Nineteenth-Century African American Literatureand the ‘New Regionalism’

Eric Gardner*Saginaw Valley State University

Abstract

While the study of nineteenth-century African American literature has gained a much strongerposition in the academy and while authors like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are essen-tially canonized, the field often remains reduced to the study of stories of the South (especiallyslave narratives) published in a handful of northeastern urban centers. However, paired with recentrecovery efforts, new attention to questions of location and especially to various understudiedregions in the nineteenth-century United States like the Black West may cause a radical rethink-ing of nineteenth-century Black textual presences. This essay thus offers a preliminary discussionof the following questions surrounding the ‘new regionalism’ within the study of nineteenth-cen-tury African American literature: How do ‘new regionalist’ scholars define and deploy ideas of‘region,’ place, and location – especially given the period’s mobility and diversity? How do theyengage with the expectations and stereotypes inherent in existing regional labels including thosetied to race and racial absence? How do the (sometimes) micro-historic approaches of ‘newregionalism’ fit in dialogue with seemingly broader conceptions of hemispheric studies and ⁄ or a‘Black Atlantic’? What do ‘new regionalist’ approaches offer the field of African American litera-ture and the broader community?

As a field, the study of nineteenth-century African American literature is in the fascinat-ing and exciting position of being both richly mature and exceedingly nascent. Today’scritics do truly ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ from pioneering bibliophiles andlibrarians like Robert Adger, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray, Arthur Schomburg, andDorothy Porter Wesley to generations of critics from Darwin Turner and Robert Steptoto Houston Baker and Nellie McKay to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Frances Smith Fos-ter. The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have seen awondrous flowering of collections and key reference sources, especially efforts led byGates like the forty-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black WomenWriters and, more recently, the massive African American National Biography and the BlackPeriodical Literature Project, but certainly also including William Andrews’s massive workwith the North American Slave Narratives portion of the online Documenting the AmericanSouth project. Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents inthe Life of a Slave Girl have become standard fare for survey courses in American litera-ture; Douglass is regularly recognized as one of the nineteenth-century’s most importantwriters; nineteenth-century African American literature has achieved strong footholds inmost period anthologies and has developed into a broadly recognized academic specialty.

That said, the field continues to change dramatically. Less than three decades ago, Har-riet Wilson’s 1859 Our Nig and serialized novels by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wereabsent from scholarly conversations, and the new century has already seen re-discoveriesof an 1865 serialized novel by Julia C. Collins, a pseudonymous and possibly Black-authored manuscript novel by ‘Hannah Crafts,’ newspaper columns by Jennie Carter....

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The list could go on. At the same time, scholars have found that Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins (once thought to be one of the earliest African American novelists) was actuallywhite; many scholars similarly conflated the white Mary Tucker Lambert with the BlackMollie E. Lambert and so mistakenly ascribed a pair of early volumes of poetry to anAfrican American author. Biographical finds suggest that Wilson’s ‘novel’ may have beenmuch more autobiographical than initially asserted, and literary historians have madecompelling (re)discoveries about the centrality of the Black press to early Black literature.

Critics are also beginning to question the fact that the academy has marked the slavenarrative as the representative genre of early Black literature and Douglass and Jacobs’stexts as the uber-representatives of that genre. While most agree that slave narratives arecrucial to African American literature and culture (indeed, to American literature and cul-ture) and while the sheer power of Douglass and Jacobs’s texts is obvious, to say that they– perhaps framed by a few bits from eighteenth-century authors like Phillis Wheatley andOlaudah Equiano and later writers like Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar – arepre-twentieth-century Black literature is a grievous oversimplification. Too many students(and too many scholars) hold to the sense that early Black literature is synonymous with asmall handful of texts directly or indirectly tied to slave narratives, distributed in bookform, and generally consisting of stories of the South that were published in northeasternurban centers. The diversification of Douglass and Jacobs studies – Robert Levine andSamuel Otter’s attempts to see Douglass in dialogue with both Herman Melville and Blackwriters, for example, in their edited collection Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville:Essays in Relation (2008), as well as Jean Fagan Yellin’s landmark work collecting andediting the Harriet Jacobs Papers (2008) – certainly reminds readers that these two figureswere part of much larger Black textual cultures that deserve study.

Three areas of consideration seem especially promising in thickening our over-simpli-fied genealogies of African American literature: the nexus of African American literatureand print culture studies, nascent and active attention to the Black press, and studies thatfocus on region and place, often with an emphasis on previously understudied or de-emphasized locations of Black literature. Leon Jackson’s overview of intersectionsbetween the fields of book history and early Black literature in the 2010 volume of BookHistory and the work of the scholars involved in the March 2010 Early African AmericanPrint Culture conference provide a primer on the first of these areas, and collections likeTodd Vogel’s The Black Press (2001) and germinal essays like Frances Smith Foster’s ‘ANarrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Development of AfricanAmerican Print Culture’ (2005) offer introductions to the second. While these efforts arefar from complete and while there is certainly overlap between all three sets of concerns,in part because the third area – regional studies – has received the least formal attentionand in part because some moves in hemispheric studies, trans-Atlantic studies, and studiesof the ‘Black Atlantic’ have made ‘locating’ nineteenth-century Black subjects (andauthors) more complex, this essay emphasizes questions of location and place, with afocus on a ‘new regionalism’ in studies of nineteenth-century African American literatureand culture.

The term ‘new regionalism’ has long, multiple, and conflicted histories, especially – invery different ways – in disciplines ranging from geo-politics to urban planning and fromhistory to literary study. If time and space permitted, full discussion from across disciplin-ary and ideological spectra might begin with Fredrick Soderbaum and Timothy Shaw’sTheories of New Regionalism (2003) and Henz Preusse’s The New American Regionalism(2004), and perhaps place some emphasis on historical approaches like Charles ReaganWilson’s edited volume The New Regionalism (1998) and literary critical approaches from

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Carey McWilliams’s challenge to regionalist terminology in his 1930 chapbook NewRegionalism in American Literature to, more recently, Philip Joseph’s American LiteraryRegionalism in a Global Age (2007) and Judith Fetterly and Marjorie Pryse’s Writing Out ofPlace (2003). Still, the scholarship considered here traces most closely to the work of his-torians of Black experiences that blends social history, micro-history, and regional historyand considers race as a central concern – ranging from works by James Horton, LoisHorton, Gary Nash, Julie Winch, and Leslie Harris on northeastern urban centers to Wil-liam Loren Katz’s The Black West (1971, 2005), Stephen Vincent’s Southern Seed, NorthernSoil: African American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765–1900 (2002), Mark J. Sam-mons and Valerie Cunningham’s Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African American His-tory (2004), Bill Silag’s massive edited collection Outside In: African American History inIowa, 1838–2000 (2000), and H. H. Price and Gerald E. Talbot’s edited collectionMaine’s Visible Black History (2006).

‘New regionalist’ modes of bringing race (and other constructs used to marginalizeindividuals and groups) to the fore in considering the nexus of region and culture (espe-cially literary cultures) are in many ways best embodied in projects like the UniversityPress of New England’s ‘Revisiting New England’ series – which is actually subtitled‘The New Regionalism.’ In focusing on a single region, per the series description, theseries considers ‘‘the interaction between... ‘‘official’’ New England culture and the peo-ple who lived in the region’ as well as ‘local, subregional, or even biographical subjects asmicrocosms that explicitly open up and consider larger issues.’ Put more simply, it offersa sense of the region that, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says of his rediscovery Harriet Wil-son’s Our Nig, ‘turned my understanding of New England on its head’ (ix). In this vein,the new regionalism in African American literary studies – regardless of specific praxis orfocus – thus demands a revision of our thinking about location and particularly about theways in which ‘region’ as a construct has been de-emphasized, ignored, and ⁄or buriedunder (or Other-ed through) ‘safe’ phenomena like the language of ‘quaintness.’ Mydeployment of the term ‘new regionalism’ can thus be understood as a tool for rethinkingpresences of African Americans and especially African American textual communities inways that open up our senses of blackness, culture, textual production and circulation,and especially ideas of the literary through careful consideration of place and location.

This essay offers some very preliminary description, synthesis, and analysis of theseevolving and challenging questions: How do critics and historians of nineteenth-centuryAfrican American literature and print culture broadly define and deploy ideas of ‘region,’place, and location – especially given the period’s mobility and diversity? How do theyengage with the expectations and stereotypes inherent in existing regional labels includingthose tied to race and racial absence? In all of this, how do these sometimes micro-his-toric approaches of region fit in dialogue with hemispheric studies and conceptions of a‘Black Atlantic’? What do ‘new regionalist’ approaches offer the field of nineteenth-cen-tury African American literary studies and the broader community? While I do not meanto suggest an organized movement or a fully unified ‘school’ of criticism in my explora-tion, the efforts I discuss here all do seem to be variably conscious of the following facts:African American stories happened throughout the nation; those stories often wereinflected by and had much to say about both their own ‘local’ locations and the broadernation; these facts challenge how we think about questions of genre, place, authorship,textual circulation, and the developing canon of early African American (and American)literature.

The massive range of definitions of ‘region’ operating within new regionalist parame-ters may initially seem deeply vexing. B. Eugene McCarthy and Thomas L. Doughton’s

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collection From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives (2007) draws togetherthe narratives of eight individuals who settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, at some pointafter gaining their freedom and thus marks a single small city as a locus. WilliamAndrews’s edition of North Carolina Slave Narratives (2003) and Susanna Ashton’s editionof South Carolina narratives I Belong to South Carolina (2010) take, per their titles, state-level boundaries. Andrews’s efforts with the North American Slave Narratives section of theDocumenting the American South project – like many nascent discussions of the Black West,including the key University of Nebraska Press series of new editions of early texts – takea multi-state approach. While we have not yet seen a collection of Black texts using anorganizing focus like Thomas C. Buchanan’s innovative, river-centered, multi-state his-tory Black Life on the Mississippi (2004), such cannot be far away. There is a similarly widerange of approaches to ‘placing’ authors and texts in given locations. Gerald Early’santhology Ain’t But a Place: An Anthology of African American Writings about St. Louis(1998) – which, it should be noted, emphasizes the twentieth century much more thanthe nineteenth – focuses on St. Louis as a subject; Norman Shapiro’s work with Creolepoets of color in Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana(2004) centers on a site of publication (New Orleans) but reminds readers that most ofthe authors using that site resided in or near the Crescent City. These approaches breakwith From Bondage to Belonging, whose texts say little about Worcester itself and had vari-ous publication sites. However, even placing texts through their authors’ homes can becomplex: Lunsford Lane’s 1842 slave narrative appears in both Andrews’s collection ofNorth Carolina texts (given its setting) and the Worcester collection (given Lane’s laterhome).

This wide and flexible range of approaches, however, actually allows for a more accu-rate and complete sense of authors, texts, and locations. It would be relatively easy tomark, for example, Thomas Detter (author of one of the first books published by an Afri-can American in the West, the 1873 collection Nellie Brown) as a writer of the BlackWest even though he was born in Washington, D.C., and wrote about both the Westand the South. Still, labeling him solely a ‘Black Nevadan’ – as he likely wrote the titlenovella in his collection while living in Nevada – ignores his extensive wanderingthroughout (and writing about) California, Washington, Idaho, and beyond. WilliamWells Brown’s writings about St. Louis are crucial to any sense of Black presences in thatcity, but – as I argue in Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African AmericanLiterature (2009) – the very existence of those writings depended on Brown being farfrom St. Louis and settled in the urban Northeast. Brown’s relocation as well as differ-ences in social, economic, and legal status made his St. Louis very different from that of,say, Cyprian Clamorgan, a free Black barber who wrote a gossipy account of The ColoredAristocracy of St. Louis in 1858. Reducing St. Louis to one author or another or to onesubject or another devalues and oversimplifies the complex dialectics in the region. Otherhard and fast categorizations can cause similar problems. If we are forced, for example, tochoose a single ‘place’ for Lane’s narrative, we lose the chance to fully explore the kindsof mobility that allowed a formerly enslaved North Carolinian to move to Worcester andthe chance to consider his text’s connections to both sites.

While these examples suggest that geographical labels are often temporary, mobilitydoes not by any means negate the importance of regional factors in the works of figureslike Detter, Brown, Clamorgan, or Lane. Rather, these examples recognize that newregionalist approaches must figure in questions of temporality, that definitions of regionsmust have some permeability, that an individual (especially in highly mobile times and ⁄orin circumstances where mobility mattered greatly [as with, for example, a fugitive slave])

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might belong to more than one region, and that the question of scale is key to the outputresulting from applying different definitions of region. Finally, these examples suggest thatmuch might be gained through considering various kinds of borderlands (in GloriaAnzaldua’s sense of the term). Harvey Amani Whitfield’s Blacks on the Border: The BlackRefugees in British North America, 1815–1860 (2006), as well as the John J. Bukowczyk,Nora Faires, David R. Smith, and Randy William Widdis’s Permeable Border: The GreatLakes Basin as Transnational Region (2006) and Faires’s other work like ‘Going Across theRiver: Black Canadians and Detroit before the Great Migration’ (2006) all offer a histori-cal basis for considering the borders between the northern United States and Canada, forexample – in ways that both Afua Cooper’s study of Henry Bibb in ‘The Fluid Frontier:Blacks and the Detroit River Region, 1789–1854: A Focus on Henry Bibb’ (2000) andespecially Jane Rhodes Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the NineteenthCentury (1998) had already begun to explore in terms of print presences. Similarly fluidborder regions that promise riches include the Panama of James Williams’s California-published slave narrative The Life and Adventures of James Williams (1873; republished in2002 as Fugitive Slave in the Gold Rush), texts on Black expatriates in British Columbiaand even Japan published in the Pacific Appeal and the San Francisco Elevator, and U.S.Blacks’ various textual relationships with Haiti (as richly suggested in Jacqueline Baconand Maurice Jackson’s collection African Americans and the Haitian Revolution [2010]). Bor-der regions that encompass significant social differences hold similar promise – like, forexample, the greater St. Louis area, which was free on the Illinois side, slave on the Mis-souri side, and deeply shaped by river culture. And while the example of St. Louis mightsuggest a reification of the long-standing senses of the ‘upper South’ and the ‘lower’ or‘deep South’ as unified regions, consideration of Black Creole textual cultures in NewOrleans vis-a-vis their ties to France and French possessions (and culture) suggests, as seenin Shapiro’s collection of Creole poetry, that even some far South locations might havekey borders worth study.

While perhaps both loose and baggy, then, the varying definitions of region notedabove allow us to account for a set of facts about American and specifically Black lives inthe nineteenth century. The nation’s external borders shifted massively during the cen-tury, and there was even more play with the nation’s internal borders as state and countyboundaries were figured and refigured. This play extended well beyond legal boundariesand into metaphysical regions, as the ‘West’ in the 1830s included Indiana, Illinois, andMissouri, areas which were clearly part of the settled and ‘civilized’ Midwest by the1870s even though Missouri also maintained a complex and politically charged positionin the South throughout the period. Regional affiliation remained complex and multi-layered in many areas – as can be seen in, for example, the number of towns in the Westnamed after towns in the East by transplanted residents. Both antebellum free Blacks andfugitives as well as postbellum African Americans participating in individual or groupmigrations often found new opportunities and new home-places through movement.

For all this variation in terms of geography, scale, and theory, most critics and histori-ans who take regional approaches to nineteenth-century Black literature and cultural pro-duction generally do seem to share a recognition that a geographical location functions asa (temporary) meeting place between author and textual community. They assert thatplace mattered not only in terms of material conditions – from the availability of publica-tion and distribution networks to factors as diverse as the local application of ‘Black laws’and the presence of a supportive or unsupportive community of potential readers – butalso in terms of philosophical and aesthetic questions. Such scholars thus often begin totrace both personal networks as well as (and within) regional affiliations. Inherent in any

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new regionalist approach, then, is the need to describe and reflect upon ‘place’ and theborders between ‘places’ – geographical, but also less physical borders like those of time,personal networks, and textual distribution and circulation networks. This is why manyregion-centered approaches to Black literature (from Julie Winch’s landmark introductionto the 1999 reissue of Clamorgan’s book to From Bondage to Belonging) spend significanttime engaging in and with local history.

These approaches often come with a recognition that regional labels are not value- orcontent-free. Among the most common assumptions tied to regional labels are thoserelated to racial presences and to the assumption that nineteenth-century Black writerssimply did not exist in places like, say, Indiana or California. Because this false account ofracial absence is part and parcel of a larger national elision of the histories of peoples ofcolor (especially by accounts purposefully focused on equating whiteness and givenregions) some of the first efforts in new regionalist approaches to, for example, the Uni-ted States West have focused on recovering and analyzing multi-cultural sets of texts.Thus, Noreen Glover Lape’s West of the Border: The Multicultural Literature of the WesternAmerican Frontiers (2000) considers how authors of various races and ethnicities lived inand wrote from and about ‘the culturally fluid contexts of the contract zones as the fron-tier’ (3). Similarly, Dan Moos’s Outside America: Race, Ethnicity, and the Role of the Ameri-can West in National Belonging (2005) considers Thomas Detter and the Black communitysurrounding him – as well as the work of and the community around twentieth-centuryfigure Oscar Micheaux – in some depth, even though it is more concerned with the lar-ger, multi-ethnic ways in which a master narrative of the ‘American West’ was ‘appropri-ated by those Americans who resided structurally outside of that story’ (4). Both textsoffer exceedingly important correctives to the existing senses of the literature of the wes-tern United States; however, neither focuses solely on African American literature. Onthe other hand, valuable initial studies of Black literature in the West – especially MichaelK. Johnson’s fascinating Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature(2002) and Blake Allmendinger’s Imagining the African American West (2005) – do focus onBlack literature but deal only briefly with pre-twentieth-century texts. Again, both offerimportant correctives to absences in the study of African American literature, the litera-ture of the West, and American literature generally; however, these texts, like work byLape and Moos, come close to suggesting that Black Westerners did not have a significanttextual culture(s) until the twentieth century.

Tracking the roots of these assumptions is beyond the scope of this essay, but studentsof the Black West (and new regionalism) in general might do well to consider two state-ments seemingly at odds: Langston Hughes’s directive to Black historians ‘Don’t leaveout the cowboys!’ (Katz xi) and Houston Baker’s assertion, in his landmark Long BlackSong (1972), that ‘tales of pioneers enduring the hardships of the West for the promise ofimmense wealth are not the tales of Black America’ (2). Hughes’s forceful commentalmost seems a direct challenge to Baker’s later statement, and, indeed, it can be creditedwith planting the seeds for the critical recovery of texts like James Beckwourth’s 1856narrative as well as the 1995 reissue of the Life and Adventures of Nat Love (originally pub-lished in 1907, complete with a picture of Love as a powerful Black cowboy on thecover). Still, both Hughes and Baker equate the West with a set of severely limited stockcharacters and stories, all tied to a larger master narrative of the American West that oftencenters on deeply gendered conceptions of the frontier, the destruction of racial heteroge-neity, and nationalist rhetoric. Frances Smith Foster’s recovery of Thomas Detter’s NellieBrown – whose title novella focuses on divorce in the South – certainly challenges suchpigeon-holing of the Black West, as does my work with Jennie Carter, a Black

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Californian who published over seventy columns in the San Francisco Elevator duringReconstruction and wrote on topics ranging from the Underground Railroad to women’srights, all the while retaining a ‘sense of the West as embodying multiple frontiers forAfrican Americans’ (xxix).

Though perhaps not as stark as the limits placed on the study of the Black West, otherregional interests have often been similarly pushed aside in the rush to mark nineteenth-century Black literature as southern stories published in northeastern urban centers. Thisis why the editors and authors of Harriet Wilson’s New England (2007), for example,repeatedly challenge the common short-handing of all of New England as Boston alone:Milford, New Hampshire, they argue, was materially different from Nashua, New Hamp-shire, and from any number of locations within and around Boston, and only tracing allgives us a sense of the New England owned through the title apostrophe. In a differentvein, most criticism limits St. Louis’s nineteenth-century literary presence to representa-tions as a locus of the evils of the slave system and so a center of violence because, amongother factors, it was a key point for the Mississippi River slave trade and was deeply tiedto the martyrdom of Elijah Lovejoy. St. Louis was actually much more complex – as seenin my discussion above and my consideration in Unexpected Places of the ways in which,for example, William Wells Brown rewrites the city’s sense of itself as a ‘gateway’ to theAmerican West. Even some ‘new’ versions of the Black West threaten oversimplification,as most de-emphasize the Pacific Northwest, an area historian Quintard Taylor has stud-ied in depth but that has not received much attention from scholars of Black literature(though Nina Baym’s forthcoming work on Seattle Black writer Emma J. Ray’s TwiceSold, Twice Ransomed will advance the process). Regardless of the ways in which theymark a region, then, new regionalist critics of nineteenth-century African American liter-ature have to both account for and challenge the swirl of assumptions, expectations, andstereotypes surrounding regional labels and identities; often, the first step in doing so hasbeen (and will be) simply (re)establishing the facts of Black textual presences in a givenlocation.

This kind of localized attention to Black textual presences – often in unexpected places– and new regionalist approaches to early Black literature in general might initially seemto directly challenge the massive vogue in hemispheric studies as well as various concep-tions of a ‘Black Atlantic’ (especially those offered in the wake of Paul Gilroy’s The BlackAtlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [1993]) given the differences between the‘micro’ and sweeping international ‘macro’ that these labels suggest. Still, I would suggestthat the best work being done in hemispheric studies – that of, say, Caroline Levander –is deeply grounded in micro-history and especially in the consideration of specific regionsand regional functions. Rather than treating a whole hemisphere as a ‘region,’ it recog-nizes that regions may cross national boundaries, that authors may have had connectionsto multiple regions, and that regions themselves were variously connected not only bydefinitions of entities like nations but by all kinds of circulation.

Certainly some senses of a ‘Black Atlantic’ – especially those that privilege texts andindividuals whose presences were trans-Atlantic – can be at odds with the new regional-ism’s hope for locational specificity and its recognition of an immense diversity of texts,authors, and subjects tied to regions. Further, as Sandra Gunning has wisely recognized,‘the most recent privileging of diaspora identification almost to the point of romanticizingthe revolutionary and subversive power of this identification threatens to elide the veryreal impact of color, status, region, and gendered experience as sites of intra-racial differ-ence within the context of the black diaspora’ (33). Such privileging also suggests that,rather than reducing early Black literature to southern stories with urban northeastern

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publishers, some approaches to the ‘Black Atlantic’ would limit the nineteenth-centuryAfrican American texts we consider to a small handful of works with clear trans-Atlanticthematic emphases and contexts. Still, the most thoughtful work in this sub-field – likeIfeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo’s rich Black Cosmopolitanism (2005) – begins to show howregional identities and presences as well as ‘national affinity’ coexist and shape more inter-national phenomena (13). In short, the ‘Black Atlantic’ can be a useful construct forunderstanding the international power of the diaspora, but the ‘Black Atlantic’ is not asingle region. Rather, it (like a hemisphere or even a nation) is a collection of regions indialogue.

New regionalism shares with the best of hemispheric and trans-regional ⁄ trans-nationalcriticism an imperative to critique what Levander and others have short-handed as‘nation-based literary study’ (437). New regionalist critics thus recognize that Janice Rad-way’s 1998 American Studies Association Presidential Address – which Levander marks asa foundational text for hemispheric studies – called on critics and historians to thinkabout units both bigger and smaller than the nation. Similarly, they recognize thatregions, like nations, are simultaneously pre-existing constructs that have already been‘invented’ and entities in the process of being invented (and re-invented); they thus alsorecognize that authors and texts function within and through such inventions. Thus,Shapiro begins to hint at the ways Louisiana’s Creole poets of color functioned at a nexusof both French literature and culture and Francophone communities of color in NewOrleans. Similarly, my discussion of the Black West in Unexpected Places wonders aloudabout a ‘Black Pacific’ through considering the letters in the San Francisco Black pressfrom Peter Cole, a Black expatriate in Japan and briefly noting similar letters from Afri-can Americans in British Columbia. Such efforts certainly speak to hemispheric, trans-national, and diasporic identities, but do so in ways firmly grounded in the locationalspecificity of regionalist study. In this vein, the stunning internationalism of someone likeFrederick Douglass might be best understood as a growing collection of specifically regio-nal knowledges garnered from his time in slavery, his escape, his initial free life, his aboli-tionist lecturing across much of the northern United States, and, later, his experiences inGreat Britain; Martin Delany’s internationalism might be usefully contemplated not onlyas stemming from his wide travels but also as an outgrowth of the striking Black national-ism within the Pittsburgh Black community from which he rose to initial public recogni-tion, as suggested in Robert Levine’s Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (2003).

The rethinking of Black presences within literary and cultural study and the regionalreconsideration of hemispheric, trans-national, ‘Black Atlantic,’ and diasporic Black litera-tures of the nineteenth century that are outlined above begin to suggest the ways inwhich a ‘new regionalism’ may contribute to African American literary study and to thebroader world, but a short historiography of the reception of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nigmay best foreground the ways in which new regionalist approaches can reshape our senseof both a text and a place. Rediscovered by Gates and republished in 1983, the book wasinitially lauded as a novel – specifically as the first novel by an African American woman.The earliest critical attention, like Gates’s careful introduction, focused on this placementand so set the book in dialogue with the most-expected Black genre of the period (theslave narrative) and the major approach associated with women’s novels of the period(sentimentalism). Not surprisingly, critics found that Wilson’s variations from both werestriking.

Subsequent biographical research – first Barbara White’s work, and, more recently, aseries of stunning discoveries by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Reginald Pitts, and KatherineFlynn – has foregrounded the deep similarities between Wilson’s life story and her book;

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among other developments, this has led to a friendly argument between Gates andAndrews, with Gates maintaining that Our Nig is an autobiographical novel, and Andrewsasserting that it is a novelized autobiography. Some of the deep and real importanceattached to what most laypeople might consider a purely semantic debate is tied to anational sense of early Black literature – to the establishment of ‘firsts’ within givenboundaries and to exploration of how Wilson talked back to the texts and generic expec-tations surrounding her. In part, this debate – like the critical discussion of genre thatpreceded it – thus asks what a Black author and specifically a Black woman author coulddo. (Indeed, some of the early discussion of Our Nig focused on Boston – the site of thebook’s printing – and specifically on what the Boston abolitionist establishment mightand might not permit Black books to do. Gates and Andrews’s debate reinvigorates andreframes these questions, as does, in different ways, Lois Brown’s fine biography PaulineElizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution [2008], itself a significant ‘new regional-ist’ reconsideration of Black New England.)

Following Gates’s lead, scholars of Our Nig have certainly considered location as a fac-tor in their work, but Our Nig is perhaps unique among ‘major’ nineteenth-centuryworks by African Americans in that, from the very beginning of its modern reception, itscritics have not simply focused on its northeastern urban printing site, which historianshave long and rightly shown as a complex hub of the national abolitionist community’sprint culture. The critics who have produced the most germinal readings of the bookhave also been deeply attuned to Wilson’s – and the book’s – deep ties to Milford, NewHampshire. Indeed, Gates and White’s careful delineation of the book’s relationship withthe Milford area may be among the earliest cogent examples of a ‘new regionalism’ innineteenth-century African American literary study. Further, approaches to the book thatre-emphasize such careful consideration of place (in all of the rich senses of that term)have perhaps most advanced critical discussion of Our Nig. Harriet Wilson’s New England:Race, Writing, and Region – which, not inconsequentially, is part of the ‘Revisiting NewEngland: The New Regionalism’ series – exemplifies efforts to reconsider the complexand shifting boundaries and definitions of Wilson’s region and regional identities. Innova-tive readings in this collection call on us to rethink, for example, how the book tells (ormore properly, does not tell) stories of, in Cassandra Jackson’s words, ‘rape and the failureof genre’ and how Our Nig addresses, per Eve Allegra Raimon’s essay, the figure of theNew England schoolteacher, educational reform, and ‘a racially inclusive education’ –issues that are as or perhaps more important than finalizing a generic label (155, 167).

These contributions would, in themselves, auger for value in approaching Our Nig in anew regionalist frame of mind, but the collection also showcases two other related stories:a story that revises New England history and historiography through the lens of Our Nigand a story of a contemporary community’s coming to terms with a previously unknownor ignored history. The first is accomplished through the collection’s consideration ofother early African American presences in Wilson’s ‘home’ area paired with broader anal-ysis of the ways in which white history often silenced African Americans and removedthem from many narratives of New England history. In each of the more ‘historical’essays in the collection, Wilson’s presence and especially her text provide openings forrethinking not only Wilson’s book but the character of the region itself and of AfricanAmerican history and culture more generally. Through Wilson’s book, historians andcritics like Barbara White, Reginald Pitts, David Watters, and Valerie Cunningham seeNew England, New Hampshire, and Milford specifically anew.

Perhaps equally important and equally ‘new regionalist’ is the collection’s attention tohow (re)placing Wilson and Black history (including literary history) in Milford, in New

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Hampshire, and in a broader New England challenged community activists like JerriAnneBoggis, who, in her own words, ‘would never have guessed that black folks had a historyin our town’ (226). The recognition that nineteenth-century Black history and Black lit-erature were, in the title words of Boggis’s essay in Harriet Wilson’s New England, ‘notsomewhere else, but here’ led her to spearhead efforts to increase the attention to Wil-son’s legacy in not only Milford, but the state and the larger region. As recorded in Bog-gis’s essay and the volume’s apparatus, through the Harriet Wilson Project, Wilson hasbecome the subject of a local play, a series of lectures in Milford (including one by Gateshimself), book groups, curricular discussions, and, perhaps most strikingly, a statue(sculpted by Fern Cunningham) that now graces Milford’s Bicentennial Park. Residentsand visitors alike can take a ‘Black Heritage Tour of Milford’ that both includes and goesbeyond discussion of Wilson. These concrete reminders – the face (albeit imagined), forexample, of a hopeful Wilson holding her open book out to the community with onehand while comforting the son the book was written to support with her other hand –challenge what Boggis rightly terms the ‘historical amnesia’ surrounding so much of thestory of people of color in the United States (231). In the title words of Milford residentWilliam Allen’s contribution to Harriet Wilson’s New England, such a combination ofscholarship and community outreach allows each resident of Milford (and of New Hamp-shire and beyond) to participate in ‘Discovering Harriet Wilson in My Own Backyard’;these efforts remind all that many ‘backyards’ in the United States may have traces ofBlack textual cultures.

The ‘new regionalism’ in the study of nineteenth-century African American literaturethus not only promises to expand our critical approaches to (and simply our list of) earlyBlack texts; it also hopes to give contemporary readers in all sorts of places a set of waysto rethink regional identities, histories, stories, and ties to broader national, trans-national,and hemispheric questions. It may also offer powerful tools for considering questions ofethnic identity and place in, for example, Native American studies or especiallyAfro-Native studies, where we might ask, for example, about the factors in certainlocations in Kansas at the end of the nineteenth century that allowed Black newspaperslike the Afro-American Advocate to cross (but not remove) boundaries between AfricanAmericans and Native Americans. It might also pose some fascinating juxtapositions likesome of the recent work on Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville. In all, it suggeststhat Black presences throughout American literature and culture need to be recovered,mapped, and much, much more carefully considered.

Short Biography

Eric Gardner is deeply involved in archival research on nineteenth-century AfricanAmerican literature and culture. His Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century AfricanAmerican Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2009) won the inauguralEBSCOhost ⁄Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize in 2010. It calls for arethinking of the nineteenth-century African American literary landscape throughpresenting case studies of early Black authors and texts in sites surrounding St. Louis,Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Gardner is also the editor of three books:the anthology Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery (Toby Press, 2005), which recovers sev-eral early American plays about slavery and race; Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of theEarly West (University Press of Mississippi, 2007), which conclusively establishes thatCarter was the ‘Semper Fidelis’ who wrote for the San Francisco Elevator and shares overseventy of her columns; and, with John Ernest, a scholarly edition of J. McHenry Jones’s

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fascinating 1896 novel Hearts of Gold (West Virginia University Press, 2010). Gardnerholds a BA in English from Illinois Wesleyan University and a PhD in English fromthe University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a Braun Research Fellow andProfessor of English at Saginaw Valley State University.

Note

* Correspondence: Saginaw Valley State University, University Center, Michigan, USA. Email: gardner@svsu.edu

Works Cited

Allen, William. ‘Discovering Harriet Wilson in My Own Backyard.’ Harriet Wilson’s New England: Race, Writing,and Region. Eds. JerriAnne Boggis, Eve Allegra Raimon, and Barbara A. White. Durham: University of NewHampshire, 2007. 213–6.

Baker, Houston. Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture. Charlottesville: University ofVirginia Press, 1972.

Boggis, JerriAnne. ‘Not Somewhere Else, But Here.’ Harriet Wilson’s New England: Race, Writing, and Region. Eds.JerriAnne Boggis, Eve Allegra Raimon, and Barbara A. White. Durham: University of New Hampshire, 2007.225–35.

Gardner, Eric. Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Jackson: University Press ofMississippi, 2009.

——, ed. Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.Gates, Henry Louis Jr. ‘Foreword.’ Harriet Wilson’s New England: Race, Writing, and Region. Eds. JerriAnne Boggis,

Eve Allegra Raimon, and Barbara A. White. Durham: University of New Hampshire, 2007. ix–xvi.Gunning, Sandra. ‘Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility, Home, and Diasporic (Mis)Identification.’ American

Quarterly 53 (2001): 32–69.Jackson, Cassandra. ‘Beyond the Page: Rape and the Failure of Genre.’ Harriet Wilson’s New England: Race, Writing,

and Region. Eds. JerriAnne Boggis, Eve Allegra Raimon, and Barbara A. White. Durham: University of NewHampshire, 2007. 155–65.

Katz, William Loren. The Black West. Rev. ed. New York: Harlem Moon ⁄ Broadway, 2005.Lape, Noreen Glover. West of the Border: The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers. Athens: Ohio

University Press, 2000.Levander, Caroline. ‘Hemispheric American Studies: Preliminary Thoughts on Research and Pedagogical

Challenges.’ Literature Compass 5 (2008): 435–47.Moos, Dan. Outside America: Race, Ethnicity, and the Role of the American West in National Belonging. Hanover, NH:

Dartmouth University Press, 2005.Nwankwo, Ifeoma Kiddoe. Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-

Century Americas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.Radway, Janice. ‘What’s in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association.’ American Quarterly

51 (1999): 10–5.Raimon, Eve Allegra. ‘Miss Marsh’s Uncommon School Reform.’ Harriet Wilson’s New England: Race, Writing, and

Region. Eds. JerriAnne Boggis, Eve Allegra Raimon, and Barbara A. White. Durham: University of NewHampshire, 2007. 167–81.

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