TY - JOUR
AU1 - Rezek,, Joseph
AB - Abstract 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. Scholars of the early Atlantic world have come to a new consensus about the role that the materiality of print played in underwriting modern racial hierarchies. Emerging largely in the wake of influential work by Walter Mignolo and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the new consensus holds that printed objects from the earliest moments of New World colonization could embody Eurocentric ideologies of the human and, in the ensuing centuries, ideologies of racial difference. Mignolo marked the colonizing effects of European beliefs about alphabetic writing, literacy, knowledge, and history, all registered in “the medieval codex and the Renaissance printed book” (83), and Gates identified within Enlightenment thought a racially exclusive conception of writing that led authors of African descent to figure their engagement with the “literate white text” through the now-famous “trope of the Talking Book” (Signifying 143). In recent years, our understanding of print’s colonizing role has deepened as early Americanists have considered whether printed objects were not just media for racist ideologies but ideological in themselves. Many have studied modes of writing, literacy, cultural expression, communication, and performance, not dependent on print and therefore implicitly revealing of the medium’s limitations, and others—including Frances Smith Foster (“A Narrative”), Phillip Round, Elizabeth McHenry, Joanna Brooks (“Counterpublic”), and Raúl Coronado—have revolutionized the field of print culture studies by exploring how colonized and racially marginalized people claimed the white-dominated medium of print as their own.1,2 While such work has undermined any notion of the ideological neutrality of print, the new consensus risks essentializing the medium in a way structurally similar to but precisely opposite the older liberal view of print as the embodiment of enlightenment, revolution, and political progress.3 Such essentializing can happen even when a dominant ideology of print is contrasted against subversive or marginalized practices of reading, authorship, publication, or performance. It is a risk because any essentialist understanding of a medium fails to acknowledge the contingent processes through which it acquired and sustained specific ideologies through use. No medium has an inherent ideology, even though most have political, economic, religious, aesthetic, gendered, and racialized histories.4 The media historian should investigate those histories rather than assume them. In this essay, I consider the relationship between modern racism and print technology as an ever-shifting historical process we have yet fully to understand. We might call such a process the racialization of print: the centuries-long, noninevitable procedure through which printed objects became powerfully associated with white supremacy and ideologies of racial hierarchy. How did modern associations between print and racism initially take shape, beginning with Columbus’s voyages to the New World and the establishment of printing centers throughout Europe, and how did they change over time—up through the industrialization of print and the The racialization of print was uneven and contested; it continually shifted, varying widely from place to place; and it occurred in relation to the medium’s changing associations with … class, gender, religion, and nation. codification of scientific racism? I argue that the racialization of print was uneven and contested; it continually shifted, varying widely from place to place; and it occurred in relation to the medium’s changing associations with such other unstable and developing social and ideological categories as class, gender, religion, and nation. It depended above all on the individual choices of state and economic actors who used print as a technology to subdue, control, commodify, and dehumanize colonized and enslaved people. Even as my sense of this process is heavily indebted to recent work on such questions, I believe that the current thinking in the field is in need of complication and refinement. My principal aim in this essay is to examine a significant eighteenth-century moment in the anglophone context that is generally understood through the Mignolo/Gates consensus but might benefit from revision. Within 11 months of each other, Samson Occom published A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772), the first English-language book by a Native American, and Phillis Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first book of poetry published in English by an African-descended person.5 Long recognized as originary texts in racially defined literary traditions, Occom’s and Wheatley’s books powerfully refute print authorship’s long-established association with whiteness. An analysis of print’s exclusions along the axis of socioeconomic status, however, raises additional questions. A focus specifically on Occom’s apparent anxiety about his “common, plain, every-day talk” (177) and what Wheatley’s writings reveal about her relationship to the English aristocracy suggests that the intractable barriers of social status were more important to their racialized navigation of print than is commonly granted. I contend that Occom and Wheatley published in an era when an author’s low station in society vied with racial identity as a liability for those who sought entry into print. This played out differently for the Mohegan minister, whose gender permitted his ordination in the Presbyterian Church, than it did for the enslaved African poet. But a long view of print’s racialization allows us to see that the earliest authors of color who harnessed print as a medium faced a different set of intersecting racial and social obstacles than those who did so in the nineteenth century under the “harsh new spirit of modern racial essentialism” (Stewart 693). My secondary aim in this essay—inspired by Occom and Wheatley—is to sketch out a provisional hypothesis about the media dynamics of the anglophone world over the longue durée. I propose that the racialization of print unfolded in two phases: the establishment phase, during which the hyperelite medium of the printed codex slowly 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, the medium’s racialization intensified to the point where a published book by a single author was understood as capable of representing the essential nature of an entire race of people. The shift between these phases depended not only on the codification of modern racial ideologies such as white supremacy but also on the democratization of print as a mass medium. After the expansion of access to print in the nineteenth century and the concurrent transformation of race into an ideology that appeared to subsume class differences, the racialization of print deepened considerably. Attention to this long story more clearly reveals the medial pressures eighteenth-century authors of color faced as they challenged Anglophone print conventions. It also changes our understanding of the rise of racially marginalized print traditions in the nineteenth century. One way of recognizing that socioeconomic status mattered to both Occom and Wheatley is to say that Moses Paul and Poems on Various Subjects appeared during the shift between the establishment and essentializing phases of print’s racialization. They published in an era before print disaggregated from early modern class hierarchies and before print’s racialization fully took hold. Hierarchies of class, race, social status, and gender have, of course, mutually determined each other for centuries and continue to do so. Structural categories of “sameness and difference,” Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall write, should be conceived “not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power” (795). Rather than challenge historians’ current understanding of how categories of difference were mutually determined within the varying geographies of the early Atlantic world, I argue simply that print was not a blunt, unchanging participant in such intersecting dynamics but was instead fully implicated in their complexity. I begin by elaborating the establishment phase of print’s racialization as a way to prepare for my discussion of Occom and Wheatley; I end with a speculative account of essentializing shifts occurring after the Age of Revolution. 1. Print and Racialization Countless scholars have addressed the racialization of print without quite naming it as such. Indeed, any scholar investigating the racialization of a particular aspect of the early Atlantic has necessarily drawn from printed sources as evidence for the increasing dominance of racial ideology, from Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black (1968) to Roxann Wheeler’s The Complexion of Race (2000), to more recent interventions like Nell Painter’s The History of White People (2010) and Justin E. H. Smith’s Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference (2015). In making the case for the racialization of print as an object of study in itself and in proposing that it was a contingent process that changed over time, I hope to join scholarship that has urged a reconsideration of the interdependence between racial ideology and print. Foundational work largely coming from outside book history and print culture studies by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Simon Gikandi, and Sara E. Johnson has exposed print’s complicity by demonstrating that, for racially marginalized subjects, printed texts hide more than they reveal and are often a site of violence. Meanwhile, as Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne have recently argued, scholars of print culture still need to reckon more fully with the importance of race. This is true despite book historians’ longstanding interest in unequal access to print along economic lines, if not racial ones, beginning with their field’s origins in the Annales school of social history. An early commitment to understanding books as economically restricted commodities helped historians argue that print’s democratization led to revolution.6 Since the 1980s, scholars like Mary Kelley, Cathy Davidson, Catherine Gallagher, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (The Gender of Freedom [2004]) have explored print’s gendered prohibitions, masculinized ideologies of the public sphere, and the economic force of women in the marketplace, as both readers and authors.7 The time is ripe to show how attention to the history of race promises to change the history of print, writ large. Racialization, we know from Frantz Fanon, is a matter of power, perception, and violence. It is the process through which belief in the meaning of racial difference and hierarchy overwhelms other social, cultural, and economic categories of affiliation.8 For Michael Omi and Howard Winant, “racialization” signifies “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (64). A medium is racialized when ideologies of race shape users’ understanding of who controls the production of the medium and for whom it is principally intended, regardless of the actual realities of control or use. In the letterpress period, printed objects were so heterogeneous in format, genre, content, and purpose that it is arguably impossible to speak of control in any general sense. Users encountered blank forms, account books, stationery, ephemera, pamphlets, broadsides, chapbooks, visual illustrations, maps, primers, serials, periodicals, folios, quartos, octavos, duodecimos, pocket editions, etc., all gathered, unbound, bound, or scattered and meant to be read, written upon, discarded, repurposed, reused, or recycled, in hugely diverse ways. Yet if we limit the “social practice” under consideration to the printing of codices inscribed mainly with text (whatever the format), generalization becomes a more reasonable proposition. Generalization about authorial categories is even possible prior to the codification of modern authorship under eighteenth-century copyright regimes. In the eighteenth-century anglophone world, print’s racialization is evident in a presumption faced by authors like Occom and Wheatley: that the author of an English-language printed text is presumed white unless indicated otherwise by a racial signifier. Instead of taking this presumption for granted—as inherent to print from the very beginning—we might trace a genealogy of its emergence. When, where, and how did the racial category of whiteness intersect with print authorship’s older categories of association, such as an elite class position or a masculine gender? How did those intersections change over time? The establishment phase of print’s racialization began with the dissemination and codification of modern categories of human variety in the context of New World colonization. This was grounded in the printed book’s association with elites, but it also required an intersecting theory of racial difference. In the century after Johannes Gutenberg, European-printed books were extremely rarefied commodities, mostly authored, published, and intended for wealthy, classically educated Christian men. Print was defined by radical class exclusion up through the mid sixteenth century, as Joad Raymond reminds us about the British case. “Print was not produced by the people,” he writes. “Printing was a capital-intensive business, and few early modern books can be said in this sense to represent a popular voice” (4). During this period, as Sylvia Wynter argues, elite Europeans “overrepresented” themselves as “the human”—as the universal “referent” for mankind (303). They theorized, developed, and consolidated categories of racial difference largely by way of circulating printed objects, including books and laws. Conceived as what Joyce Chaplin has called a “heritable difference that was hierarchically meaningful” (168), the modern idea of race, most historians agree, developed unevenly and sporadically in Europe over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and hierarchized significantly between the mid seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a period that includes François Bernier’s “Nouvelle Division de la Terre” and Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735).9 During this long period, elite Europeans claimed whiteness as their racial category, usually under the sign of civilization—a condition that became indelibly associated with print literacy. Such an association emerged directly out of the violent historical events that inspired European men to publish new theories of race in print. “In early English contact literature,” Round writes, “the figure of the book as an agent of conquest is ubiquitous” (21). Round points to the Seal of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel as illustrating this phenomenon (Figure 1). Published in 1706, this racist seal depicts a missionary brandishing a codex at the bow of a ship while it approaches native people on shore. Such representations reinforced the presumed whiteness of print: the belief that authors and producers of printed codices not only held elite positions in society but were also members of a common racial category. Racial categories indeed shifted and varied widely in the early modern period, but it was clear that those at the top of the developing and hardening hierarchies controlled the press. The press was largely inaccessible to ordinary people who inhabited the streets, the theater, ships, town squares, cities, the countryside, cottages, and the church—places about which printed objects may provide important evidence but not because common people created them.10 Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Frontispiece, An Account of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts. London, 1706. Courtesy of the Princeton Theological Seminary. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Frontispiece, An Account of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts. London, 1706. Courtesy of the Princeton Theological Seminary. In the establishment phase, non-Europeans were understood as objects of representation, not subjects who created printed texts of their own. This happened as print became a medium associated with European colonial ambition, as Mignolo originally argued 25 years ago.11 However, the widely disseminated pseudoethnographic texts of colonization—in the English tradition exemplified in works by Richard Hakluyt, Thomas Harriot, and John Smith—were not merely symptomatic of an already existing racialized media dynamic; they actively helped to create such a dynamic. As Jennifer L. Morgan has written, publication projects like Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations (1589; 1598–1600) actively established racialized thinking by “erect[ing] a boundary that made English expansion in the face of confused and uncivilized peoples reasonable, profitable, and moral” (26). Consider also Francis Bacon’s famous passage celebrating print’s supposed European origins in Novum Organum (1620)—a passage Elizabeth Eisenstein used as an epigraph to the 1968 essay that grew into her field-defining work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) (“Some Conjectures”). Bacon’s comments about print are immediately preceded by a passage Eisenstein elided: a comparison between the mechanical arts of Europe and the supposed absence of such arts in the Americas: [L]et anyone reflect how great is the difference between the life of men in any of the most civilised provinces of Europe and in the most savage and barbarous region of New India; and he will judge that they differ so much that deservedly it may be said that ‘man is a God to Man’, not only for help and benefit, but also in the contrast between their conditions. And this is due not to soil, climate or bodily qualities, but to Arts. Again, it helps to notice the force, power and consequences of discoveries, which appear at their clearest in three things that were unknown to antiquity, and whose origins, though recent, are obscure and unsung: namely the art of printing, gunpowder and the nautical compass. In fact these three things have changed the face and condition of things all over the globe: the first in literature; the second in the art of war; the third in navigation. (100) Through this comparison, Bacon helped to establish an ideological connection between European civilization and the technology of print.12 His insistence that “Arts” and not inherent “bodily qualities” determined such a connection suggests that he wrote at a time when concepts of racial difference had arisen but were not yet systematized. Nevertheless, print becomes European here through the geographical scale of his comparative method, which remains absolutely central to the idea that the medium, along with its brother “discoveries,” changed “the face and condition of things all over the globe.” In retrospect, it may seem that contrasts and connections like Bacon’s emerged from a previously racialized understanding of the medium. Such passages in fact laid the groundwork for print’s racialization one iteration at a time. Occom and Wheatley published in an era when the presumed whiteness of the English-language printed text had been firmly established but before the medium’s democratization helped its racial ideologies to essentialize. By the mid eighteenth century, notions of racial difference had come to define the anglophone media landscape, even though racial hierarchies were viewed climatologically and through the lens of monogenesis. An author’s access to print, however, was still shaped by the persistent socioeconomic hierarchies of early modernity. 2. Class Transgression in Occom and Wheatley A few short years before the American Revolution, Occom and Wheatley contested the norms of anglophone print culture with Moses Paul and Poems on Various Subjects. These two authors emerged contemporaneously from within the same milieu—the evangelical Atlantic of the 1760s–1770s—and they understood that their entrance into print transgressed the medium’s rarefied high cultural associations. This seeming contravention was more pronounced for Wheatley, as a woman writer and enslaved African who wrote poetry, but it defined the terms of Occom’s transgression as well. Significant differences in gender and race—and, for the texts in question, differences in genre, format, and place of publication—make the commonalities between Occom’s and Wheatley’s experiences with print even more fascinating to explore.13 Occom’s thin pamphlet, published in New Haven as the record of a specific occasion, differs greatly from Wheatley’s lengthy, subscription-based, London-printed book of neoclassical poetry, with its elegant frontispiece engraving, elaborate paratextual apparatus, and large and leaded type. Yet a comparison of their publishing careers can illuminate how print’s racial ideologies intersected with the medium’s older association with educated elites. Here, my aim is to suggest that late in the establishment phase of print’s racialization, social hierarchies may have seemed just as insurmountable to the two authors as the racial hierarchies they also challenged. Occom and Wheatley met in Boston, probably in 1764.14 They were friends and correspondents who advocated for the aid and religious salvation of their own “kindred” and “Nation,” terms they sometimes used to signify race.15 They both traveled to England in cooperation with white patrons who played significant roles in their careers. Like George Whitefield, whom they both admired, they believed that religious salvation was open and available to people of all races and from all stations of society. Unlike Whitefield, they condemned African slavery. Indeed, it was in a reply to a letter from Occom that Wheatley implicitly refuted Whitefield’s proslavery views and elaborated her “Love of Freedom” and commitment to equality for all (Wheatley 153).16 There is no question that printing books meant something specific to these writers, both of whom used other methods of public communication, including manuscript publication, ephemeral print publication (especially in Wheatley’s case), and, in Occom’s case, preaching.17 Occom’s autobiographical “Short Narrative,” not printed until the nineteenth century, was “publish[ed]” in manuscript, as he put it in 1768, to vindicate his character (52), while many of Wheatley’s poems circulated in manuscript or were sent via post to such dignitaries as the Earl of Dartmouth or George Washington. Wheatley depended especially upon scribal publication for her reputation and credibility.18 Printing books for the public, however, presumed upon the interest, attention, credulity, and judgment of a much larger audience of strangers than other forms of publication could reach; such publication made an appeal to usefulness, relevance, permanence, or posterity; and, as a commodified activity (usually), it asked for payment as proof of interest. Whether an appeal was grounded in a metropolitan volume of poetry or an occasional sermon, these were hefty demands that authors outside the presumed categories of authorship had difficulty issuing with any kind of plausibility. Wheatley’s gender further exacerbated the risks of making such demands. How did Wheatley and Occom understand these pressures, and what were their strategies for success? 2.1 Occom’s Common Talk The liability of a low socioeconomic position is clear with Occom, who reflected extensively on the decision to “appear in print” in his preface to Moses Paul (177). Occom seems to have understood his race as less of a problem than his position in a society divided by class and education, even though he perceived that race, class, and education go hand in hand, as becomes clear toward the end of his remarks. His extraordinary preface is worth quoting at length: THE world is already full of books; and the people of GOD are abundantly furnished with excellent books upon divine subjects; and it seems that every subject has been written upon over and over again: And the people in very deed have had precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little and there a little; and so in the whole, they have much, yea very much, they have enough and more than enough. And when I come to consider these things, I am ready to say with my self [sic], what folly and madness is it in me to suffer any thing of mine to appear in print, to expose my ignorance to the world? It seems altogether unlikely that my performance will do any manner of service in the world, since the most excellent writings of worthy and learned men are disregarded.—But there are two or three considerations, that have induced me to be willing to suffer my broken hints to appear in the world: one, is, that the books that are in the world are written in very high and refined language, and the sermons that are delivered every Sabbath, in general, are in a very high and lofty stile, so that the common people understand but little of them. But I think they can’t help understanding my talk; it is common, plain, every-day talk—little children may understand it; and poor Negroes may plainly and fully understand my meaning; and it may be of service to them. Again, it may in a particular manner be serviceable to my poor kindred the Indians—Further, as it comes from an uncommon quarter, it may induce people to read it, because it is from an Indian. Lastly, God works where and when he pleases, and by what instruments he sees fit, and he can and has used weak and unlikely instruments to bring about his great work. (177) Like all apologies for publication, Occom’s is partly ironic. The “world” is “full of books,” he declares, but it may as well be empty, since few can “understand” all that divine excellence written “in a very high and lofty stile.” Occom promises to fill this profound gap with “common, plain, every-day talk,” so that “the common people,” “children,” “poor Negroes,” and “my poor kindred the Indians” can benefit from religious instruction. This does not seem like self-abasement. Buoyed by the democratic ethos of the evangelical movement, Occom asserts his advantages as a man of the people through a critique of elite religious print culture, whose excessive superfluity he ridicules with repetitive phrasing in the first paragraph (“much, yea very much,” “here a little and there a little,” “enough and more than enough”). Occom is a “weak and unlikely instrument[]” of God because he enters into a media landscape that excludes all uneducated people—children, Indians, and Negroes. He aims to serve those people by launching his sermon before an audience of the poor, and his book’s inexpensive format is a part of that project. Occom is an exception to the rule of the educated, refined minister-author because his book is modest and because he speaks with a “common” voice to “common people.”19 Occom is also an exception because of what he marks as “uncommon” about himself, his identity as an Indian.20 He frames this not as a problem, like his “ignorance,” but instead as a point of interest that “may induce people to read” his sermon. What explains the relationship between Occom’s ironic apology for his low station in society and his equally interesting comments about race? One answer lies in the differing roles social position and racial identity played in his career before he turned to print as an author. Despite his profession as an educator, Occom lacked formal education; his status as an autodidact and his persistent poverty (which he battled endlessly to overcome) were consistent disadvantages, as his “Short Narrative” and later correspondence show. Often, he shows that racial discrimination bred poverty through legal restrictions on Native land use and through unequal pay for missionary work. Yet Occom’s Indian identity was inspiring in a way his class never was, both for his advocates and himself. He was earnestly and consistently devoted to serving “my Brethren according to the Flesh,” “my poor kindred the Indians,” and he increasingly believed that as a Mohegan he could preach with advantage to members of other Native American nations (Occom 54, 177).21 His racial identity also recommended him to white patrons interested in educating and converting Indians, a circumstance that advanced his career but that also occasioned his anger and resentment. In one instance, after returning from his trip to England to raise funds for a missionary college (later Dartmouth College), Occom bitterly complained to his sponsor, Eleazer Wheelock: Many gentlemen in England and in this Country too, Say if you had not this Indian Buck you woud [sic] not [have] Collected a quarter of the Money you did, one gentleman in Particular in England Said to me, if he hadn’t Seen my face he wouldnt [sic] have given 5 happence but now I have 50£ freely. (99–100) In this context, Occom’s suggestion in the preface to Moses Paul that his Indian identity would be interesting to readers appears strategic and self-conscious. Insofar as Occom experienced that identity as one of the most salient aspects of his masculinized public persona, it makes sense that he would emphasize it without shame in the most public medium he had ever used. Occom had to work harder in his preface to transform his shame about social status and education into a privileged point of contact with “common people.” Embracing such an affiliation was an unfamiliar stance made necessary by Occom’s decision to make print an “instrument” of salvation. It was also part of his larger project of using education and literacy, as Lisa Brooks has explored, to “‘outwit’ colonial deceit” (99). Occom needed simultaneously to acknowledge and reject print’s conventional association with formally educated authors of means. The complexity of his struggle with those associations indicates that they mattered just as much for his foray into print as the racial associations he also understood he was transgressing. In print, one may say, Occom’s race was interesting; his class and education were ridiculous, offensive, embarrassing, “common,” and now “expose[d]” like never before. In this sense, Occom’s triumph in publishing Moses Paul was to put himself unexpectedly in the company of ministerial preacher-authors confident enough of their high social position to demand the attention of unknown and anonymous readers. 2.2 Wheatley and Patronage Wheatley demanded the company of poets, a taller order and one more difficult for a woman and an African than a Native American man.22 The front matter to Poems on Various Subjects flagrantly displays opposition to Wheatley’s ambition, for a book that Boston publishers refused to print and one that needed the testimony of 18 white men to battle any incredulity over her qualifications. In assessing Wheatley’s relationship to print publication, how might we consider the social hierarchies of the early anglophone Atlantic not only as a function of the blatantly racist opposition she faced but as constitutive of that opposition? Scholars have a well-developed understanding of Wheatley’s challenge to the racialized and gendered public sphere as a “multiply-burdened” subject (Crenshaw 152). Occom’s book was thinner, it’s true; but we might also compare their portraits. The large, London broadside of Occom's portrait that circulated in Britain during his fundraising trip for Wheelock dwarfs Wheatley’s frontispiece in stature (Figure 2). While he stares down the reader with the authority of an ordained minister, she demurs with pious and feminized modesty. Wheatley’s gender intensified the racism she faced as did the unique dehumanizing logic of antiblack racism.23 Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Frontispiece, Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), compared with The Reverend Mr. Samson Occom (1768). Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Frontispiece, Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), compared with The Reverend Mr. Samson Occom (1768). Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College. More can be said, however, about the specificity of Wheatley’s social status as an enslaved person within the rigidly hierarchical network of individuals who ushered Poems on Various Subjects to the press. While Occom critiqued elite print culture by embracing the “common,” Wheatley leveraged elite class associations against her (imagined) low origins as an “uncultivated Barbarian from Africa,” as the signed attestation describes her (8). The radical intervention of Poems on Various Subjects depended just as much on exploding expectations about the first part of that description—“uncultivated Barbarian”—as the second. An autodidact like Occom, Wheatley exceeded the expectations of her social position in her command of poetic form, literary language, and classical and biblical allusion. This is immediately evident in the book’s first poem, “To Maecenas,” which recounts Wheatley’s “thrills” reading Homer (9). We might also note that in the long history of white paratextual testimony for black authorship, Wheatley’s witnesses were particularly grand.24 In gathering signatures for the attestation, Wheatley and Susanna Wheatley sought the endorsement of “the most respectable Characters in Boston,” including Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, as well as the lieutenant-governor, five “Honorables,” seven “Reverends,” three “Esquires,” and “her Master” (8).25 Their socioeconomic status complements and reinforces the aristocratic authority of the book’s dedicatee, the Countess of Huntingdon, who had also been Occom’s patron. Huntingdon shared Whitefield’s liberal views about salvation, but she herself was an unrepentant enslaver who invested 2,000 pounds toward purchasing kidnapped Africans for her Georgia plantation just months after Wheatley’s book appeared.26 A year later, the loyalist Governor Hutchinson fled to England during the American Revolution. Indeed, Wheatley’s supporters were wholesale apologists for the ancien régime. From their perspective, any endorsement of her was a condescending act of aristocratic benevolence that preserved the hierarchies of elite literary culture by framing her as an exception. There was some precedent for this in the laboring poets of the eighteenth century, including Stephen Duck, a thresher; Mary Collier, a washerwoman; and James Woodhouse, a shoemaker. “It is thought proper to assure the Reader, that the following Verses are the real Productions of the Person to whom the Title-Page ascribes them,” reads the advertisement to Collier’s The Woman’s Labour (1739), “[n]ow a washer-woman, at Petersfield in Hampshire.”27 Wheatley’s continuing status as a slave under the supposed protection of her enslavers and with the endorsement of a countess smoothed her entry into print as a familiar kind of eighteenth-century natural genius. Wheatley’s Poems were published in London instead of Boston not only because England had a more favorable racial climate than New England, as many have noted, but also because in England, rigid class hierarchies could neutralize the threat of racial difference. The rigidity of those hierarchies worked together with the servile authorial frontispiece Huntingdon commissioned for the volume. Wheatley’s patrons initially made room for her poetry, after all, but not her freedom.28 Wheatley reflected on England’s social hierarchies in a letter to her friend Obour Tanner, an enslaved black woman living in Newport, Rhode Island. After returning from her trip to London in 1773, she wrote: I can’t say but my voyage to England has conduced to the recovery (in a great measure) of my Health. The Friends I found there among the Nobility and Gentry, Their Benevolent conduct towards me, the unexpected, and unmerited civility and Complaisance with which I was treated by all, fills me with astonishment. I can scarcely Realize it.—This I humbly hope has the happy Effect of lessning [sic] me in my own Esteem. (Wheatley 148) Here Wheatley is not talking about her experience in England so much as her experience with the English aristocracy (“the Nobility and Gentry”), which she views through the lens of their values (“benevolence,” “unmerited civility,” “lessning me in my own Esteem”). Wheatley critiqued the aristocratic social order throughout her poetry and other writings.29 Yet, perhaps her most suggestive rebellion occurred after the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, when she tried to make a living as an independent professional author. The audacity of her bid to become the first self-supporting black author must be understood in economic terms. Wheatley was manumitted after her book was printed, and its sale was her chief means of subsistence moving forward. “I am now upon my own footing,” she told David Wooster on 18 October 1773, “and whatever I get by [my book] is entirely mine” (147). She worked hard to enlist friends to sell her book throughout New England: Wooster sold copies in New Haven; Tanner in Rhode Island; and Occom himself around Connecticut (Carretta 145–46). Wheatley also autographed the copyright page of “Genuine Cop[ies]” of her book in an effort to protect it from unauthorized reprinting (Wheatley 147) (Figure 3). This attempt to promote, sell, sign—indeed to authorize—her own book rejected the associations Wheatley had earlier strategically accepted through aristocratic patronage but in turn left her more vulnerable to failure and rejection. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Phillis Wheatley’s signature on the copyright page of Poems on Various Subjects. Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Phillis Wheatley’s signature on the copyright page of Poems on Various Subjects. Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Wheatley’s profound decision to autograph her copyright page repeatedly is filled with implications that have not, to my knowledge, received scholarly attention.30 The practice marks a shift among her social, economic, and legal statuses even as her racialized and gendered identity remained the same. Between the time when her books were printed in London and when she autographed them in Boston, she had transformed from an enslaved author with the backing of powerful white patrons into a newly emancipated black author making a living on her own. As many have recognized, the gambit failed: Wheatley did not manage to support herself through writing poems, and she never did publish a second book of poetry. As Foster has written, Wheatley’s “commitment to a literary career prompted concern and discouraging advice” (Written 33). The reasons for her difficulties are myriad (she also had an unhelpful marriage), but Wheatley’s autographs—hopeful, bold, prospective, almost utopian and ultimately tragic—highlight the central, paradoxical irony about her career: success in print was predicated on her enslavement. Once she acted freely and independently as a professional author, certain avenues to book publication closed. This says nothing about Wheatley as a poet but everything about her unprecedented challenge to the long-established ideological restrictions of her medium. Occom’s and Wheatley’s struggles with print’s hyperelite stature cannot be separated from the racialized presumptions that characterized print authorship during the establishment phase. Even so, the energy they spent acknowledging, combating, transcending, undermining, and embracing their humble origins suggests that whatever was at odds between those origins and the elite conventions of authorship was not reducible to the difference between their racial identities and print’s presumed whiteness. Thomas Jefferson’s notorious dismissal of Wheatley attempted just such a reduction. “Among the blacks is misery enough … but no poetry,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1784; 1787); “the compositions published under [Wheatley’s] name are below the dignity of criticism” (140). Though a response like Jefferson’s was influential, Ignatius Sancho, an African shopkeeper in London, made more instructive comments when he praised Wheatley in 1778 while criticizing her patrons: [T]he list of splendid—titled—learned names, in confirmation of her being the real authoress.—alas! shews how very poor the acquisition of wealth and knowledge are—without generosity—feeling—and humanity.—These good great folks—all know—and perhaps admired—nay, praised Genius in bondage—and then, like the Priests and the Levites in sacred writ, passed by—not one good Samaritan amongst them. (112) The terms Sancho uses to contrast Wheatley to the names on the attestation (“splendid—titled—learned”) reflect the very social hierarchies I have been discussing. In contrast, the exclusively racist reaction of a reader like Jefferson may have drawn from an Enlightenment tradition dating at least to David Hume, but it was also largely proleptic, a harbinger of things to come. 3. Print’s Racialized Future The racialized dynamics of the nineteenth-century media landscape are more familiar to scholars and have obscured the specific interrelated hierarchies that affected early authors of color like Occom and Wheatley. As racial differences and hierarchies came increasingly to determine an author’s social position in the Anglo-American world, the racialization of print intensified. The post-Revolutionary period witnessed the ascendancy of the distinctly modern idea that a printed book could represent the essence of the entire race or nation to which its author was presumed to belong. This familiar and ideological conviction defined the essentializing phase of print’s racialization and proved extremely powerful and lasting, especially in the realm of literature. It was strategically embraced by many writers of color who published texts explicitly to forward the cause of racial equality. But the idea that print indexed the nature of a race was never inevitable; it was a product of history. Space permits only a sketch of the causes and effects of the rise to dominance of this indexical logic, which in large part retains its power today. It was initially made possible by changes to racial ideology and print technology that are well known but rarely associated: the hardening of race into a category that claimed to transcend class and the gradual democratization of print over time. By the mid nineteenth century, access to print had expanded radically, with the invention of the steam press, cheaper paper, stereotype printing, and more efficient methods of distribution. Meanwhile, in the nineteenth-century US, “stratification based more clearly on race as well as class” was fueled by “the institution of racially defined political statuses, violent racial conflicts, labor competition, the systematic exclusion of blacks from certain occupations, and the development of an ideology of racial inferiority” (Horton 643, 629). New racial ideologies that emerged both to combat abolitionism and to justify the dispossession of Native peoples presupposed polygenetic theories of the human creation and a vision of race as fixed and immutable. In England, the early nineteenth century gave rise to a concurrent hardening of racial categories and hierarchies (Makdisi). Racial ideology reached perhaps its most virulent and essentialist guise with the pseudoscientific discourses of the mid nineteenth century, by which time, as Gates has written, “ideas of irresistible racial differences were commonly held” (“Writing” 3). As these developments barreled along, each printed text seemed increasingly to provide a window into the vitality of such differences.31 The rise of nationalism also played a significant role in yoking print to essentialized racial categories. The upheavals of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions undermined longstanding class hierarchies and gave new power and meaning to national and racial distinctions—for revolutionaries and reactionaries alike.32 The triumph and shock of Haiti especially has been increasingly recognized as catalyzing the rise of racialized national ideologies on both sides of the Atlantic. Nationalism fueled racialization by grounding competing white nationalities in fictions of discrete organic inheritance, which paradoxically reinforced the larger fiction of whiteness that united them. Readers engaging with printed books by white authors understood such objects as embodiments of national identity. At the same time, readers understood books by deracinated and dispossessed authors of African and Native American descent exclusively according to race. The long-established association of print with white authorship continued, but more recent developments in technology and ideology converged to create the new idea that a printed object represented something deep, intimate, and unchanging about both its author and an entire racial group. These developments intensified the political implications of racially defined minority print traditions. Their force became cumulative, so that the contestations of nineteenth-century black authors like David Walker, Mary Prince, and Frederick Douglass and Native Americans like William Apess, Black Hawk, and George Copway were layered with the force and protest of their antecedents. “I hold in my hand a specimen of African genius,” wrote the activist William Hamilton in 1809, pointing to a printed pamphlet by his colleagues Peter Williams Jr. and Henry Sipkins. “If we continue to produce specimens like these, we shall soon put our enemies to the blush” (36–37). For the editors of the Cherokee Phoenix, endeavors like their own stood as implicit evidence that “Indians … are as capable of improvement in mind as any other people” (“To the Public”). Generations of scholars have shown how hundreds of nineteenth-century writers of color harnessed print for “racial representation,” in Gene Jarrett’s words, “as an intellectual and cultural genre of political action” (11).33 These writers did so in the cause of their humanity, local community, mutual relief, self-determination, racial identity, diasporic consciousness, political agency and belonging, tribal sovereignty, religious affiliation, citizenship, and emancipation. In so doing, they radically undermined the traditional association of print with whiteness. As printed objects by authors of color proliferated, the fictionality of print’s whiteness transformed from a simple presumption into a profound and false erasure. Sometimes from within their own communities, and almost always from the outside, authors of color during the essentializing phase were considered rigidly on account of their race, even if their writings undermined racial essentialism itself. William Snelling’s notorious review of The Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak (Black Hawk) (1833) embraced the racialization of print by separating the narrative’s “truly Indian” nature from earlier, less authentic, apparently “civilized” autobiographies like Apess’s A Son of The Forest (1829) (Snelling 69, 68). Consider also Margaret Fuller’s wholly racialized assessment of Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, which echoes Hamilton’s remarks. She calls it “an excellent piece of writing, and on that score to be prized as a specimen of the power of the Black Race… . We prize all evidence of this kind” (qtd. in Douglass 87). The difference between Fuller’s response to Douglass and Sancho’s earlier quoted response to Wheatley is that Sancho’s was individualized. Wheatley is a genius whose “bondage” her patrons unjustly ignored, and Douglass embodies the power of the “Black Race.” Jefferson’s opinion of Wheatley proceeded from premises more like Fuller’s (albeit with the opposite conclusion), which assumed that printed books are evidence of racial ability. The eventual triumph of Jefferson’s view, evident in Fuller’s, has led to a simplification of the medial pressures faced by eighteenth-century authors of color.34 Henri Grégoire’s abolitionist treatise De la littérature des nègres (1808; trans. 1810) represents a prototypical eighteenth-century view: it grouped black writers like Wheatley, Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano with unlikely white “genius[es]” from low stations in society, like Robert Bloomfield, Ann Yearsley, and the Dutch poet Beronicius, a seventeenth-century chimney sweep (164–65).35 In contrast, Margaret Odell, in the preface to the abolitionist edition of Wheatley’s Poems published in 1834, claims that Wheatley “present[s] an unvarnished record of African genius” (vii). From “Genius in bondage” to “African genius,” the racialization of print had solidified. In this essay, I have argued that the history of racism and the history of print were dynamically intertwined in ways we must investigate anew. Many questions, of course, remain. In sketching out these preliminary conjectures, and in focusing on Wheatley’s and Occom’s struggle with print’s elite stature, I hope to have demonstrated the importance of reassessing complicated historical processes and specific moments of contestation, resistance, and rebellion. Such moments look different when print’s racialization is understood not as simple and static but as a product of intertwined historical pressures. In a searching study largely about twentieth-century sound technology and print, Louis Chude-Sokei comments that “[t]oday’s focus on race and technology” can “benefit from the far longer tradition” of inquiry going back to the nineteenth century, because “technology has always been racialized or been articulated in relationship to race” (2). We need to go back even further to investigate how a technology like print repeatedly collided with shifting ideas of racial difference as both media and ideology divided and ravaged humankind. Print was never the only medium of racism, but it has had uniquely lasting effects.36 His scholarship on early black print culture has been published or is forthcoming in Early American Literature; Early American Studies; Early African American Print Culture, edited by Lara Cohen and Jordan Stein (2012); and two volumes of the Cambridge University Press series African American Literature in Transition, edited by Joycelyn Moody (forthcoming). Footnotes 1 Research for this essay was funded by a UK Travel Grant from the Huntington Library, a long-term National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and a long-term NEH fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. 2 For recent work on marginalized print traditions, see also Leon Jackson, “The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian: African American Cultures of Print—The State of the Discipline,” Book History, vol. 13, 2010, pp. 251–308; Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture (2002); Joycelyn Moody and Howard Rambsy II, editors, “African American Print Culture,” MELUS special issue, vol. 40, no. 3, 2015; P. Gabrielle Foreman, “The Colored Conventions Project and the Changing Same,” Commonplace, vol. 16, no. 1, 2015, web; Rodrigo Lazo, Letters from Filadelfia (2020); Derrick Spires, The Practice of Citizenship (2019); and Lara Cohen and Jordan Stein, editors, Early African American Print Culture (2012). For the limits of print, see Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence is Power (2000); Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness (2009); Kristina Bross and Hilary Wyss, editors, Early Native Literacies in New England (2008); Elizabeth Dillon, New World Drama (2014); Elizabeth Boone and Walter Mignolo, editors, Writing Without Words (1994); Gordon Brotherston, Book of the Fourth World (1992); M. Cohen and Jeffrey Glover, editors, Colonial Mediascapes (2014); Johnson; L. Brooks; and Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn,” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 2, 2018, pp. 207–36. 3 In modern scholarship, Elizabeth Eisenstein (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change [1979]) embodies the view that print produces enlightenment. William Hazlitt succinctly expressed such a view in 1828: “The French Revolution might be described as a remote but inevitable result of the invention of the art of printing… . There is no doubt, then, that the press (as it has existed in modern times) is the great organ of intellectual improvement and civilization” (84). 4 “Media are … the results of social and economic forces,” writes Lisa Gitelman, “any technological logic they possess is only apparently intrinsic” (10). See also Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic (1990), and David Henkin, City Reading (1998). 5 Occom’s sermon was published in October 1772, and Wheatley’s book was published in September 1773. 6 In a foundational and representative moment, Lucien Febvre argued that as print industrialized in the nineteenth century, “[a]n elite society gave way to a mass society” (Febvre and Martin 11); see also Richard Altick, The English Common Reader (1957). 7 See also Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (1982); Kate Flint, The Woman Reader (1993); and Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (2000). 8 Murji and Solomos trace the origins of the term to Fanon (5). In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon reflects on the expectation that a black man “demonstrate the existence of a ‘Negro’ culture.” Fanon writes that “the major responsibility for this racialization of thought … lies with the Europeans who have never stopped placing white culture in opposition to the other noncultures” (150). 9 See also Painter, especially pp. 48–76; Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference (2005); Wheeler; Smith; Phillip Biedler and Gary Taylor, editors, Writing Race Across the Atlantic World (2005); Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, editors, Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1994); David Davis, “Constructing Race: A Reflection,” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 1, 1997, pp. 7–18, and Inhuman Bondage (2006); Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (1997); Herman Bennett, Colonial Blackness (2009); and John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (1992). Other influential scholars have offered a longer view of racial thinking, as beginning immediately with the start of New World colonialism, including Wynter; Anibal Quijano and Michael Ennis, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla, vol. 1, no. 3, 2000, pp. 533–80; Kim Hall, Things of Darkness (1995); and Ibram Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning (2016). Geraldine Heng (“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,” Literature Compass, vol. 8, no. 5, 2011, pp. 315–31) has argued for the origins of “race” in the Middle Ages, understood as involving a “repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups” (324). 10 For a classic study along these lines, see Davis, pp. 189–226. 11 In addition to Mignolo, see especially Birgit Rasmussen, Queequeg’s Coffin (2012); Laura Donaldson, “Writing the Talking Stick: Alphabetic Literacy as Colonial Technology and Postcolonial Appropriation,” American Indian Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 1/2, 1998, pp. 46–62; Round; and many authors cited in note 1. For a recent complication of Mignolo, see Dillon, who in “Atlantic Aesthesis: Books and Sensus Communis in the New World,” Early American Literature, vol. 51, no. 2, 2016, pp. 367–95, argues that Native encounters with the “thingness of books” could sometimes “withdraw[] the book, as object, from its use as a text and foreground[] its sensate nature as a site of shared pleasure” (379). 12 Dillon also discusses these Baconian myths in “Atlantic Aesthesis,” pp. 372–75. 13 Occom and Wheatley have been productively compared on the grounds of religion and race: see J. Brooks, American Lazarus (2003), and Katy Chiles, Transformable Race (2013), pp. 31–64. Important recent books that include Wheatley and Occom in their discussion of black and Native American literature and religion include Cedrick May, Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760–1835 (2008) and Hilary Wyss, Writing Indians (2000). 14 I have drawn most biographical information from Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley (2011) and Occom, edited by J. Brooks. 15 Samson Occom to Eleazar Wheelock, 1 June 1773: “my poor kindred” (Occom 105); Wheatley to Arbour Tanner, 19 May 1772: “my Nation” (Wheatley 142). 16 “[I]n every human breast,” Wheatley wrote, “God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our Modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us.” Wheatley to Occom, 11 Feb. 1774 (153). 17 For more on Occom and print see Round, pp. 46–72. On Occom as a preacher, see especially Gustafson, pp. 90–101. The scholarship on Wheatley’s relationship to print is abundant. See especially Foster, Written by Herself (1993); Kirstin Wilcox, “The Body into Print: Marketing Phillis Wheatley,” American Literature, vol. 71, no. 1, 1999, pp. 1–29; Carretta; and Rezek, “The Print Atlantic.” On Wheatley’s private correspondence, see Tara Bynum, “Phillis Wheatley on Friendship,” Legacy, vol. 31, no. 1, 2014, pp. 42–51. 18 See J. Brooks, “Our Phillis, Ourselves,” American Literature, vol. 82, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–28. On scribal publication in colonial North America see David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (1997). 19 For a complementary reading of this passage, see Round, pp. 100–1. 20 Many scholars have written about Occom’s relationship to Indian identity, including Wyss; J. Brooks (Lazarus); L. Brooks; Round; and Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior, American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006). 21 In 1791, Occom wrote, “I am now fully Convinc’d that the Indians must have Teach[ers] of their own Coular [sic] or Nation” (133). 22 Early modern racial ideologies placed the “negro,” or sub-Saharan African, on the lowest rung of the “chain of being,” below Native Americans. See Jordan, pp. 216–65 and Painter, pp. 59–90. See also Karen Kupperman, “Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American Self-Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization,” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 1, 1997, pp. 193–228. 23 On the question of intersectionality in colonial North American slave societies, see especially Morgan. 24 The most influential model for understanding such paratexts, offered by John Sekora (“Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo, no. 32, 1987, pp. 482–515), is based on the nineteenth-century slave narrative and does not adequately describe the history of this phenomenon in the eighteenth century. 25 J. Brooks (“Our Phillis”) has demonstrated that these men did not call Wheatley before them for an oral examination, as Gates imagined in The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2003) and elsewhere. Instead, their signatures were secured through the circulation of a manuscript petition. 26 Robert Keen to the Countess of Huntingdon, 14 May 1773, A1/7/04; and Robert Keen, Accounts, 25 Oct. 1773, A2/1, American Papers of the Countess of Huntingdon, Westminster College, University of Cambridge. 27 Collier wrote this “advertisement” herself, though she signed it as a fictional editor, “M. B.” Donna Landry (The Muses of Resistance [1990]) puts Collier and Wheatley in the same company. Eve Bannet (Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810 [2011]) attends to the published and mediated voices of poor, working class, and racialized subjects. 28 Writing to David Wooster on 18 Oct. 1773, Wheatley reveals that it was only after the publication of her book that her “friends in England” convinced John Wheatley to grant her legal freedom (147). Wheatley writes of the countess’s desire to have her portrait as a frontispiece in a letter to Huntingdon dated 27 June 1773 (144). 29 Evidence for this is everywhere, in her letters about London, in her poem to university students (“Improve your privileges while they stay” [12]), in her epistle to Dartmouth (which rails against “wonton Tyranny” [40]), in her bold address to Washington (“I Have taken the freedom to address your Excellency” [88]), and in her embrace of the true egalitarian potential of evangelicalism. See also David Waldstreicher, “The Wheatleyan Moment,” Early American Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 2011, pp. 522–51. 30 Wheatley signed many of her books. Emily Gowen and I have so far located 17 extant signed copies: at the Boston Public Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard (two copies), the Peabody Essex Museum (two copies), the Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Beinecke Library at Yale (two copies), Wellesley College, Dartmouth College, Vassar College, Princeton University, Pennsylvania State University, the Museum of the American Revolution, the Morristown National Historic Park Museum and Library, and University of California–Los Angeles. I write about Wheatley’s practice in a forthcoming essay, “Transatlantic Traffic: Phillis Wheatley and her Books,” The Unfinished Book: Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (forthcoming), edited by Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch. Autographing books to prevent piracy had some precedent in England, as in the case of Laurence Sterne (see David Brewer, “The Tactility of Authorial Names,” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 54, no. 2, 2013, pp. 195–213). 31 These nineteenth-century transformations in print’s democratization occurred in both Britain and the US; see Altick; James Raven, The Business of Books (2007); Henkin; Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print (2007); Michael Suarez and Michael Turner, editors, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 5: 1695–1830 (2009); David McKitterick, editor, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 6: 1830–1914 (2014); Robert Gross and Mary Kelley, editors, A History of the Book in America: Volume 2 (2014); Scott Casper, Jeffrey Groves, Stephen Nissenbaum, Michael Winship, and David Hall, editors, A History of the Book in America: Volume 3 (2014); and Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People (1993). The nineteenth-century shifts in racial ideology I describe here are well known. For a recent exploration of how African Americans responded to the new racial ideologies, see Britt Rusert, Fugitive Science (2017). See also Senchyne, who, in an essay whose concerns overlap with mine (see “Bottles of Ink”), addresses print’s relationship to nineteenth-century racial discourse. 32 For classic accounts of this well-known shift, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra (2000); and Raymond Williams, Culture & Society (1958). On Haiti see especially Johnson; and Marlene Daut, Tropics of Haiti (2015) 33 My citations in this essay reference only a sampling of such foundational work. 34 This reading complicates my earlier sense of Sancho’s reception of Wheatley as exclusively racialized in “The Print Atlantic.” Sancho’s response is not reflective of a static ideology of the book but instead of shifting notions about the relationship of a printed book to racial meaning. 35 The grouping occurs in a chapter called, in English, “Literature of Negroes” (pp. 155–70). 36 The whip, the chain, the ship, the rifle, the sword, the smallpox-infected blanket, and other instruments of colonial domination were among the media of racism, along with more conventionally defined communications media such as manuscript correspondence and scribal publication (especially among state actors); visual media such as painting and sculpture; and the human body, including voice. “[H]e dealt sparingly with his words, and bountifully with his whip,” Frederick Douglass writes of the overseer Mr. Gore, “never using the former where the latter would answer as well” (11). 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Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Racialization of Print
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajaa019
DA - 2020-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-racialization-of-print-WrkmU1ttD2
SP - 417
EP - 445
VL - 32
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -