The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865. - book review

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by William L. Andrews

Dickson D. Bruce. The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001. 390 pp. $55.00 cloth/$ 9.50 paper.

Dickson D. Bruce's The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865, is a throwback--and I mean this as a distinct compliment--to the kind of literary history that once was regarded as foundational to scholarship in virtually any field of literary study. Books like this are rarely attempted anymore, partly because of the explosion of the canon in almost every field. It's very hard these days for a person who aims at some degree of inclusiveness to know what not to write about. If one feels obliged as a literary historian to give due attention to every important kind of writing--and in early African American literature nearly every genre of literature was experimented with and is thus worthy of consideration to some degree--then the task of writing a one-volume history of a field as vast as African American literature before 1865 is daunting.

The Origins of African American Literature recognizes the mutual implicatedness of white and black writing in English from the earliest beginnings. Bruce's emphasis on the dialogic character of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century African American and Anglo African writing is very instructive. Who before him has made such an interesting case for the impact of the colonization scheme on African American writing in the 1820s? His emphasis on the mutual involvement of whites and blacks in the African Repository typifies his attention throughout his book to the various biracial experiments in African American voice, discourse, and literary authority that mark the formative era of black American literature. Some of these early texts, such as Daniel Coker's fictionalized Dialogue between a Virginian and an African Minister, are striking, though rarely discussed. It's also impressive to see the extensive discussion of the dialogic character of Garrison's newspaper The Liberator itself, in which blacks and a few white s discourse in a variety of genres on the issues of the day. Nor does Bruce softpedal the tensions and conflicts that arose in these repeated efforts of whites and blacks to work together on various writing and publishing enterprises. One of the real strengths of Bruce's book is its thorough analysis of black journalism and the role of African American periodicals, in particular Freedom's Journal, as for a for discussion and literary production.

Bruce's view of African American literature is not bounded by the borders of North America but embraces the writing of Africans and Anglo Africans in England as well as Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and African Americans in North America. Bruce attends to African American literary production across the spectrum of genres without ignoring the importance of the generally acknowledged major players--Wheatley, Walker, Douglass, Delany, etc. Bruce interweaves these figures into the story he is telling so that, instead of literally singling out a Douglass for treatment in his own special place, he becomes a participant in a variety of literary undertakings and discursive interactions. The same is true for William Wells Brown, which has the valuable effect of showing just how prevalent Brown's "literary presence"--to use Bruce's term--was in American, English, and African American letters in the 1840s and 1850s.

There is a price to be paid, however, for historicizing the big-name writers in this fashion. For instance, George Moses Horton receives barely more than two pages of treatment, and that in connection with Russworm and Comish's Freedom's Journal. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper makes a few cameo appearances in The Origins of African American Literature, but if one were to judge simply by the number of pages Bruce allots to Harper versus, say, Sarah Forten, it would be easy for an unwary reader to conclude that Sarah Forten was the more important of the two. A sustained discussion of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is not available in The Origins of African American Literature. Major novels of the 1850s--Clotel, The Garies and Their Friends, The Heroic Slave, and Blake--are presented in the useful context of the mass appeal of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and in terms of the evolution of African American character in narrative discourse--but none of these texts is analyzed in detail. Bruce's discussion of Phillis Wheatley alone occupies more space in The Origins of African American Literature than do his comments on Clotel, The Garies and Their Friends, The Heroic Slave, Blake, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl combined.

Although the question of proportionality of explication may not be especially significant when reduced to numbers of pages, it does serve as an index to the kind of literary history that Bruce set out to write. In his Preface Bruce notifies his reader that he has undertaken "something other than a survey of major African American authors and their works, although, of course, they occupy center stage" in his book. His aim, by contrast, is "to investigate the historical conditions for an African American literary enterprise." His particular focus is "less on texts than on the webs of interaction among African Americans and between black and white Americans that encouraged literary endeavor and provided for the discursive realms within which it took place." It is instructive to encounter a literary history that presents texts and their authors as participants in bigger discursive dramas and debates, the significance of which would likely be skewed, if not lost, were these texts and authors to be given inordinate ly prominent treatment as separate, almost larger-than-history (and thus dangerously close to a historical) entities. Reading The Origins of African American Literature places some hitherto undervalued writers in new contexts, which may well spur more research on figures who as yet are but slenderly appreciated in our current canon of pre-New Negro Renaissance literature.