The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal": Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829-1851

by Marcy J. Dinius

Overview

Historians and literary historians alike recognize David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829-1830) as one of the most politically radical and consequential antislavery texts ever published, yet the pamphlet's significant impact on North American nineteenth-century print-based activism has gone under-examined. In The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal" Marcy J. Dinius offers the first in-depth analysis of Walker's argumentatively and typographically radical pamphlet and its direct influence on five Black and Indigenous activist authors, Maria W. Stewart, William Apess, William Paul Quinn, Henry Highland Garnet, and Paola Brown, and the pamphlets that they wrote and published in the United States and Canada between 1831 and 1851. She also examines how Walker's Appeal exerted a powerful and lasting influence on William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator and other publications by White antislavery activists.

Dinius contends that scholars have neglected the positive, transnational, and transformative effects of Walker's Appeal on print-based political activism and literary and book history—that is, its primarily textual effects—due to an enduringly narrow focus on the violence that the pamphlet may have occasioned. She offers as an alternative a broadened view of activism and resistance that centers the works of Walker, Stewart, Apess, Quinn, Garnet, and Brown within an exploration of radical forms of authorship, publication, civic participation, and resistance. In doing so, she has written a major contribution to African American literary studies and the history of the book in antebellum America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812298390
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Series:	Material Texts
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
File size:	30 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Marcy J. Dinius is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University and author of The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 "Look!! look!!! at this!!!!": Reading Walker's Appeal 29

Chapter 2 Immediate Effects: William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator and Maria W. Stewart's Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality 80

Chapter 3 Taking the Texts: William Apes's "An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man" 109

Chapter 4 Taking Walker's Appeal West: Reverend William Paul Quinn's The Origin, Horrors, and Results of Slavery 137

Chapter 5 "As Being Bound with You": Henry Highland Garnet's 1848 Edition of Walker's Appeal 165

Chapter 6 The Northern Exposure of Walker's Appeal: Producing and Reproducing African American Antislavery Literature and Authorship in Canada 198

Conclusion. Walker's Ideal Reader: W. E. B. Du Bois 231

Notes 241

Index 285

Acknowledgments 297

Editorial Reviews

"Marcy J. Dinius draws out a sophisticated theory of influence and revision through Walker’s Appeal that is unmatched in the existing criticism. This is a field-changing work, and one that promises to have a long life in African American literary studies, book history, African American intellectual history, Black studies, and rhetorical criticism."

Cornell University Derrick R. Spires

"[A] rich and rewarding study. [Dinius'] central concept of 'textual effects' comprises both textual evidence of Walker’s strategies and intentions and his work’s reception. Dinius traces its reception in the textual evidence of its influence on Black and Indigenous readers who wrote (and in some cases, also published and distributed) their own pamphlets, and her comparative readings, contextualized within the history of antebellum Black print culture, demonstrate that these writers were astute readers and revisers of Walker’s work...Dinius’s treatment of Brown exemplifies her critical skill; under her lens, even overt acts of copying Walker’s text become complex interpretive sites. Dinius’s own generous scholarly ethos suits her project particularly well, conveying a strong sense of collaboration with colleagues on shared projects that are at once intellectual, social, and political.

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Textual Cultures

"The Textual Effects of David Walker’s Appeal is a deeply researched study of the many ways that Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829; 1830) influenced Black and Indigenous writers from the 1830s to the 1850s. While scholars have long studied the rippling political effects of Walker’s incendiary publication, including the passage of antiliteracy laws and the censoring of abolitionist periodicals in southern states, this is the first study to focus on the works of print by writers of color who were directly influenced by Walker’s manifesto...Dinius does the field an important service by showing that the Appeal was not a one-off publication written by a political fanatic but a deeply learned text invested in both the powers of Black self-education and intellectual inquiry and one that would become a touchstone for some of the most important activist texts of the antebellum period. In this way, Dinius offers a new political genealogy of nineteenth-century American literature."

Early American Literature

"Marcy J. Dinius draws out a sophisticated theory of influence and revision through Walker's Appeal that is unmatched in the existing criticism. This is a field-changing work, and one that promises to have a long life in African American literary studies, book history, African American intellectual history, Black studies, and rhetorical criticism."—Derrick R. Spires, Cornell University

From the Publisher