Intimate Matters in This Place: The Underground Railroad of Literature

Literature matters. It makes a substantial impression on the thoughts and prayers of the populous. We can't relive the past, but we can learn from it. So, I invite our consideration of "recovery" and "democracy" as civic and scholarly imperatives. We must not only rediscover the lost, stolen, or strayed writings of our foremothers (and fathers), but we must also interpret them rightly and promulgate them widely. Most of us in SSAAW agree that inclusive curricula are a start. But, quiet as it's kept, many of us are not very inclusive in our recovery efforts, we are quite undemocratic in our analyses, and we too often forget that recovery and conservation are equally essential. So, I introduce to some and present to others the Underground Railroad of "recovery and democracy" as fundamental to our scholarly (and civic) journeys. In the interest of time, I limit my discussion to four (hopefully provocative) reasons.

1. recovery is nowhere near complete.

Considering this a "'Post-Recovery' Era" is as ignorant as proclaiming this a post-racial period (Harris 284). We have dug deep, but we have only scratched the surface. And, as Sharon M. Harris (one of the founders and the first president of SSAAW) stated several scholarly generations ago: "Once a text is 'recovered,' it must be analyzed through an equally broad compendium of theoretical perspectives, cultural contexts, transatlantic contexts, interdisciplinary contexts, and print and production contexts. That is, the scope of contexts in which we place texts is really what recovery is about, and in that sense our work has and always will have only begun" ("Across the Gulf" 295).

2. "the past ISN't dead and buried. in fact, it isn't even past."¹

Progress is not linear and presentism is undemocratic. Traveling the Underground Railroad starts with knowing that facts don't have a "best if used before" date. Scholarship older then twenty-one years is not necessarily useless. In a changing-same world, sometimes answers were published, or at least the route was mapped, before we imagined the question. We should not have to recover recoveries—so don't neglect the lessons of the elders. For example, Barbara Christian's "The Race for Theory," Judith Fetterley's "Commentary: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Politics of Recovery," and Nellie Y. McKay et al.'s "The Inevitability of the Personal" are only three of several essays that should be understood—before one begins her research pilgrimage.²

3. all that glitters is not gold.

The Underground Railroad rider knows that Research I institutions and the more recent issues of proverbial top-tier journals are not the only stations from which we can begin our quests or end our explorations. Visiting Radical Teacher, CLA Journal, Frontiers, Aztlán, Sage, College English, Yellow Medicine Review, and early issues of Legacy separates the tourist from the explorer. The academic illuminati by definition exclude the masses.

4. democratic recovery includes the literature of the domestic and the mundane.

Research centers are good places to go. But basements, attics, and garages are where they get their treasures. The vast amount of unrecovered literature and most of the writing that chronicles and informs the folk (and to be truthful, the intelligentsia at its core) are produced by and for limited distribution among family and friends, cultural and ethnic communities. They are letters, diaries, cookbooks, organizational documents, funeral programs, anniversary commemorations, family histories and scrapbooks that enable and extend microhistory and other ways of confronting the "inarticulate woman" and enabling our apprehension of "our mothers' gardens" (Chamberlain 33; Walker 231). Ellen Gruber Garvey's Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance is one station from which to start; Elizabeth S. D. Englehardt's A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food, Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman et al.'s "Archive Survival Guide," and Lois Brown's "Memorial Narratives of African Women in Antebellum New England" are three of many others.

5. democratic recovery in action; or, my next trip as a case in point.

This weekend I am...