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1 i n t r o d u c t i o n Loosed Canons The Race for Literary History People who are looking for “a lot of interesting ideas,” and hope to dabble here for little more, offend the author and degrade themselves. they would do well to stop right now. those who read in order to take action on their consequent beliefs—these are the only readers i respect or look for. Atrocities, real and repeated, proliferate within this social order. the deepest of all lies in our will not to respond to what we see before us. — JonAthAn kozoL, The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home This book has been inspired by numerous conversations, conferences, articles , and books over the years, but basically it was sparked by my initial experience of reading and trying to understand Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892). Intrigued by the names of the characters in Harper’s novel, I started to do some very elementary research on such names as Iola, Delaney, Latimer, Latrobe, and Gresham, and in so doing found my way to Ida B. Wells, Lucille Delaney, George Latimer, John Hazlehurst Boneval Latrobe, and Gresham’s Law, among many other entrances to the complexities of nineteenth-century American history and culture.1 Since then, I have had many occasions for realizing anew that I did not know nearly enough about the literary and cultural history on which, according to my doctorate and professional experience, I was supposed to be an expert . As I read and taught numerous narratives, novels, poems, pamphlets, orations, and other pieces, and as I immersed myself in the relevant and even peripheral scholarship on African American literature, culture, and history, I found myself increasingly convinced that we cannot appreciate American literary and cultural history without a deep understanding of nineteenth-century African American literature. I found myself focused on a single though admittedly broad question: What are the requirements i n t r o d u C t i o n 2 for this field? Why is it that so many conversations, conference sessions, articles, and books about American literary history seem to require so much translation, adaptation, qualification, or simply patience to those who come to questions about the field by way of a broad and deep involvement in African American literature? What constitutes a just approach to nineteenth-century African American literature, and what does justice in literary studies have to do with the broader realm of justice so central to Black Studies? Perhaps another way to put this is to say that this book is devoted to a very simple question: What is African American about African American literature, and why should we identify this as a distinct tradition? If we take African American literature to be literature written by African Americans, then a great number of nineteenth-century texts cannot be considered part of this tradition—the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1884), for example, or any number of slave narratives written by a white amanuensis . If we take it to be literature about African Americans, then we will face the specter of such texts as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” tales (1881–1910), and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). We can, of course, dismiss the question altogether and merely note that it matters little how we identify some of these texts as long as we read them. But the insistent reality of African American history, the literary traditions that have been influenced by that history, and the scholarly traditions that have developed in turn will not be so easily decategorized, and the presence of black caricatures, stereotypes, or even feminist icons in the works of white writers only highlight the cultural dynamics that have made African American a significant ideological and cultural marker, one still very much needed. In this book, I will have occasion to talk about the various Uncle Toms, Uncle Remuses, Nat Turners, and “Ar’n’t I a woman” icons that play an important and sometimes defining role in African American literary history. My goal, though, will be to address a more complex network of authors, texts, narratives, tropes, and rhetorical maneuvers, the deeply intertextual and multivocal world of nineteenth-century African American literature.2 Even without such historical work, questions about the significance or even the necessity of the term “African American” have been matters of familiar but...

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