"Nobody did more to bring black women writers into academic and popular recognition.”įor so long, the majority of representations of black women in literature were crafted by white writers. “She was a path-breaking scholar,” said Percy Hintzen, chair of the UC Berkeley department of African American studies. She was pivotal in creating the university’s African American studies department and, in 1978, was the first African American to be granted tenure. In 1972, two years after graduating from Columbia, Christian became an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. Her exploration of these writings would be realized later in her career - she was one of the first scholars to bring the works of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to the attention of academia. While pursuing a graduate degree in literature at Columbia University, Christian became friends with Langston Hughes and was introduced to the works of many black writers. Virgin Islands, she dedicated her life to changing ideas about race, gender and class, particularly around the representation of black women in American literature, ultimately asking, “who gets to tell their stories?” That all changed with Barbara Christian.įrom a young age, Christian was an avid reader, questioning why there were no African American or Afro Caribbean women included in the books she read. But just 50 years ago, this was far from a common way to engage with art, culture and literature. The content we consume and its authenticity are called into question on a daily basis. The collection pays forward the promise of theoretically charged engagements with the materials, processes, and products of African American print.Barbara Christian: Feminist literary critic Moreover, by bringing scholars from a range of historical fields and subspecialties to a single volume, Against A Sharp White Background makes a compelling argument for collaboration among scholars of various geographies and historical periods. “The questions that Fielder and Senchyne introduce offer paths for further investigation and refinement of our key terms of study.
“This is an important field, and the work collected here is exciting in its range and diversity of voices, methods, and insights.” He has published several articles on print culture, material textuality, and the digital humanities. Jonathan Senchyne is an assistant professor in the Information School and the director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This collection challenges mainstream book history and print culture to understand that race and racialization are inseparable from the study of texts and their technologies. Topics include antebellum literature, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement “post-Black” art, the role of black librarians, and how present-day technologies aid or hinder the discoverability of work by African Americans.Īgainst a Sharp White Background covers elements of production, circulation, and reception of African American writing across a range of genres and contexts. Contributors to this volume explore the relationship between expression and such frameworks, analyzing how different mediums, library catalogs, and search engines shape the production and reception of written and visual culture. While the printed word can seem democratizing, it remains that the infrastructures of print and digital culture can be as limiting as they are enabling.
The work of black writers, editors, publishers, and librarians is deeply embedded in the history of American print culture, from slave narratives to digital databases. Eric Gardner, author of Black Print Unbound: The “Christian Recorder,” African American Literature, and Periodical Culture “Offering wide-ranging subjects and approaches, these essays usefully extend conversations in print culture studies that have grown even more intense and even more important over the last decade.
Infrastructures of African American PrintĮdited by Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne UW Press: Against a Sharp White Background
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