Bringing together papers focused on a range of periodicals from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century literature -- from indigenous boarding school newspapers to Black activist and religious newspapers to La correspondencia de Puerto Rico -- this panel invites exploration of these potentials through a comparative approach.
Ayendy Bonifacio focuses on the newspaper publications of transamerican poet, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873), one of the most celebrated writers to emerge from the nineteenth-century Hispanophone world. Like many women writers of the mid- to late-nineteenth-century, Avellaneda maneuvered a literary landscape governed by separate spheres ideology that deemed women unfit for public letters. Yet, no other Hispanophone woman poet of her time was reprinted more in newspapers. Published in both pro- and anti-Spanish newspapers during and after her lifetime, Avellaneda’s popularity meant that her poems crossed political divides. Bonifacio examines how Puerto Rico’s progressive press negotiated nationalist discourses via Avellaneda’s poetics and reputation, contextualizing her poems within an anti-colonial paratext of news, poems, and advertisements in La correspondencia de Puerto Rico and La Democracia.
Magdalena Zapędowska contrasts the Christian Recorder reception of Albery Whitman's poetry with its publication of Black women poets. The paper argues that the women poet contributors to the Recorder constitute a chorus, in Saidiya Hartman’s sense, that both foregrounds and disrupts the newspaper’s applause for Whitman. On the one hand, this chorus functions as a background for the Recorder’s celebration of Whitman’s exceptional masculine genius. On the other hand, the chorus disrupts this celebration by affirming Black women’s creativity, imagination, and experience.
Annemarie Mott Ewing's paper examines how Indigenous youth used the emerging print culture of boarding school newspapers to demand and enact an alternate form of citizenship. Envisioning a world other than the one they inhabited, Indigenous student authors and editors of boarding school newspapers critiqued government policies and challenged the historiography prevalent at the time. They often did so through imaginative and counterfactual writing. Folktales, historical counternarratives, and opinion pieces in these student newspapers reveal the contested nature of Indigenous citizenship in the late nineteenth century, the Indigenous demand for full citizenship, and argue for an ethics of redress.
Finally, Brad Evans examines the writings of Anna Leach (1860-1952), a prolific short story writer and novelist. Leach wrote “storiettes” for Munsey’s Magazine and The Argosy and was a pathbreaking newspaperwoman at the New York Times, publishing both under her own name and others including Robert McDonald and A. S. Duane. The paper recovers her life and work as a way of addressing issues of genre (the short story), gender (middle class white women), and ephemerality (trash art) in the mass-market magazines of the period. As a significant case study from the period, Leach's writings help us better understand the effect of superabundance on the literary marketplace and the significant role played by hundreds of women writers in propelling it forward.
We will limit an introduction for the panel to five minutes and each paper to twelve minutes. This strict timekeeping will allow at least twenty minutes for discussion, questions, and answers at the end of the panel.