Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture by Eric Gardner (review)

Eric Gardner’s Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture is a rare and invaluable book: an intensive study of a single newspaper, focusing on less than a decade of its long run, deeply embedded in its religious and material circumstances. Such fine-grained archival analysis is vital to understanding the richness of early African American print cultures, and Gardner’s subject could not be more important. The organ of the AME Church, the Christian Recorder was arguably the most powerful black periodical of the nineteenth century, with a (usually) weekly publication schedule and a national readership that reached into elite and working-class households alike. Black Print Unbound showcases the diversity of its contents, which included not only Church business but also important Civil War reporting, political commentary, and literature by well-known authors such as Francis Ellen Watkins Harper and James W. C. Pennington. One of the great strengths of the book, though, is Gardner’s commitment to highlighting writers for the Recorder who have been nearly or even completely forgotten by literary history, such as Lizzie Hart, George Paul Vashon, Daniel Adger, Robert Meacham, and Edmonia Goodelle Highgate. Gardner’s study would be welcome under any circumstances, but it feels utterly necessary following the June 2015 massacre of nine congregants at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church by a young white supremacist—a devastating reminder of both the Church’s prominence as a center of black flourishing in the U. S. and the threats such world-building continues to face.

Although its subject is tightly focused, Black Print Unbound justly frames its work as an intervention into literary history. Despite the efforts of several generations of critics and bibliographers, Gardner observes, scholars continue to take a very narrow view of nineteenth-century black literature. They generally focus on just a few texts, mostly slave narratives, and “[a]lmost all ignore the Recorder” (12). Gardner ties this omission to the skittishness that Frances Smith Foster has observed scholars have about engaging with Afro-Protestantism, despite its importance to a wide variety of black writers. He also connects it to the archiving of the Recorder itself, which he reveals to be woefully incomplete and inaccurate. To address such problems, the first half of the book carefully pieces together the material history of the Recorder, including its often fraught relationship to the AME Church leadership, its home base in Philadelphia, its sources of funding, its distribution, its subscribers, and its staff—particularly Elisha Weaver, who (mostly) edited the newspaper between 1860 and 1868. During the same time, Weaver also served on and off as Steward of the AME’s longstanding book publishing arm, the Book Concern, and Gardner’s account of the controversies over these responsibilities illuminates the Church’s relationship to print. The Recorder sought to build an imagined community through print, but that community also took physical form through the institutions of the AME Church. These communities were sometimes synchronized and sometimes not, and Gardner suggests that the success of the Recorder lay in the productive dialectic between the material realities of church community and the newspaper’s representations “unbound” from them.

Gardner ends the first half of the book with a long chapter investigating who subscribed to the Recorder, using data gleaned from the newspapers’ regular acknowledgements of subscriptions. (This chapter significantly expands on his 2011 American Literary History article on the same subject, which analyzed a smaller sample.) Readers will appreciate it not only as a valuable data set but also as an indispensable guide to interpreting census data, especially concerning African Americans. Gardner meticulously reconstructs the kinds of livelihoods, household arrangements, and property holdings at which such records only hint. Even more powerful is his inquiry into census data about black literacy. His research shows that white census takers habitually marked African Americans, including writers for the Recorder, as illiterate, in what Gardner calls “a frightening...