Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry by Nadia Nurhussein

Nadia Nurhussein’s Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry elegantly merges insightful formal literary criticism with a sweeping narrative history of elite magazine print culture, schoolroom pedagogy, debates surrounding American orthography, and the emerging technology of voice recording and film to resituate radically the reception and significance of dialect poetry in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. Nurhussein’s readings convincingly revise commonplace understandings of dialect poetry as a performance-centered, light entertainment that inclusively addressed itself to the non-literate, revealing instead a difficult form that challenged both sub- and highly literate readers with pervasive “visual and textual” experimentation (7). Moving beyond the questions of excellence and authenticity that have long confined dialect poetry to a minor episode in literary history, this intervention illuminates the rhetorical complexity, political significance, and pedagogical impulses of this under-examined form.

Due to the relative dearth of women’s dialect poetry, only one chapter of Nurhussein’s volume is dedicated to women writers; however, the book makes significant interventions in recent conversations in lyric and cultural studies that are germane to the study of late-nineteenth-century literature more broadly. Nurhussein shows that by implying the existence of an audience, dialect poetry raises important challenges to what Virginia Jackson calls “lyric reading” (Jackson 10). By mapping the types of dialect represented in textbooks and anthologies and theorizing the role of dialect poetry in literacy instruction, the book advances scholarship in the vein of Angela Sorby’s study of “schoolroom poetry” (Sorby 67). Finally, in excavating dialect poetry from bedrock assumptions regarding the supposedly oral origins of the genre and locating it within the prevailingly female culture of late-nineteenth-century silent reading, the book opens a new direction in African American literary criticism. Indeed, though most dialect poetry was published by men, Nurhussein draws attention to the fact that black women were extremely enthusiastic consumers of dialect verse and that women in general exerted a great deal of influence over its publication (146).

Illustrating how dialect poetry “both thematized and cultivated literacy,” the first two chapters place popular poetry by James Whitcomb Riley and Bret Harte in the context of emerging technology, debates on American spelling, and pedagogical practices of literacy acquisition (19). Nurhussein suggests that by forcing readers to “sound out” lines, dialect poetry supported the phonics-based style of literacy training embraced by American schools. At the same time, sounding out was at odds with another pedagogical invention, the rise of silent reading near the end of the century, which in turn changed the way that dialect was read (25). Identifying a range from “plain” to “peculiar” departures from standard language, Nurhussein posits links between the distinct formal qualities and political possibilities of Harte’s and Riley’s dialect poems (57). Notably, Nurhussein argues that Harte’s most famous poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James”—an attempt to satirize anti-Chinese sentiment—was (mis)read and embraced as a racist text, in part because its dialect was so plainspoken. Nurhussein’s careful reading of Riley’s phonograph recordings and appearance in silent film is another highlight.

The third and fourth chapters examine Paul Dunbar’s poetry. Examining his work within the pressures of a white-dominated elite print culture, Nurhussein reads Dunbar’s “inauthenticity” both as a consequence of his attempt to follow Riley in writing western regionalist dialect in a culture unable or unwilling to separate African American literature from oral and southern culture, and in terms of his own embrace of experiments that did not intend to record speech, such as his “epistolary dialect poems” (100). In exciting archival scholarship that tracks Dunbar’s revision of spelling and punctuation in dialect poems across drafts and publications, Nurhussein sheds new light on his attention to visual experimentation that subtly subverted his readers’ beliefs that his work was rooted in uncultivated, oral culture. Suggesting that Dunbar’s first publication in Century was as responsible for launching his career as was Howells’s well-known review of Majors and Minors, Nurhussein also significantly reframes Dunbar’s early reception history.

Readers of Legacy will be especially interested in the fifth chapter, which examines the relationship between dialect writing and gender through the work of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the largely unknown Maggie Pogue Johnson. The chapter effectively settles the critical debate over whether Harper wrote in dialect at all. Countering Harper critics from J. Saunders Redding to Paul Lauter and Elizabeth Petrino, Nurhussein convincingly argues both that Harper wrote in dialect and, more importantly, that “dialect is a more elastic medium” than its associations with “humor and pathos” would suppose (148). According to Nurhussein, neither Harper nor Johnson found dialect to be at odds with racial uplift; in fact, she demonstrates that both Harper and Johnson used dialect to “emphasize the value of education without detracting from the value of dialect” (171). In addition to engaging discussions of poems that dramatize literacy and education, the chapter offers a discerning reading of the differing role of fashion in these poets’ poetry and self-presentation, further illuminating challenges facing women writers in the period. While Nurhussein makes important connections between Harper’s poetic practice and that of Riley and Harte, given the timeline of publication history, some readers might wish for more concrete connections between Harper and the dialect writing of Dunbar or Langston Hughes.

The final chapter addresses dialect’s transition into literary modernism by taking up Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Mother” and Claude McKay’s Songs of Jamaica. Exploring the authorial and editorial notes, respectively, that accompany the volumes, Nurhussein persuasively reads these necessarily silent elements as further evidence of dialect’s textual qualities that exceed and inform their oral performances.

One of the great strengths of Nurhussein’s first book is its habit of making observations that, once discussed, seem entirely obvious, despite the fact that they contradict the most basic assumptions about dialect poetry as we know it. For instance, Nurhussein’s claim that dialect poetry forced readers to “[relive] the early experience of learning to read” contradicts long-held associations of the genre with orality and simplicity (210). I was reminded of a student who commented that, in forcing her to slow down, reading dialect made her “feel like she didn’t know how to read.” Finally, in identifying previously unrecognized subgenres of “learning to read,” “spelling bee,” and “epistolary dialect” poems, which foreground literacy as a path to independence and belonging, the book confirms in new ways that nineteenth-century poetic practice did not see political content as at odds with formal experiment.