This panel, “Racialized Reading in Nineteenth-Century America,” aims to interrogate the complex racial dynamics of reading and readership as they developed across the nineteenth century. As PMLA’s January 2019 issue on “cultures of reading” illustrates, recent years have seen a renewed critical interest in theories, practices, and cultures of reading, and this panel seeks to build on these discussions by addressing the racial implications of nineteenth-century reading practices. In Race and the Literary Encounter (2015), Lesley Larkin suggests that African American literature has always been especially attuned to issues of readership and can therefore offer theoretical insights into the ethics of reading. In this vein, our presenters examine a diverse range of racially significant American literature, paying particular attention to the ways in which these texts both depict and garner racialized readerships.

This panel, moreover, attends to “reading” both as interpretation (i.e. the work of literary critics) and as everyday acts of textual consumption. What, our panelists ask, can the racialized reading practices of nineteenth-century Americans teach us about our own critical methods? Even as our current critical moment is one in which interpretive assumptions and practices have been increasingly called into question, what we find is that nineteenth-century authors were themselves deeply invested in questions of reading method. While, in The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (2016), Paula M.L. Moya has called for a method of racially attuned close reading, our presenters attend to the ways in which these sorts of readings are performed by and in these texts themselves.

Each speaker will take fifteen minutes to present his or her paper. After our three speakers have presented, we will open the floor to questions. With twenty or thirty minutes allocated for discussion, our hope is that we will foster a robust conversation.

Lori Leavell’s paper, “‘Scatter it broadcast throughout the state’: The Afro-American Banner and Its White Readers in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition,” takes up white readings of black print as represented in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901). While Chesnutt’s novel most notably depicts the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, Leavell contends that the text also illuminates an understudied aspect of nineteenth-century racialized reading practices: white surveillance of black print culture. While scholars have long been attuned to the period’s networks of black readers as well as the white readers who were drawn to black-authored texts out of sympathetic identification, Leavell points to a more sinister aspect of African American literary history. Situating her analysis in relation to recent scholarship on Chesnutt’s position as a black artist in the literary marketplace, Leavell argues for Chesnutt as a documenter of black print’s variegated readership. In the process, she calls for more attention to the range of affects that drew readers into textual encounters with black-authored texts.

Jackson Truschel’s paper, “Reading Racism (Post)critically: White Supremacist Aesthetics at the Turn of the Century,” calls for a reexamination of the white supremacist fiction of Thomas Dixon Jr. and Joel Chandler Harris. Responding to recent methodological debates over post-critique, surface reading, and the state of new formalism(s), Truschel argues that ideology critique has failed to adequately account for the workings of white supremacist literature. Through their desire to critique these texts, critics have been quick to cast white supremacist fiction as essentially un-literary, a mode of analysis that has elided the fundamental imbrication of racist ideology and a white supremacist aesthetic. These texts, Truschel contends, attain their destructive power through the aesthetic experiences of their readers. By returning our attention to the ways in which white supremacy has often functioned through literary language—and not merely in spite of it—we open ourselves up to modes of reading that can better account for the intricacies and instabilities of racist thought.

Magdalena Zapędowska’s paper, “Lydia Sigourney, Black Hartford, and the Bias of Benevolence,” takes up the unacknowledged racial significance of Lydia Sigourney’s poetry. Despite a recent reappraisal of Sigourney as a poet of substance, critics have focused primarily on her feminist activism and ecological engagement, largely ignoring her treatment of race. Despite her close relationship with Hartford, Connecticut’s prominent black activists such as Hosea Easton and James W.C. Pennington, Zapedowska argues that Sigourney’s poetry built a white, middle-class readership through its embrace of racial paternalism. Indeed, despite her commitment to an ethic of Christian benevolence, Sigourney’s support for the American Colonization Society places her squarely in line with the views of a moderate abolitionist print culture.