Winner 2010 Outstanding Academic Title Choice
Winner 2010 EBSCOhost / Research Society for American
Periodicals Book Prize
Honorable Mention 2010 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award, Western
Literature Association
In January of 1861, on the eve of both the Civil War and the
rebirth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church's "Christian
Recorder," John Mifflin Brown wrote to the paper praising its
editor Elisha Weaver: "It takes our Western boys to lead off. I
am
proud of your paper."
Weaver's story, though, like many of the contributions of early
black literature outside of the urban Northeast, has almost
vanished. "Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African
American Literature" recovers the work of early African American
authors and editors such as Weaver who have been left off maps
drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters
restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St.
Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and
several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based Recorder during and
after the Civil War.
In conversation with both archival sources and contemporary
scholarship, "Unexpected Places" calls for a large-scale rethinking
of the nineteenth-century African American literary landscape. In
addition to revisiting such better-known writers as William Wells
Brown, Maria Stewart, and Hannah Crafts, "Unexpected Places" offers
the first critical considerations of important figures including
William Jay Greenly, Jennie Carter, Polly Wash, and Lizzie Hart.
The book's discussion of physical locations leads naturally to
careful study of how region is tied to genre, authorship,
publication circumstances, the black press, domestic and nascent
black nationalist ideologies, and black mobility in the nineteenth
century.
General
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