil War and the rebirth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Christian Recorder, John Mifflin Brown wrote to the paper praising its editor Elisha Weaver: "It takes our Western boys to lead off."

Weaver's story, though, like many of the contributions of early black literature outside of the urban Northeast, has almost vanished. Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature recovers the work of early African American authors and editors such as Weaver who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based Recorder during and after the Civil War.

In conversation with both archival sources and contemporary scholarship, Unexpected Places calls for a large-scale rethinking of the nineteenth-century African American literary landscape. In addition to revisiting such better-known writers as William Wells Brown, Maria Stewart, and Hannah Crafts, Unexpected Places offers the first critical considerations of important figures including William Jay Greenly, Jennie Carter, Polly Wash, and Lizzie Hart. The book's discussion of physical locations leads naturally to careful study of how region is tied to genre, authorship, publication circumstances, the black press, domestic and nascent black nationalist ideologies, and black mobility in the nineteenth century.

About this title

Book Description:

An argument for a major remapping of the early African American literary landscape

From the Author:

Like many students and scholars, my first experiences with nineteenth-century Black literature centered on stories of the South that were published in northeastern urban centers. Growing up in the rural Midwest, I was insulated from their radicalism not only by time but by myths of northern liberalism, geographical distance, and narrow definitions of nineteenth-century Blackness.

Deep archival research, though, is beginning to show that nineteenth-century African Americans throughout the nation used their stories to advance individual and collective struggles. As a scholar, I've grown to recognize that we need to return their voices to our historical and cultural record; as a teacher, I've come to understand that students need to see how close they are to nineteenth-century Black literature.

Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature relocates and recovers Black authors and texts from "unexpected places" from frontier Indiana to early San Francisco. In arguing that early Black texts raised challenging and uncomfortable questions across the nation, I hope to resituate the field of African American literature to recognize a much more diverse textual landscape, including Black journalism and poetry in newspapers, freedom suit case files, and many more examples of ardent and, until now, lost expression.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1604732830
• ISBN 13: 9781604732832
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272