The Racialization of Print

This essay reimagines the centuries-long process through which printed objects in the Anglophone world became powerfully associated with white supremacy and ideologies of racial hierarchy. It argues that the racialization of print was not inevitable but contingent, uneven, and always contested; that it continually shifted, varying widely from place to place; and that it occurred in relation to the medium's changing associations with such other unstable social and ideological categories as class, gender, religion, and nation. The essay proposes two phases for this historical process: the establishment phase, during which the hyperelite medium of the printed codex acquired an association with white authorship in the early modern period; and the essentializing phase, during which, over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a printed book by a single author came to be understood as capable of representing the essential nature of an entire race of people. Samson Occom and Phillis Wheatley wrote during the shift between these two phases of print's racialization. A comparative case study of Occom's and Wheatley's relationships to book publication suggests that early modern social and class hierarchies were more important to their navigation of the medium's racialized dynamics than is commonly granted.