Under Pressure: Reading Material Textuality in the Recovery of Early African American Print Work

Abstract

Reconsidering received assumptions about what constitutes African American print culture may revise our stories of origins and developments, of contributors and of purposes.Frances Smith Foster I n 2006, Brown University's Committee on Slavery and Justice issued a study of the university's "historical entanglement with slavery and the slave trade" and a reflection "on the meaning of this history in the present, on the complex historical, political, legal, and moral questions posed by any present day confrontation with past injustice" (4). 1 The report outlined the university's physical and financial connections to slavery and its development within the context of the Rhode Island slave trade. It highlighted the use of enslaved labor to construct an early and iconic building on campus and reported the number of early benefactors whose wealth derived from the trade. A result of the study has been sustained conversation about the institutional legacies of slavery and questions about how to trace, acknowledge, and make reparations for the known and unknown enslaved people whose thoughts, bodies, and labor are constitutive of today's educational institutions. 2 Early-American print may be overdue for similar considerations. Print, print culture, and "the archive" are not finite institutions in the same way that a university is. Print is, however, no less entangled with slavery and the slave trade. Enslaved people were made to work on presses doing a range of tasks that facilitated the production of print. Though unfree, there they set, cleaned, and organized type, pulled impressions on hand presses, and cut engravings. Enslaved African Jonathan SenchyneAmericans made print just as they made buildings, pottery, and sugar. Some of their names have been obscured on purpose or by custom. Some, but not all, of an American university owes its existence to enslaved people, and the same is true of the printed serials, books, and broadsides in its archives. Decades of African Americanist scholarship and Black activism have opened a moment for open acknowledgement to eclipse silence. In this essay, I propose a methodological shift toward reading practices capable of making the revenants of Black art and labor visible in the archives of print. For though this labor was not free it took the skill, time, and energy of specific people to create, and given the contingencies of history and craft, we would not, today's archives of print would not be possible without them.This approach to reading will privilege the legibility of the most material aspects of material texts. Scholarly readers are trained to interpret the meaning of words and images, temporarily suspending this urge is necessary to see what other traces material texts bear. In studies of the built environment, for example, Joseph McGill, founder of The Slave Dwelling Project, has documented how fingerprints of enslaved brickmakers appear within the bricks of plantation and other buildings constructed by enslaved people: "One of the most indisputable telltale signs of w...