`All Things are Becoming New': Antebellum African American Literary Societies and Traditions of Modernity

This panel eschews consideration of individual genius to examine antebellum African American literary institutions as sites of collective production and dissemination of intellectual knowledge. It focuses on the ways in which... [ view full abstract ]

This panel eschews consideration of individual genius to examine antebellum African American literary institutions as sites of collective production and dissemination of intellectual knowledge. It focuses on the ways in which black intellectuals of the period availed themselves of the tools of literacy— reading, writing, and print culture—to define and foster community understood as both shared values and shared political activism.  In the first paper, Peterson lays out the intellectual background of New York's and Philadelphia’s African American literary societies and their related institutions.  Working from reading lists discovered in archives of African Free schools, she assesses book reading as a collective enterprise.  Specifically, she examines society members’ particular investment in 18^th-century British literary traditions—most notably Scottish Enlightenment figures and English poets—as a claim to participation in modernity.  Ernest’s paper analyzes the later Anglo-African Magazine as a continuation of the work of earlier literary institutions.   Considering the magazine in its totality—as a single sustained piece of writing—Ernest illuminates the importance of debate within the magazine, and its fundamental understanding of conflict as productive.  From synoptic perspective, Fanuzzi’s paper concludes the panel by assessing the ways in which antebellum African American literary societies and newspapers worked to bypass formalized and professional curricula of the period's institutions of higher education to create an alternative site of education, or what he terms the para-university.  

Literary societies proliferated among antebellum black communities in the urban North.  This paper tracks the reading practices of literary society members in Philadelphia and New York, 1825-1860.  It begins by making two general points. 1) Literary societies were not discrete entities, but part of a broad interdependent network of institutions—schools, public lectures, libraries and readings rooms, newspapers, and even the production of manuscript material—that collaborated across city lines.  2) The term “literary” referred not only to imaginative prose or poetic writing but more generally to all writing, and hence included all branches of knowledge.