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Published 2022 | public
Journal Article

African American Literature in Transition, 1800-1830: Volume 2 ed. by Jasmine Nichole Cobb [book review]

Murphy, Dana

Abstract

At its outset, African American Literature in Transition, 1800–1830, vol. 2 (AALT), stresses that its contents will be far from any account of literary expression as a form of leisure. The volume's cover illustration is taken from a section of The Hunted Slaves (1862), an oil painting by white British painter Richard Ansdell, now in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The painting sets a multivalent tone of despair, urgency, and resistance as a Black man and woman escaping from slavery fend off a pack of dogs, the man wielding a hatchet prepared to strike another dog. In preparing to strike, the man swings back the hatchet perilously close to the woman's head, while his crouched body protectively shields her from the attacking dogs. While visual culture is one of the volume's areas of expertise, this image also discloses something of the volume's general grappling with gender within the history of this period. Ansdell's original rendering of the couple in The Hunted Slaves does center Black masculine strength, although the cropped image selected for AALT's cover compounds this further by cutting the woman's body in half, leaving her only partially depicted. Meanwhile, the image of the couple in resistive flight, poised on the brink of another strike of the hatchet, is an apt metaphor for AALT's main argument of its treatment of Black history by acknowledging, correctly, that "the material conditions of 1800 to 1830 were rather repressive in terms of the production of African American literature" (Jasmine Nichole Cobb, "Introduction: African American Writing Out of Bounds, 1800–1830," 4). I point out these facts at the outset to argue that while the volume makes several extraordinary analyses, it does so within the bounds of a difficult and regulative history wherein extant Black literary expression and other records of lived experiences of the period are the select few "that elided the suppression of African American thought" (Cobb 2). These bounds have also shaped the limits of the archive that is legible to literary historicist scholars engaging and attempting to understand its material today. Expanding the definition of African American literature beyond "the covers of bound books" (Cobb 2), AALT spotlights the historical and cultural transitions that informed the publication and dissemination of Black texts and expressive works, the lived experiences of Black writers and cultural producers, and the activities of Black communities engaging in print and visual culture between 1800 and 1830, with an awareness of the various ways that flashpoints or patterns in this period operate in connection with previous and future "years to come" and with "earlier and later works" (Cobb 9). As a volume, AALT contributors honor their subjects' cumulative labors for abolition by reading them historically and literarily as well as experimentally and imaginatively "as an archive in the making" (Cobb 10). As volume editor Jasmine Nichole Cobb writes, special care is taken by the authors of AALT to acknowledge but not overdetermine "external forces" and to honor "the changes and developments ignited by Black cultural producers who transformed US literature, writ large" (Cobb 7). The volume draws particular attention to literary resonances in Black "organizational life," "mobility," print culture, and "visual culture" (Cobb 8), but it is AALT's contributors' "analysis of those materials" (Cobb 10) that highlights the fascinating histories underlying each of the distinctive modes of literature Black people practiced from 1800 to 1830. Cognizant of its contemporary readers, AALT sets many valuable disciplinary precedents for the ways scholars should be practicing Black literary criticism after Barack Obama's presidency ended in 2017 (Joycelyn K. Moody, "Preface: African American Literature in Transition," xi) and raises valuable questions about the directions and motives of the field after 2020. AALT also stays true to its titular claims of detailing how histories "in Transition" have transformed Black literary practice, but the moments that contributors demonstrated the...

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 25, 2023