Early African American Print Culture

4. Early African American Print Culture and the American West

c h a p t e r 4 Early African American Print Culture and the American West eric gardner A handful of recovery efforts have begun to alert scholars to black textual presences outside of the urban Northeast, but the lively black print culture in the American West has often remained absent from consideration. This essay begins to treat crucial pieces of that print culture—specifically three nineteenth-century black San Francisco newspapers—to introduce scholars to the intrinsic richness of these texts (and their contexts) and to offer a case study that highlights key issues in the study of the black West as a location of early black print culture. First, though, as absences and supposedly representative presences are deeply instructive, we should consider the factors that led to the black West’s silencing and recognize some caveats necessary for “recovering” print in the black West. Certainly some of the silencing has to do with the forms of publication that dominated the nineteenth-century black West—especially the region’s emphasis on newspapers rather than the bound books. Frances Smith Foster and a handful of other literary historians are struggling to remind the field of just how important the black press was within early black literary culture. Partially rooted in literary studies’ powerful, consistent privileging of what Joseph Rezek (Chapter 1) refers to as the “heft” of bound books, the separation of periodicals from the literary is directly responsible for part of what the editors of this volume note as a separation between two most vibrant areas for American Studies scholarship, the “inauguration of an African American literary tradition” and “the consolidation of American print culture” 76 eric gardner (see Introduction). For figures as diverse as Daniel Payne, Frederick Douglass , Elisha Weaver, Philip Bell, Jennie Carter, and Harriet Jacobs, there was no such separation: the black press—made possible in part by developments in print technology and print culture generally—was crucial to any sense of black textuality. Bound books of poetry and autobiography (especially in generic formations orbiting the slave narrative, like the few early black novels) were only part of the story of early black literature. Critics favoring novelistic narratives often severed that part from the larger whole by marking periodicals as nonliterary and ignoring short-form genres (for example, letters, editorials , travelogues, historical and biographical essays, religious explorations) that dominated many black newspapers. Similarly, as a discipline, African American literary studies still favors and still expects primarily Southern (and occasionally northeastern) stories that were published in northeastern urban venues; in this vein, it has largely dismissed “western” stories as inherently not black. Through decades of intensive recovery efforts, Houston Baker’s assertion that “tales of pioneers enduring the hardships of the West for the promise of immense wealth are not the tales of black America” has remained largely unquestioned. Most of the rare efforts to combat Baker’s claim using pre-twentieth-century texts have argued that black westerners did tell such stories—and so reached back to Langston Hughes’s famous call, “don’t leave out the cowboys”; thus, recent years have seen some attention to “cowboy” narratives like the autobiographies of James Beckwourth and Nat Love. The University of Nebraska’s series “Blacks in the American West” widens “cowboy” to include Henry Ossian Flipper’s military story as well as the narratives of James Williams, Mifflin Gibbs, and Henry Bruce, but still focuses on extended novelistic forms; beyond these examples and Foster’s edited reprinting of Thomas Detter’s Nellie Brown, few literary historians have challenged the unitary definition of western stories embodied in both Baker and Hughes’s opposing rhetorics. We need to recognize black presences beyond those tied to “cowboy genres,” and we need to move beyond the bound book, beyond our disciplinary preference for novelistic narrative, and beyond geographic assumptions tied to specific senses of blackness and of the West, as well as beyond the whiteness of much print culture scholarship. Given this call for a wider and more varied sense of black letters, a caveat is also necessary: we still do not have a full sense of just how large, complex, and diverse my too-ambitious title phrase is. We should deconstruct the geographical boundaries suggested by “American West”—as the Indianapolis- American West 77 based AME Repository of Religion and Literature, for example, as well as the Saint Louis...