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  • Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
  • Keith Green
Eric Gardner. Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009. 183 pp. $50.00.

In recent years, William Tynes Cowan’s The Slave in the Swamp (2004) and related studies have sought to complicate nineteenth-century African American literature’s relationship to the American South and, more specifically, to the genre that has come to define that geopolitical space: the slave narrative. Eric Gardner’s persuasive Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2009) is the latest, and perhaps the most insightful, addition to this body of work. It argues succinctly and cogently that African American literary production emerged in multiple locations and in diverse generic modes, engaging a number of thematic concerns well beyond the life narrative of the (ex-)slave.

Gardner explains that “nineteenth-century African American literature has often been reduced to southern stories told in bound books that were written by blacks in the urban Northeast and published in one of the handful of urban Northeast centers of activism like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston” (12). As a corrective to this disproportionate attention to the “bound book,” he relocates black writing within one of the most prolific mediums of expression during the nineteenth century: [End Page 540] the world of African American periodicals, what Gardner describes as “the central publication outlet for many black writers” (10). Accordingly, each chapter is an exploration of periodical print culture related to neglected geographical sites of black textual production, from St. Louis in chapter one, to Indiana in chapter two, to California and its vicinity in chapter three, and finally to Philadelphia and its nationwide influence in chapter four. In each case, Gardner illustrates how locally and regionally specific texts create “a more fully national story” (123).

Gardner’s analyses in these chapters benefit from the considerable work already done on black American periodicals in such notable books as Todd Vogel’s The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (2001) and in the reconceptualization of the field of African American literary study in W. Lawrence Hogue’s The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History (2003), from which Gardner generously quotes throughout the introductory chapter. His distinctive contribution to this body of work is his expert “thick-contexting” (18) of each author, text, and geographical location, a skill he undoubtedly honed while researching his copious contributions to the African American National Biography (2008). In the contextualizing process, the book unearths crucial African American documents and journals that have either been underappreciated or simply unacknowledged. These include the Mirror of the Times, the first black newspaper in the West, William J. Greenly’s The Three Drunkards (1858), possibly the first book of plays by an African American, and especially the Philadelphia-based Christian Recorder, the official organ of the A. M. E. Church and probably “the most important black periodical in the nation” (133).

In what Janet Gray would call his “recuperative scholarship,” Gardner goes well beyond recovering interesting firsts, however. Each chapter is grounded by a narrative thematic, such as agency, citizenship, or, most often, mobility. In the first chapter’s discussion of the freedom suit of the Missouri slave Polly Wash, Gardner thus tracks the “contested sense of mobility” (52) embedded in white subjects’ testimony, showing how even in legal documents where African American subjects are seemingly powerless objects, black agency and stories survive. Likewise, in chapter three, he examines the “sentimental, germinal mobility” (115) evinced in the Elevator pieces of California journalist Jennie Carter, who championed the benefits of domesticity and temperance in her more than seventy contributions to that publication.

These ideas are expressed through clear and comfortable prose. Though erudite, the writing is not pretentious or clunky. Gardner’s language instead reflects his consummate mastery of his material and allows his reader to digest large chunks of biographical detail with ease. If there is one failing of the book it is its essentially nationalist focus, which moves from as far east as Philadelphia to as far west as northern California while never adequately articulating what black writing might...

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