The Changing Same: Recursivity, Reification, and Reaping

For one of its 1882 spring issues, the Southern Workman published a notice on the "Death of the Poet Longfellow." The encomium praises the aesthetics of Longfellow's "simple words," the "commonness of some of his verses," and the politics of his practice as a "poet of the people" (52). In this monthly periodical that was published out of Hampton University (then still Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute), the author evinces that "there is no class of people in this country who should cherish Mr. Longfellow's memory more tenderly than the freedmen should." Yet, the author begins the column by quoting Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850): "If, as Tennyson beautifully says of him, he 'sings / To one clear harp in divers tones,' the tones are always those which echo in every heart" (52). As a transposition whereby Tennyson's lines—written for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died decades earlier in 1833—are presented as ostensibly for the recently deceased Longfellow, even this cursory quotation illustrates Daniel Hack's observation that "nineteenth-century British literature was woven deeply into the fabric of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture" (2). Indeed, "transposition" is part of the critical lexicon, including "engagements," "repurposing," and "recontextualizations," among other terms, that animates Hack's readings throughout Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2017) (21). The most important of these, however, is the "afterlives" of Victorian literature, an idea already symbolically signaled by the writer of this 1882 issue of the Southern Workman, and marked with the word "echo."

Hack's governing claim in Reaping Something New is that the centrality of Victorian literature to the production of African American literature demands that the latter be considered for how it functions as an "important archive for the study" of the former (2). In reading Reaping Something New, Victorianists will encounter subtle analyses of works, such as George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy (1868), that have received comparatively little attention; African Americanists will be rewarded by Hack's exemplary archival research, particularly with questions around periodicals and print cultures. Informed by literary critics such as Laura Doyle, Elisa Tamarkin, and Elizabeth Young and their efforts to render the black and white, the English and American nineteenth centuries strangers no more, Hack is also indebted to Henry Louis Gates's signature scholarship culminating in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), whereby Hack's "reaping" amounts to a cognate of "signifyin's" repetition and revisionist impulses. He meticulously illustrates the ways in which African American writers took up the Victorians for the particular needs of their own political conditions as well as the desires of their aesthetic ambitions in different spaces if not times, a practice that Hack calls "close reading at a distance." In one respect, Reaping Something New is not dissimilar to the broader field of reception studies, which seeks to glean information about how the circulation and recirculation of previous histories and cultures—especially literary—are trafficked in the present, something that is evident, for example, in recent scholarship on black reception of the classics.

Inasmuch as Hack is preoccupied with how African American culture has engaged Victorian literature, another latent concern that Reaping Something New stages is the problematic between time, genealogy, and history. Much of the book proceeds under the assumption that because nineteenth-century African Americans and English Victorians occupied roughly the same chronological time, they can be said to share similar cultural genealogies, even if their literary histories have often been understood as separate and discrete. In this sense, Hack assumes a diachronic approach to limn the possibility of a reconstituted history of African American and Victorian literatures that binds them as part of the same epochal moment, save for instances where he takes up the contemporary, as in the examples of the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Percival Everett's 2001 novel, Erasure.

What might be called Hack's binocular approach in Reaping Something New—with one eye visualizing the hyperlocal in the first half, and...