Book studies often ignored literature

November 2, 2009 —

There is a quote early in Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature that implies an exclusive relationship between such literature and slave narratives.

Eric Gardner, the book’s author, dissects this quote to emphasize the misconception that African American literature of this period rarely ventured from the template of the slave narrative or came from outside the Northeast.

Gardner, an SVSU professor of English, debunks these fallacies through a revisitation of (unexpected) areas from the 1840s through the 1860s.

Closer inspection of areas such as St. Louis, Indiana and San Francisco during this period reveals slave narratives were just the tip of the proverbial iceberg from the black literary community.

“These writings covered other topics like gaining broader civil rights, reuniting families and black contributions to pioneering the nation,” said Gardner.

Though African American literature of this era has garnered more critical attention and study in recent decades, the scope of this attention is typically limited to books.

This tunnel vision severely shortchanges the genre, though, since African American writers often struggled to have their work published as books.

Gardner says black newspapers of the time are more indicative of the range these writers had because content included anything from poetry to serialized novels.

“These papers change the way we look at these writers because we see how versatile a lot of the writing was,” he said.

Unexpected Places primarily calls for greater acknowledgement of this literature’s geographical and topical versatility.

But it also reveals the genre as a relatively untapped area of literary study.

As part of his research, Gardner ran several searches of the Modern Language Association’s International Bibliography. The searches showed a skewed amount of attention toward black writers of the 20th century in comparison to those of the previous century.

Gardner uses these findings to bolster his argument that even many scholars equate 19th century black literature only to slave narratives.

Research from previous book projects also helped serve Unexpected Places.

Gardner says he drew from his findings of Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West to flesh out the section in this book about San Francisco, where Carter was a vital part of the area’s black writing scene.

Though Unexpected Places strives to display the expansive nature of the genre, Gardner doesn’t look to undermine the importance of literature concerning slavery or racism.

The importance of these writings is amplified by how slavery affected virtually every person in the country.

“Even if you lived in Michigan, and you were wearing a cotton shirt or ate white rice, you were connected in some way to the slave system,” Gardner said.