Slavery's Intertextual Harvest

In its consideration of the various ways in which African American and British Victorian literatures were mutually entangled, Daniel Hack's Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2017) does indeed reap something new through its enlargement of our critical perspectives on both literary traditions. Whereas Henry Louis Gates's Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (1987) focused on ways in which African American authors troped on literary narratives within a tradition of black writing, Hack expands this intertextual method to encompass Atlantic literary production more widely. He shows, for example, that Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854) was reprinted in 1855 in Frederick Douglass's Paper, and that it was subsequently deployed by Paul Dunbar in his 1895 poem "The Colored Soldiers" to celebrate the role of African American troops in the American Civil War. The title of Hack's book is taken from Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" (1869), with the author being willing to countenance a mode of what he calls "deracializing decontextualization" in his analysis of how Victorian poems and novels were re-read in widely (and wildly) varying circumstances (79). Hack's implicit conjunction of a canonical Tennyson poem with his analysis of "African American Transformations of Victorian Literature" highlights his interest in how questions of race travel and circulate among different textual locations, with centers and margins being brought here into productive juxtaposition. He is thus concerned not so much with intertextuality in the narrower theoretical sense, as it was developed by Julia Kristeva and others; instead, he looks to a broader process of cultural borrowing and transmission, the manner in which familiar texts were framed and reframed both by contemporaries and by succeeding generations through "such literary devices as allusion, parody, or diegetic transposition" (21). Accordingly, the first half of the book tracks "African Americanizing engagements with the work of a single Victorian author"—Charles Dickens, Tennyson, and George Eliot successively—while the last three chapters "explore a single African American author's engagement with fiction and poetry by multiple Victorians," focusing in turn on the work of Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois (101).

The great virtue of this approach is that it enables us to understand more clearly how African American literature and culture were enmeshed within the rubrics of Victoriana, just as mainstream Victorian literature itself was negotiating, albeit sometimes obliquely, with the shadow of slavery. Reconfiguring Franco moretti's notion of distant reading, Hack proposes a critical method that he calls "close reading at a distance," one that "combines detailed, granular textual analysis with consideration of a work's geographical dispersal and uptake, especially by readerships not envisioned or addressed by the work itself" (3). This enables him to discuss, for example, how Anna Julia Cooper's collection of essays, A Voice from the South (1892)—a "book now recognized as a milestone in African American literary and intellectual history" (4)—relies heavily on Tennyson. Cooper quotes Tennyson's words, "but quotes them slant," so that In Memoriam (1850) is given an additional valence within the apparently incongruous milieu of the U. S. South (11). Given these tortuous paths of reception, Hack's largely convincing display of the ways in which British literature was woven deeply into the fabric of nineteenth-century African American culture enables him to trace the tentacles of slavery in unexpected places. As he observes, actual "depictions of African Americans" in these canonical British works "are virtually non-existent," but this does not mean that slavery was not crucial to the ways such works were received and re-articulated (3). Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53), for example, was reprinted in its entirety in Frederick Douglass's Paper between April 1852 and December 1853, and was appropriated enthusiastically by white abolitionists.

Hack is indeed particularly good in his analysis of Dickens, demonstrating identifiable affinities between him and Douglass. Douglass referred to Dickens's American Notes (1842) in several of his speeches, while Dickens himself in 1848 sent a copy of Douglass's Narrative (1845) to one of his friends, having first torn...