Early African American Print Culture

13. Networking Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Hyper Stowe in Early African American Print Culture

c h a p t e r 1 3 Networking Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Hyper Stowe in Early African American Print Culture susan gillman What’s in a network? For many who tout the new knowledge that will be unleashed by going or better yet being born digital, the past is an already discovered country. We can improve our access and have better recovery but the outer limits of that known world are fixed. Moreover, the supposed historical redundancy of the idea of “networks” stems from the mistaken ways this term is applied only to digital versions of earlier texts, especially those firmly anchored in the print culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The general view is that new digital media will revolutionize the book by making it “networked ,” integrated with a potentially infinite set of other works in a variety of formats, thus transforming a static to a dynamic form, a finished work to one always in progress. But to assume that print, unlike other media, is a singular medium produces a misleading view of the book (or any print form). What if we take as a case study that classic of multimedia adaptation, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s nineteenth-century blockbuster Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Her book’s many afterlives are surely a species of networking, but with a slower temporal rate and a different spatialization (not electronic but physical ) than those of today’s digital age. When we understand the nineteenthcentury book to produce the kind of proliferating references and cultural sprawl that many claim to be unique to the Internet age, then we relocate the question “What difference do digital media make?” from revolutionary 232 susan gillman to evolutionary grounds. A little less hype would allow for a more nuanced history of “networking.” How are models of interactive digital scholarship coextensive with African American traditions in print and performance? Stowe’s novel may seem like an unlikely candidate in this context, but not because it wasn’t a major presence in African American life and writing. Rather, to explore the ways in which African Americans cited or commented on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or the ways in which the novel (and the vast dramatic, popular, literary, and commercial culture it inspired) shaped perceptions of African Americans would be to hark back to an older model of the literary network, based in studies of influence and adaptation. This would not produce the kind of changed relationship to the literary past that we may forecast through connecting the new media to the historical construction of authorship and literature itself. How can we use the technology of digital editions and electronic archives to create more than a 3-D version of the flat world of print? Rather than relying on ties to print culture as stable and communication as a one-to-many enterprise, the newer generation of digital tools may be less prone to produce vast databases of previously unavailable digitized works and more characterized by a view of text making as dynamic and participatory and communication as a many-to-many undertaking. Smaller networks (plural), narrower and deeper, rather than singular, ever bigger and wider, may be put in intersecting relation with one another, as well as identified, named and half-spoken, by the texts and contexts themselves. Different “centers” means different concentric relations that reach across different spaces and times. In presiding over these kinds of open-ended, future configurations that are dependent on subterranean streams running through the past, this essay will argue that the networked history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the context of early African American print culture suggests a way for the comparatively minded to straddle the bounds of comparison: to think both within and beyond compare. As the ur-text of adaptation, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is at the virtual center of a long-standing, well-developed, and highly regarded website and electronic archive, established in 1998, that is itself today’s register and indicator of a nineteenth-century blockbuster complex. The University of Virginia website “Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive, Directed by Stephen Railton” is an outstanding resource and conceptual guide, formatting the material temporally and generically: “Pre-Texts (1830–1852)” (includes minstrel shows), “Stowe’s Uncle Toms” (various editions, as well as the Uncle Tom’s Cabin 233 texts of The...