The session has two goals: to deepen the scholarly conversation about the Black press as a site of African American literary achievement, and to investigate less-studied yet significant ways of reinventing African America in nineteenth-century Black-authored poetry. Building on Frances Smith Foster’s claim that early Black print culture promoted “construct[ing] African America” (2005) and Derrick Spires’s (2019) argument that African Americans “generated new forms of living and of articulating life,” we examine this creative African America as a thematic locus to read Black-authored poems. The African America happened not only in “unexpected places” (Gardner 2009), but also in unexpected ways, such as publishing anonymously, establishing familial intimacy with readers, and reclaiming nature as crucial to Black experience. Our concern with materiality extends from print to the nonhuman world. Following Evie Shockley’s claim that Black nature poetry represents “actual, rather than symbolic, space[s],” we examine poems as repositories of Black joy and self-determination.

This panel is related to other sessions on African American and Black Studies, e.g., LLC African American’s “Black Is/Not a Place.” It is also aligned with the presidential theme, “Multilingual US.” We reject the monolithic picture of early African American literature, discovering heteroglossic voices that Carla Peterson calls “principles of hybridity in Black community formation” (1995) and Gabrielle Foreman identifies as a “practice of simultaneous address” (2009).

We begin with Jewon Woo’s “Performative Unnaming: Visualizing Black Women Writers in Early Black Newspapers.” With examples from Palladium of Liberty (1843-1844) and other Black newspapers in 19th-century Ohio, Woo examines how women writers published their works anonymously or pseudonymously, while their writings often took main pages as the highlight to attract readers. The invisibility of these Black women writers in these newspapers might result from the dominant culture of true womanhood that discouraged women from being in the public. Woo argues that, however, the writers could also secure the liberatory space for their imagination and agitation for Black civil rights under fabricated writer-personas. In other words, their silence and location in archival lacunae might indicate a highly performative gesture that they took to publish in the anti-Black and male-dominant print culture.

Expanding the panel’s archive, Kassidi Jones in “‘For Health, For Pleasure, and For Profit’: Nineteenth-Century African American Environmental Thought” examines poems and journalism written in the mid- to late nineteenth century to elucidate a relationship between African Americans and the natural world that is not entirely based on labor and to question how poetry reflects African American environmental thought at large. Jones asks how landscapes depicted in African American ecopoetry mimicked or diverged from the physical world of the U.S. How can these poems formally instruct modern readers on the state of the environmental contexts in which they were written? This paper demonstrates that understanding the natural world was imperative to black spiritual, mental, and physical wellness long before Black environmental justice rhetoric constituted in the twentieth century.

The structured part of the session ends with Magdalena Zapędowska’s “The Weekly Anglo-African’s Paeans for the Newspaper and the Affects of Publishing,” which identifies a subgenre of newspaper poem that lauds the newspaper itself. African American periodicals had always published poetry on a variety of topics to foreground Black authors’ literary achievements. The laudatory poems for the newspaper theorize the Weekly Anglo-African’s place among more established, white-owned periodicals, affirming its important role on the national periodical scene, and celebrate its educational role. Harnessing poetry’s affinity for figuration and heightened emotion, these poems convey Hamilton’s and his readers’ affective relationship to the paper as a site of Black self-determination and cultivate a collective intimacy of reading, grounded in a shared attachment to the Weekly Anglo-African.

To promote audience engagement, the panelists will be limited to 15-minute presentations, leaving 25 minutes for unstructured discussion.