Writing in Black:

February 19, 2027

From the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth, Black writers used print to claim authorship, citizenship, and a place in the historical record. But the record itself had to be made, and remaking it has remained an ongoing act. This conference brings together historians, literary scholars, and book historians to study Black writing of this earlier period alongside the practice of Black bibliography as it has been carried out both then and now: the work, past and present, of deciding whose words get preserved, catalogued, and read as history.

Biography and bibliography are usually treated as separate scholarly practices, the first narrative, the second archival. This conference treats them as linked acts of representation. To write a Black biography is to make a claim about whose life is worth telling. To compile a Black bibliography, in any era, is to make a claim about whose words are worth preserving. Both acts depend on the physical apparatus of print: the printer’s case, the subscription list, the catalog, the typeface itself, whether set in 1830 or designed today.

Held at the Library Company of Philadelphia, one of the nation’s oldest repositories of early Black print, this conference draws on collections that make these questions concrete. Sessions will pair scholarly papers on early Black writing with conversations about the continuing labor of bibliography, asking public and academic audiences to consider print not just as a record of Black lives but as a practice, still ongoing, of making that record at all.