Early African American Print Culture ed. by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (review)

Meaningful criticism of scholarly works must begin with understanding of an author’s intent and rationale for entering the “great conversation” and discourse within a discipline. In presenting Early African American Print Culture, its editors, Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, have fashioned seventeen well-conceived and executed works into an anthology that advances our understanding of how early African American literature fits into the historical landscape of communication arts.

In their Introduction, the editors acknowledge their rather liberal definition of “print culture” in which the contributors explore a wide range of topics for inquiry. The editors note that “early African American print culture is not always confined by national boundaries,” and that the term “African American” is interpreted in a manner to include persons of transatlantic origin. Moreover, the scope of “literature” under consideration includes book-length novels, journals, and newspaper articles and poems, to cite a few. The concept of “print” matter is—fortunately, in this reviewer’s opinion—expanded to include visual representations.

At the same time, of course, a reader approaching the work in hope of finding definitive and in-depth insight into, for example, the beginnings and development of African American literature as we have come to know it, will be disappointed. The volume at hand is not organized and presented to provide an orderly and chronological discourse on its subject. There is no straight narrative that moves the reader from, say, the poetry of Phillis Wheatley to that of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Similarly, the reader will not learn how black printers of the American colonial era came to align themselves with writers and editors of the early African American press.

Nevertheless, as noted, this volume does not purport to address such specific matters. Rather, it is instructive of the difficulties and barriers faced by precolonial black writers that sought to yield to their calling as agents of literary expression. Among those barriers were the logistics of publication in an era that predates the development of sophisticated publishing houses and distribution channels. These considerations point to the appropriateness of the volume’s title, which denotes the work as an exploration of the “culture” of African American print history. The factors of cultural circumstance—both Anglocentric and Afrocentric—are revealed and discussed in the anthology offerings.

Necessarily, for context and contrast, readers will find elucidation of how developmental aspects of African American literature played themselves out against the hegemonic control of whites involved in the promulgation of written materials.

Of particular interest to this reviewer are the contributions that expose incidents of plagiarism, or significant “borrowing” of literary work in a era when copyright laws were nonexistent or ignored. This is seen in Daniel Hack’s treatise on the similarities between an ancient Congolese chant and metric rhymes used by Tennyson in “Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Similarly, Susan Gillman explores the concept of “networking” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Gillman undertakes a case study of Stowe’s novel and considers its derivatives and many adaptations over the years as well as implications for its incarnation into the digital age.

Visual representations in this volume also consider the political and social aspects of early American life as agents of the American Colonization Society altered daguerreotypes taken by a black photographer it had commissioned to capture images of the Liberian landscape. Dalila Scruggs explores how the ACS manipulated the images to entice free African Americans to emigrate to Liberia.

Readers may also find value in Corey Capers’s exploration of “Black Voices, White Print,” which sheds light on the dissemination of “Bobalition” publications following the abolition of the slave trade. These broadsides both satirized and commemorated the formal end of slavery, and included participation of black and white writers in publicizing the milestone event. Modern observers will find pause in noting the seeming philosophical and social incongruence of such publications.

As a practical matter, anthologies often encounter issues of consistency...