Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850
244
Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850
244eBook
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Overview
From the white editorial authentication of slave narratives, to the cultural hybridity of the Harlem Renaissance, to the overtly independent publications of the Black Arts Movement, to the commercial power of Oprah's Book Club, African American textuality has been uniquely shaped by the contests for cultural power inherent in literary production and distribution. Always haunted by the commodification of blackness, African American literary production interfaces with the processes of publication and distribution in particularly charged ways. An energetic exploration of the struggles and complexities of African American print culture, this collection ranges across the history of African American literature, and the authors have much to contribute on such issues as editorial and archival preservation, canonization, and the "packaging" and repackaging of black-authored texts. Publishing Blackness aims to project African Americanist scholarship into the discourse of textual scholarship, provoking further work in a vital area of literary study.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472900992 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 05/09/2018 |
| Series: | Editorial Theory And Literary Criticism |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 244 |
| File size: | 737 KB |
About the Author
John K. Young is Professor of English at Marshall University.
Read an Excerpt
Publishing Blackness
Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850
By George Hutchinson
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2013 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11863-2
CHAPTER 1
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF THE ANGLO-AFRICAN MAGAZINE
Or, Antebellum African American Editorial Practice and Its Afterlives
Ivy G. Wilson
On December 6, 1856, the Provincial Freeman and Weekly Advertiser ran James Monroe Whitfield's "Prospectus of the Afric-American Quarterly" advertising a future periodical that he hoped would "enter the arena of public literature, to exhibit the intellectual capacities of the negro race, and vindicate them before the world." In the wake of his attendance at the National Emigration Convention of the Colored People of North America in 1854 and 1856, Whitfield circulated an advertisement announcing that the convention delegates had authorized the publication of a "Quarterly Periodical devoted to the general interest of the colored people." Enumerating the various domains in which the interests of African Americans had been compromised such as the "wicked legislation," "the American government," and the "Word of God," Whitfield maintained that "any class of community that fails to wield" the potent power of the press will "always be depreciated and undervalued in the public imagination." Conceptualized as a "preeminent Literary work, for circulation both at home and abroad," the Afric-American Quarterly Repository was intended to contain between 160 and 200 octavo pages and be embellished with fine steel engravings of "distinguished negro[es]." Featuring both U.S. and Haitian authors, it would have articles written in English and French. Whitfield himself would act as senior editor, joined by eight corresponding editors — among them Martin R. Delany, James Theodore Holly, William C. Monroe, Mary Ann Shadd (Cary), and Mary E. Bibb.
But Whitfield's wished-for journal was a nonstarter, and the fate of the journal reveals the dilemmas and difficulties of publishing — including printing, editing, and subscriptions — that made black periodicals such a tenuous venture in the nineteenth century. Although he was an important figure in the debates regarding emigrationism, Whitfield's principal engagement with the world of publishing consisted of his experience as a poet, in venues such as Frederick Douglass's newspapers and with James S. Leavitt, a small Unitarian outfit that brought out his only volume of poetry in 1853. If Whitfield's call for a dual-language periodical seemed grandly ambitious for someone with little apparent editorial experience, then the aspirations of Thomas Hamilton to start a magazine might seem to have a greater chance of succeeding. Hamilton, who had spent the greater part of his professional life in publishing, had similar wishes to start a magazine that specifically focused on the historical condition and artistic contributions of U.S. blacks.
While recent work by Todd Vogel has reexamined the black press, and Elizabeth McHenry has analyzed black reading communities, the historical and theoretical meanings of African American editorial practices have remained relatively understudied. By focusing on the specific periodical type of the magazine I use Hamilton's Anglo-African Magazine to stage an analysis of the genealogies of African American editorial practices. In the first part of the essay, I take up Hamilton's history editing and publishing contemporary writers. In the second part, I focus on three figures centrally associated with the Anglo-African Magazine — Delany, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and James McCune Smith — to unveil some of the lines of critical inquiry that have undergirded the textual scholarship of recent editorial endeavors specifically involved with reprinting projects. In what follows, I examine the publishing initiatives of Hamilton less to formulate a theory of African American editorial practices per se than to interrogate what some of the contemporary practices related to the "archival turn" might mean to current theories of African American studies.
"The requisite editorial matter": The Emergence of the Anglo-African Magazine
While topics such as temperance, religion, and appearance were frequent mainstays, slavery and black equality were the central focus of nearly every antebellum African American periodical. When Douglass launched The North Star (1847–51), he introduced the paper with a prospectus announcing his objective: "The object of The North Star will be to attack slavery in all its forms and aspects; advocate Universal Emancipation; exact the standard of public morality; promote the moral and intellectual improvement of the colored people; and to hasten the day of freedom to our three million enslaved fellow countrymen." Willis A. Hodges's The Ram's Horn, an abolitionist paper out of Williamsburgh, New York, ran for three years between 1847 and 1850, reaching a peak circulation of 2,500. While every paper advocated the abolition of slavery, there was a wide divergence on whether African Americans should leave the United States altogether, remain isolated in segregated communities, or strive for integration. The Aliened American (1853–54), based in Cleveland, Ohio, and Mary Ann Shadd's Provincial Freeman (1853–57), published in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, championed integration. In contrast, Henry Bibb argued for keeping black communities protected and isolated from whites in his paper, Voice of the Fugitive, while John B. Russwurm, in wrestling control of Freedom's Journal from Samuel Cornish, turned the angle of the paper to one that decidedly advocated that blacks should leave the United States for Africa.
While African Americans could be found within the pages of white-edited periodicals, black periodicals pressed the call for self-representation as an urgent if not necessary responsibility. "We wish to plead our own cause," reads the editorial statement of Freedom's Journal — "Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly. ..." After Freedom's Journal and The Rights of All, Samuel Cornish became editor of the short-lived The Weekly Advocate (1837–1837), where he stated in the first issue to his black readership that the paper was "their paper, in every sense of the word ... devoted particularly to our own interests — conducted by ourselves, devoted to our moral, mental and political improvement." And Thomas Hamilton pronounced a similar mandate when he maintained in the inaugural issue of the Anglo-African Magazine that African Americans should "speak for themselves; no outside tongue, however gifted with eloquence, can tell their story; no outside eye, however penetrating, can see their wants; no outside organization, however benevolently intended, nor however cunningly contrived, can develop the energies and aspirations which make up their mission." After years in the publishing industry, Hamilton would take up this mission again when he began laying the groundwork for his magazine.
Sometime in 1858, Hamilton began distributing copies of his "Prospectus of the Anglo-African Magazine" to promote the new publication that he would edit. The prospectus was a 19 cm × 14 cm single-sheet flyer, small enough that it could have been an insert in nearly any publication. He enumerated eight primary objectives of the magazine, among them providing a forum "for the rapidly rising talent of colored men in their special and general literature," and announced that the first issue of an octavo magazine of thirty-two large pages would appear in January 1859 and feature a portrait of Alexander Dumas. When we recall that Whitfield had hoped his "Afric-American Quarterly Repository" would be something on the range of 160 to 200 pages, we begin to see the almost impossible ambition of his proposal. In an order of scale, the material costs of Whitfield's Afric-American Quarterly Repository would have been at least five times as much as Hamilton's Anglo-African Magazine. Yet, whereas Whitfield hoped to price his quarterly at seventy-five cents, Hamilton sought one dollar for twelve issues.
Hamilton's prospectus itself is a compelling document for what it reveals about the black publishing industry in New York. The flyer was printed by John J. Zuille, whose business was located at 396 Canal Street in New York City. Zuille was active in black politics throughout the century from the antebellum period (founding the New York stop of the Underground Railroad, for example) and served as a delegate at the State Labor Convention for blacks during Reconstruction. While scholars have a relatively broad picture of the numerous antebellum African American newspapers that existed and, to a lesser extent, corresponding information about their editors and publishers, we still have comparatively little information about African American printers and binders. Zuille was early engaged in African American publishing, having been the printer for the Colored American, a four- to six-page weekly newspaper edited by Samuel Cornish, Phillip A. Bell, and Charles Bennett Ray. In his brief sketch of Zuille in The Rising Son: or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (1873), William Wells Brown described Zuille as a "practical printer" who "showed mechanical skill that placed him at once amongst the ablest of the craft." Zuille's printing house was in the vicinity of Hamilton's own editorial office at 48 Beekman Street, which also served as the Office of the American Abolition Society, located in an area that was then known as Printing House Square. The same year that Zuille printed the prospectus for Hamilton's Anglo-African Magazine, he also printed a short four-page document, probably originally intended as a pamphlet, that consisted of a preamble and constitution for the African Civilization Society, of which Henry Highland Garnet served as president. In this respect, it was important for Hamilton not only to have black authors writing for the magazine but to have an African American printer as well, especially one who had experience working with African American political and civic groups.
In a burgeoning world of African American newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets, Hamilton intended the Anglo-African Magazine to be different with its attention to matters cultural as well political. In his early years, Hamilton worked in various capacities for newspapers such as the Colored American (1837–42), the Evangelist (1845–48), and the National Anti-Slavery Standard (1840–70), giving him valuable experience in the work of publishing periodicals. Still, the idea of an African American magazine was unprecedented. Later in the same year Hamilton followed with the Weekly Anglo-African, which was meant to serve as a companion to the magazine with shorter articles and news coverage. As Deborah Jackson notes, Hamilton's operating costs were quite extensive, and he underwrote his endeavors publishing the magazine and newspaper by working as a bookbinder. Jackson also notes that he supplemented his income with a sideline business selling books, offering a wide selection by both white and black authors.
It seems that Hamilton sought to advertise his magazine in areas of the country that had discernible free black populations that already had a subscription base with local or regional black newspapers. Such was the case in Ohio, a veritable bastion of black activism. Only a month after the first issue of the Anglo-African Magazine appeared, Oberlin College's Student Monthly reviewed it in the "Literary Notices" section, praising its "excellent literary matter" and concluding with the hope that "it could be put in the possession of every negrophobia-monger in the land." Notwithstanding the format, the Anglo-African Magazine was seemingly comparable to other black periodicals that focused on the condition of African Americans. Perhaps the closest equivalent was Frederick Douglass' Paper, which featured editorials, essays, poetry, and excerpted fiction in its pages. However, while most newspapers are meant to be disposable, it is evident that Hamilton intended the Anglo-African Magazine to have a degree of permanence. At the end of 1859, all twelve issues of the first year were bound and made available in book form.
With its especially keen focus on the literary arts, Hamilton most likely conceived of his magazine as suitable for the libraries of the nation's small but growing free black middle class. Indeed, when he writes of the need for an independent voice in the "fourth estate," it seems that he is referring as much to black newspapers as he is to the white publishing industry. A magazine may have seemed an unnecessary extravagance, perhaps even a waste of precious resources, given the demographics of African Americans who could afford such a luxury at midcentury, but it is clear that Hamilton wanted his magazine to be the black equivalent to those white-edited magazines that were proliferating in the publishing centers of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.
In a short story written for the inaugural volume of the Anglo-African Magazine, William J. Wilson describes a number of paintings that his protagonist Ethiop views related to the history of African American editorial practices. Among the paintings that Ethiop views is a portrait of the editor of the Anglo-African Magazine itself who is portrayed surrounded by "piles of all the journals edited by colored men from the commencement [of African American publishing] up till the present," including Freedom's Journal, Colored American, People's Press, North Star, and Frederick Douglass' Paper. Significantly, hovering in the background unbeknownst to Hamilton is Samuel Cornish, the former editor of Freedom's Journal, which ran from 1827 to 1829. The story's painting approximates a claim articulated by James McCune Smith, notwithstanding his sardonic tone, that "next to the pulpit, and behind the chairs, no place has greater charms for colored Americans than a seat in the chair editorial." In describing Ethiop's encounter with the painting, Wilson deliberately links Freedom's Journal to the Anglo-African Magazine as part of the same continuum. This continuum is underscored, however, less by the political orientation, format, or even style of the periodical than by the fact that each was under the editorship of an African American. In the painting, Hamilton is depicted sitting with Freedom's Journal, "the first journal ever edited by, and devoted to the cause of the colored man in America, held in one hand and outspread before him, while the other, as though expressive of his resolve, is firmly clenched." In representing Cornish as the "First Editor" and Hamilton as the "Last Editor," Wilson essentially imagines them as a kind of alpha and omega of black publishing.
There would, of course, be numerous black editors to come after Hamilton, but Wilson's use of Ethiop's fascination with a periodical "edited by, and devoted to the cause of the colored man" prefigures larger questions about race and editorial practices in the antebellum United States. In the most immediate sense, Wilson intimates the difference between periodicals like William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, which were devoted to the abolitionist cause foremost, and those more specifically concerned with the condition of both enslaved and free African Americans. In a different sense, Wilson uses the painting's description to implicitly ask whether black authors could hope their writings would remain more or less unadulterated by white editors. Would black authors be able to freely and fully express themselves in publications primarily intended for white readers? In a metacritical sense, the spectral presence of Cornish in The First and the Last Colored Editor painting foreshadows the ways in which editorial concerns themselves have been recessed within the field of African American literary studies. When such concerns do arise in discussions of African American literature before the Civil War, for example, it is almost always in the context of the relationship between black writers and white editors such as Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Publishing Blackness by George Hutchinson. Copyright © 2013 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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