Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (review)

A bold work of literary activism, P. Gabrielle Foreman's Activist Sentiments offers a new method of literary interrogation through a matrix of "histotextuality," "simultextuality," "homonymic overlay," and "double mimesis" (10, 20, 14, 48). The goal of this book is to illuminate the polyvalent, multitextual meanings of nineteenth-century Black women's writing. Immersing the reader in a new critical vocabulary, Foreman offers a catechism on how to be a better reader of nineteenth-century Black women's literary production by unveiling the textual layers embedded within their prose. The key element in her reading practice is "histotextuality": her term for "a method for interpreting sophisticated historicized tropes in narratives whose meaning has previously been thought to be produced by relying on the texts' thin and putatively singular or seemingly impoverished mimetic referents" (14).

Foreman argues in straightforward terms that for contemporaneous readers well versed in antebellum, Civil War, and reconstruction-era politics and print culture, the literary strategies of activist-authors like Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, and Amelia E. Johnson were hidden in plain sight. Foreman's goal is to make these complex meanings available to contemporary readers. In her second chapter, she cautions, "If one does not read Iola Leroy 'aright,' Harper's opening directive toward multivalent interpretation might be easily lost" (78). This maxim could apply to all of the works interrogated in Activist Sentiments.

At the outset, Foreman explains why such a vocabulary is necessary to comprehend the multiple registers in which texts like Our Nig operate. In its deployment of "simultextual racial construction," Foreman argues, Wilson's text is "wide wide worlds away from the teleological and transparency expectations of Maria S. Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854), Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), and other best-selling antebellum domestic fiction with which it is often compared" (66). As the intended pun with the title of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World illustrates, Foreman's rhetoric is inventive and inviting. The following quotation illustrates how her deft use of analogy and metaphor concretizes the narrative structure of Our Nig, which has for so long perplexed critics: "Like twentieth-century transparencies used as heuristic tools—skeleton, then organs, then muscles—to display a fully recognizable body, the initial chapter placed on top of the 'final' one fleshes out this text, creating an accretion of overlaid meanings" (58).

In these initial chapters, Foreman's histotextually informed readings of classics like Harper's Iola Leroy and Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl allow us to appreciate these now-canonical texts through a new critical lens, but I am most excited by how in the third chapter her method recovers and illuminates Amelia E. Johnson's work. Johnson's emphasis on temperance and literary evangelism and her adherence to racially indeterminate characters have resulted in her novels' relegation to the margins of Black women's activist writing. Foreman augments Johnson's scant literary biography by recovering her central role in the local, activist history of Black Baltimore's political campaigns against anti-Black sentiment and white supremacist legislation. She then situates Johnson's Clarence and Corrine, her presumably nonracial temperance novel, as a studied intervention in the anti-Black, pro-lynching campaigns aggressively promoted by temperance advocate Rebecca Latimer Felton. In this context, Johnson's writing "challenges the racism of ideologues in an era where the rhetoric of white home protection translated to exclusion from protection at best and violent terrorism and abuse against Black men and women at worst" (170).

The book's fourth chapter responds to the controversy surrounding what Foreman calls the "racial death" of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, a writer who was once believed to be African American and who, as recent research has revealed, has no genealogical claim to African heritage (113). Treating Kelley-Hawkins as a "black(ened)" writer, Foreman uses the incident as a way of addressing reading practices...