Abstract
This paper is part of an ongoing project with Carla L. Peterson on reconstructing the cultural, social, geographic and material circumstances of the African-American communities of readers in which literary activity was enmeshed. My focus is literature that, though largely neglected now, circulated within a vibrant nineteenth-century African American community spanning New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Alice Ruth Moore’s 1897 manuscript about nineteenth-century African-American poets and poems, “The Grievances of the Books,” is one of my major resources. Referring to books of poetry in the library of Brooklyn’s St. Mark’s Lyceum, a center of the cultural-political circle of which Moore was part, “Grievances” reflects her community’s taste, its reading practices and—as indicated by the many writers she includes for whom poetry was an avocation—the significance poetry had for African American communities who prized literary activity. “Grievances” also gives us purchase on historical shifts in such communities. For instance, George Vashon’s “Vincent Ogé,”an 1854 epic about the Cuban revolutionary leader, encouraged its original readers’ militant abolitionism; in the 1890s, it was read as testimony to the continuity between chattel slavery and the hegemony of postbellum white supremacy and to African-Americans’ longstanding creativity and resistance. While work by Vashon and some of the other poets “Grievances” features is now available, it is not yet being situated within the communities of which it was part. Contextualizing it enhances our understanding of it and of the multifariousness of African-American, and American, culture and history.
Presenters
Sandra ZagarellDonald R. Longman Professor of English Emerita, English, Oberlin College, Ohio, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERARY CIRCLES; READNG PRACTICES; RECOVERING ORIGINAL COMMUNITIES OF READERS
