Harriet Wilson's New England: Race, Writing and Region (review)

Co-edited by scholars and New England community activists, this anthology of essays surprisingly is the first to appear on the elusive Harriet Wilson, author of Our Nig. Published twenty-four years after Henry Louis Gates "recovered" Our Nig for audiences eager for African American texts, it contains a mix of approaches to the autobiographical novel—literary-scholarly, historical, regional, and personal—designed to appeal to a crossover audience of scholars and lay readers. In sum, the volume's strength lies in the regional histories it uncovers, yet it also speaks to the significant dominance of historical recuperations in readers' engagements with the text.

This collection's late appearance in an otherwise boom period in black women's writings speaks to the continuing vexed status of Our Nig in the fields of African American and American literary history. The volume's organization into three parts dedicated to context and history, genre and gender, and personal reflections demonstrates how scholars with diverse critical methods have approached this text. The volume's tripartite organization demarcates the analytical differences of its contributions, but it also limits its usefulness to scholars interested in the literary dimensions of Our Nig. Because only a small number of the volume's essays offer literary analyses, the section devoted to literary approaches, "'Sketches from the Life of a Free Black': Genre and Gender," falls short of the depth and range of other sections (primarily the first) of the volume. The last section of the volume is dedicated to a loosely organized collection of personal essays.

This volume raises key questions that speak to issues in the existing criticism of black women authors. In a field that still exists in an "archival" mode focused on recovery and republication, how should black women's writings best be approached? Today's scholars and readers place great importance on building a biographical picture of authors whose lives are often sparsely documented. They want to know how these black women authors came to write (and publish) the texts with which we are only recently becoming familiar. However, the recovery of biographical information is not a broad enough basis on which to engage with these texts, especially autobiographical ones; insofar as they may inadvertently promote transparent representations of an author's historical and sociological realities, these efforts can obscure the creative ways that black authors in a hostile print environment navigated explosive rhetorical issues. This form of biocriticism also can become invested in romantic assumptions of a particular author's subversive agency, preventing readers from discerning how black Americans contributed to, participated in, and resisted the discursive domains they inhabited. To wit, this volume's contributors tend to invest heavily in sociological analysis.

Most important, though, while searches for the historical traces of an author merit energetic efforts of all kinds, they should not prevent us from examining the role of contemporary critical rubrics in perpetuating historical erasures from which we simultaneously try to recover these texts. That is, it is wrong to suppose that black authors' own audiences and historical eras were solely responsible for their erasure from the literary record: Sometimes when these texts appear, they fall by the critical wayside if they do not meet the requirements of what currently circulates as critical capital. Such was the case twenty years ago when Wilson's account of compromised freedom in the North emerged in a critical field centered almost exclusively on the abolitionism and the narratives of former slaves. This critical reflection might have been of less interest to the general public but would have added an important analytical dimension to this interesting anthology.