Location, Location, Location: Remapping African American Print Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Eric Gardner's fascinating Unexpected Places makes a convincing, recovery-based argument for reassessing the essential character and location of African American literary production in the nineteenth-century United States. Gardner's volume—which received the 2010 inaugural EBSCOhost/Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize for the best scholarly monograph on American periodicals published in the past three years and an honorable mention for the Western Literature Association's Thomas J. Lyon Book Award for outstanding single-author scholarly book on the literature and culture of the American West—radically broadens a nineteenth-century African American literary canon dominated by slave narratives and an accompanying construction of black identity based upon the status of "slave" or "former slave." In the current canon, black voices of the 1800s sound largely along south-to-north pathways inscribed by the fugitive, in narratives preoccupied by oppression and escape that use sentimental devices to garner sympathy from a largely white, abolitionist audience. Gardner argues that these characteristics have become so expected that they limit scholars' ability to envision different possibilities for black textual expression. As he notes, "While there is no doubt of the slave narratives' importance and while early black novels are clearly crucial to thinking about both black literature and American literature generally, our near-obsession with specific kinds of narratives has drawn sharp and narrow boundaries around 'what counts' as and in black literature" (9). Gardner advocates a far-reaching expansion of those boundaries that enlarges traditional notions of black literary production. Unexpected Places reveals a far-flung network of African Americans who speak from the interior of that community back to it; who are concerned with black domesticity, mobility, and uplift; and who often seem surprisingly, even disconcertingly, silent about issues of race or white oppression.

Gardner places his work alongside what he terms "New Regionalists," scholars who are recovering and complicating localized black presences in the United States in efforts like B. Eugene McCarthy and Thomas L. Doughton's From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives (2007) or William Andrews's North Carolina Roots of African American Literature: An Anthology (2006). The self-designation is appropriate, given Gardner's book-long emphasis on the impact of (unexpected) localities on literary production, but his volume arguably does even more. The multilocal, multivocal, and multitemporal weaving of Unexpected Places exposes an intricate web of itinerancy and settlement, publication and circulation, that stretches across a continent and half a century (1830-80). The volume ultimately performs what might be called a trans-intranationalism, recovering, reinterpreting, and redrawing our understanding of nineteenth-century African American literary exchange on a national scale. Gardner uncovers the contributions of seemingly marginalized voices that speak from inside the nation but outside the locations we've been taught to expect to find them. His analysis begins in St. Louis and ranges to the far west, well away from the traditional south-north trajectory and northeastern center of African American literary production that Unexpected Places so adroitly contests. Instead of escaping the brutal South for the civil North, Gardner's educated African Americans themselves become transmitters of civilization, carrying literacy and domesticity to the wild western frontier, to the South itself, or, in the case of one Peter K. Cole, across the Pacific. Moreover, the mobility explored in Unexpected Places is autonomous; in a volume occupied by free black itinerant preachers, tradespeople, lecturers, teachers, and writers, even slave Polly Wash (mother of the better-known Lucy Delaney) travels independently across state lines from slaveholding Missouri to free Illinois and back again in a quest to encourage testimony on her behalf in her ultimately successful freedom suit.

The effectiveness of Unexpected Places derives from its accretive force. To read this volume is to experience a continuous layering of newly recovered black biographies and texts that together communicate the expansive vitality of the...