Early African American

Print Culture in Theory and Practice

Philadelphia – March 18-20, 2010

  Conference Program

 

Thursday, March 18                         

Location: Temple University

 

Tour of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Sullivan Hall, 1330 Polett Walk - 4:30pm

 

Opening Keynote Lecture - 5:30pm, Paley Library Lecture Hall

Frances Smith Foster (Emory University)                      

Reception to follow

 

Friday, March 19                              

Location: McNeil Center, University of Pennsylvania 3355 Woodland Walk

 

I. Vectors of Movement - 10:00am – noon      

 

Chair: Gustavus Stadler (Haverford College)    

 

Commentator: Edlie L. Wong (Rutgers University)   

    

Joseph Rezek (McNeil Center for Early American Studies )                                
“The Print Atlantic: Disseminating Wheatley’s Poems and Sancho’s Letters”

 

Meredith L. McGill (Rutgers University)                                  
“Forms of Address, Modes of Circulation: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry”

 

Joanna Brooks (San Diego State University)       
“The Unfortunates:  What Early Black Books Teach Us About the History of the Book in America”

 

Eric Gardner (Saginaw Valley State University)                 
“Early African American Print Culture and the American West”

 

 

Lunch On Your Own

 

II. Identity Production - 1:00 – 2:45pm     

Chair: Thadious Davis (University of Pennsylvania)

         
Commentator: Leon Jackson (University of South Carolina)  

      

Jeannine Marie DeLombard (University of Toronto)          
“Beyond Black Virtue: Crime, Print, and African American Public Presence”

 

Corey Capers (University of Illinois, Chicago)                    
“Black Voices/White Print: Racial Practice, Print Publicity and Order in the Early American Republic”

 

Lloyd Pratt (Michigan State University)                              
“The Stranger and the City of New Orleans: Americanization, Racialization, and Literary Print Culture, 1830-1850”

 

Susanna Ashton (Clemson University)                           
“Slavery, Imprinted: The Life and Narrative of William Grimes”

 

 

III. Adaptation, Citation, Deployment - 3:00 – 4:45pm

Chair: Max Cavitch (University of Pennsylvania)

                        
Commentator: David Kazanjian (University of Pennsylvania)

         

Lara Langer Cohen (Wayne State University)                     
“Notes from the State of St. Domingo: The Practice of Citation in Clotel”

 

Daniel Hack (University of Michigan)                                 
“‘Can(n)on in Front of Them’: African American Deployments of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’”

 

Holly Jackson (Skidmore College)                            
“Another Long Bridge: Reproduction and Repetition in Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter”

 

Susan Gillman (University of California, Santa Cruz)        
“Maladaptation: Uncle Tom’s Cabin in African American Print Culture”

 

Saturday, March 20              

Location: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust Street

 

IV. Mixed Media - 9:00am – 10:45am

Chair: Janet Neary (Hunter College, CUNY)         

Commentator: Marcy J. Dinius (University of Delaware)   

 

Radiclani Clytus (Tufts University)                               
“‘Keep It Before the People’: Devotional Sentiment and the Pictorialization of American Slavery”

 

Jonathan William Senchyne (Cornell University)         
“The Whiteness of the Page, or Clotel at the Margin”

 

Dalila Scruggs (Harvard University)                              
“‘Photographs to Serve Our Purposes’:  Shaping the Image of Liberia in Colonization Print Culture”

 

 

V. Public Performances - 11:00am ­– 12:45pm

 

Chair: David Waldstreicher (Temple University)   

         
Commentator: Jordan Alexander Stein (University of Colorado at Boulder)         

 

Derrick R. Spires (Vanderbilt University)                      
“Imagining a Nation of Fellow Citizens: Early African American Politics of
Publicity in the Black State Conventions”

 

Tara Bynum (Towson State University)                                           
“The Trope of the ‘Talking Book’ Reconsidered in John Marrant’s Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black”

 

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University)   
“John Marrant Blows the French Horn: Print, Performance, and Publics in Early African American Literature”

 

 

Above Image: Detail from Heroes of the colored race (Philadelphia: J. Hoover, ca. 1881).