The New Americanist

Volume One / Number Four Summer 2020

American Studies Center University of Warsaw Editor Matthew Chambers

Assistant editor Joanna Mąkowska

Advisory Board Paulina Ambrozy, Adam Mickiewicz University Laleh Khalili, SOAS University of London Charlotte Beyer, University of Gloucestershire Alex Lubin, University of New Mexico Christopher Breu, Illinois State University Josephine Metcalf, University of Hull Lori Emerson, University of Colorado Boulder Małgorzata Myk, University of Łódź Keith P. Feldman, UC Berkeley Andrew Pepper, Queen’s University Belfast Dominika Ferens, University of Wroclaw Benjamin Railton, Fitchburg State University Pawel Frelik, University of Warsaw Caroline Rody, University of Virginia Steffen Hantke,Sogang University Laurence Roth, Christina Heatherton, Barnard College Susquehanna University Tim Jelfs, University of Groningen David Schmid, SUNY Buffalo Reece Jones, University of Hawaii Jonathan Silverman, UMass Lowell Daniel Kane, University of Sussex Roberto Tejada, University of Houston Amy Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania Marek Wilczynski, University of Warsaw Caren Kaplan, UC Davis Richard Yarborough, UCLA Design Rafal Benedek and Filip Zagórski, Type2

Typesetting Andrzej Zawadzki

Printer Sowa Sp. z o.o

ISSN 2545-3556

The New Americanist American Studies Center Al. Niepodległości 22 02-653 Warsaw POLAND [email protected] newamericanist.com

Submissions The New Americanist is an interdisciplinary journal publishing scholarly work on the United States and the Americas broadly considered. We are especially interested in work which includes a global perspective, introduces new critical approaches, and proposes theoretical frameworks to the study of the US. We welcome contributions from scholars from around the world and across the humanities and the social sciences.

If you are interested in contributing, please submit a 250-word abstract and 200-word biographical note to [email protected]. Completed articles of a 6000–8000 word length based on accepted abstracts will be subjected to peer review. The New Americanist comes out twice yearly in association with the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. Please submit previously unpublished work only. All submissions will be subject to a double-blind peer review. The New Americanist is always seeking book reviews and commentary. Please contact us if you are interested in contributing.

Printed in 150 copies AMERICAN STUDIES IN THE ARCHIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS

5 Heather Fox and Amanda Stuckey What We Want Students to Remember: Archival Recov‑ ery as a Sustainable Critical Praxis

29 Derek Kane O’Leary Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold in the Antebellum U.S.

59 Laura Visser-Maessen “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives in the Netherlands in Black Atlantic Traditions of Archival Activism

101 Paul D. Reich “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions in African Ameri‑ can Newspapers of the Middle West

127 S. Luke Doughty Alain Locke’s Affective Air

149 Book Reviews

159 Contributors

What We Want Students to Remember: Archival Recovery as a Sustainable Critical Praxis Heather Fox and Amanda Stuckey

ABSTRACT Digital archives make available historically marginalized voices, particularly of women and of people of color, but the rapid pace of the digital turn may render some archives incomplete, relocated, inactive, or otherwise inaccessible. This essay focuses on one such archive as a case study for theorizing the intersection of archival research and pedagogy. The undergraduate classroom provides a significant space for situating pedagogy as inseparable from the sustainable recovery of historically marginalized writers, and archive‑based learning asks educators to re‑envision connections between how we research and how we teach. An archival collection can function as a course text for reading critically and theorizing methodologically about why recovering texts, biography, or literary production information may be difficult; whose legacy remains accessible; and how recovery changes interpretations. When students conduct archival research that can potentially contribute to scholarship on marginalized groups of writers, they break down social and disciplinary boundaries maintained in the academy, even as they reside within a system that maintains them.

Key Words: archives, recovery, historically marginalized writers, praxis, undergraduate research The New Americanist 04/2020 6

At a conference in 2015, we discussed the importance of recent archival visits to our projects in progress. But as our conversation continued, we noticed that, despite integrating recovered women’s literature, our approaches to teaching literature did not include the insights from archival research that informed our work. We asked ourselves, “If this class constitutes a student’s last literature course, what do we want them to remember?” More than recalling a scene from a course reading, we desired to cultivate a critical literacy in literary studies that could be applied methodologically across disciplines. This approach uses archival research as a model for asking questions, evaluating sources, and considering contexts, alongside readings of literary texts. By linking the research methodologies that we use in our own recovery projects to the literary and writing instruction practices in our classrooms, we sought a sustainable critical literacy, capable of deconstructing the hierarchies that perpetuate marginalization and remaining with students long after the semester’s end. Recovery projects consider texts from multiple angles, and often, scholars use archival research to introduce recovered texts into the classroom that “encourage the next generation of scholars to enhance and redefine the field” of American literature.1 As this “next generation of scholars” comes of age in the digital world, acts of recovery increasingly rely on relationships between archives, teachers, and students through a text’s initial recovery and readers’ ongoing engagements with it. Archivist‑educator relationships are essential to the sustainability of a collection’s legacy,2 in order to, as Barbara Rockenbach argues, “attract users to our collections and [to] influence the teaching and learning in our institutions.”3 Collaborations – between faculty and archivists, between students and archives, and between pedagogy and scholarship – remain “the key components of the sustainability and value of the academic special collections and archives of the future.”4 Integrating archival work into undergraduate classrooms sustains archivists’ previous work, and accessing digital resources activates a new generation of integrated teaching and scholarship. Extending collaborative archival research opportunities to undergraduate students also allows faculty to visibly connect scholarship and teaching as they cultivate “communal” and “cultural” relationships within their institutions and explorations of digital holdings.5 In one account that ex- pounds these benefits for a 200‑level literature course, Sarah Berry observes that archival projects engender “opportunities at multiple levels that differ from traditional research and writing processes,” helping students to reconsider their preconceptions and to “develop significant new thinking about the gender politics of self‑representation, professional history, What We Want Students to Remember:… 7

and cultural change.”6 These observations are not limited to English studies. When five participants from different disciplines and career stages wrote about the integration of archival research in the undergraduate classroom for an Archive Journal roundtable, for instance, they argued similarly that archival instruction through project‑based learning informs course readings and discussions, entices students by working with texts in a new way, and positions students as scholars in charge of their discoveries and learning processes.7 These observations situate the “archive” as a dynamic, constructed “cultural resources continually reshaped through use.”8 Changes in social, political, and cultural climates shape both texts and archives, and when students engage archives as part of their course experiences, the classroom becomes a laboratory for both studying and reshaping the uses of the archives within these climates. Our vision joins educators, students, archivists, and scholars toward understanding how collected materials, as well as engagements with these materials over time, reflect contemporary receptions of recovered writers’ work. These collaborations induce alternate ways of thinking about and teaching “the text,” setting the stage for sustainable recovery practices based in innovative forms of digital archival research. While questions involving the implications of acquisition and access remain embedded in the necessary narrative decisions across institutional archives, the digitization of archival resources allows for student engagement across geographic regions and social boundaries. Teacher‑student collaborations, in particular, respond to Gregory Shafer’s call, over twenty years ago, for student‑driven research that helps undergraduates to “re‑envision ... the reason why real people do research.9 If recovery is one of the reasons why “real people do research,” then students should be positioned not just as passive receivers of a syllabus‑assigned recovered text but as “real people who do research” to make meaning of both the text and the recovery research that made it accessible. This “more participatory learning environment” has the potential to deconstruct “restrictive critical categories,” such as canon formation; to hone the “interpretive abilities” of scholars examining this canon and of students delving into its archives; and to broaden the research scopes of both educators and students.10 Through inquiry‑driven, authentic research experiences in the archives, students come to value the process as much as their findings, especially when those findings look different from traditional conceptions of “literature.” The undergraduate classroom provides a significant space for situating pedagogy as inseparable from the sustainable recovery of historically The New Americanist 04/2020 8

marginalized writers. Archive‑based learning asks educators to re‑envision the connections between how we research and how we teach. Engaging undergraduate classrooms in recovery projects has the mutually beneficial role of continuing the recovery process, while teaching students about the collaborative research and information literacy skills embedded in our digital world.

Archival Collection as Course Text In designing a project to connect our research and teaching practices, we selected an archival collection in the same way we choose readings for a course. The archive must be a student‑accessible vehicle for teaching course objectives, and for the project, it must illumine the significance of literary recovery efforts, while providing relevant, authentic opportunities for students to contribute to these efforts.Legacy’s Portrait Gallery addressed these objectives. Over a decade ago, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers introduced a digital recovery initiative – its website’s Portrait Gallery – to collect resources related to American women writers’ literary lives through a systematic approach to research. The Portrait Gallery initiates readings and counter‑readings to address omissions in the American literary canon—omissions in historical and literary records that almost rendered marginalized women writers non‑existent. Since one of us served as Legacy’s Digital Media Coordinator during the project’s design, the Gallery constituted a familiar, publicly‑accessible archive. As predicted at the time of the Gallery’s initial development in 2009, rapid digital changes continue to shape methods of recovery, as well as the ways in which we receive, organize, and understand that which is recovered.11 Its digital form occasions encounters with different types of texts, those beyond our conventional notions of a singular, bound artifact. When selecting this archival collection, we predicted that examining portraits of Native American writers like Sarah Winnemucca, for instance, may lead students to archives and artifacts that, in Theresa Strouth Gaul’s words, “are not ‘traditionally’ literature,” including Native American handiwork, rhetoric of social justice, and writing about Native American women whose literary lives may not be legible to our conventional notions of “the text.”12 While the lack of tangible archived material for women of color may be perceived as an “absence,” recovery work proves this “silence” to be a “symptom of not knowing how to hear—or, more accurately, not knowing where to look” to study cultural productions as texts.13 Bringing a digitized archive into the classroom and prioritizing What We Want Students to Remember:… 9

the method of recovery as much as that which is recovered offers another strategy for teaching ways of “listening” to once‑marginalized presences. When marginalized individuals or communities are “denied full access to social agency,” they “sometimes construct stories that push back against a constraining ideology’s textual power.”14 The Gallery— an evolving nexus for dynamic “portraits” of American women writers from a myriad of sociocultural backgrounds—offers one place to look for this counter‑narrative. Student engagement with this counter‑narrative destabilizes the hegemony of “the text” to enable alternate modes of reading, engaging, and listening to texts and contexts. Recovery projects, such the Portrait Gallery’s goal of collecting and digitizing archive information about the literary lives and production of writers primarily absent from nineteenth- and twentieth‑century American anthologies, invite scholars and students to reconceive “text” as a product of various contexts whose social, political, and cultural forces are recorded within the archives. Archival research also opens up pathways for considering the sociopo- litical dimensions of how repositories and collections may construct or obscure historically marginalized voices. In the same way that scholars established that a key outcome of archival work is not the production of history or truth but, rather, the “interrogat[ion] of how archive logics work, what subjects they produce, and which they silence in specific historical and cultural contexts,”15 we believe that students should consider the origins of archived materials, who collected them, why they were included in a particular archive, and what archival presences and absences suggest about those decisions. Recent scholarship suggests archives can also function as “mechanism[s] of exclusion,” which absented women writers from the canon in the first place.16 Especially in the case of African American and Native American women writers, recovery alone cannot begin to amend the histories of violence, racism, and exclusion that not only erased their archival presences but that also constructed the very archives from which we attempt to recover them.17 Because of these limits, scholars now call for a kind of “counter‑reading” of the archives, in which we resist attempts to overcome archival absences to, instead, “inhabit” archival limitations.18 Multiple strategies of reading, engaging, and listening seek to unearth these counter‑readings. Archival collections like the Portrait Gallery, when implemented as a critical literacy tool, can be used as a course text to invite students to be part of this counter‑reading process. The early digital turn of 2009 made the Gallery’s path of recovery possible, and in the decade since its The New Americanist 04/2020 10

introduction, archival research developed alongside digital advances. However, the Gallery now stands as more of a time stamp of the early digital turn than a resource for scholars. Today, many portraits are incomplete, lacking information because it is unknown, because archives relocated, or because links are out‑of‑date. Its current state opens opportunities for revision, re‑organization, and maintenance through contemporary methods of digital recovery, while simultaneously posing questions about the longevity of information recovered and the sustainability of recovery efforts. These opportunities and questions allow the Gallery to function as both archive and course text in the classroom, since its collected portraits point to changes over time that affect a recovery initiative. When we study these changes, we encourage students to read critically and to theorize methodologically about why recovering texts, biography, or an author’s oeuvre may be difficult; whose legacy remains accessible; and how recovery can inform our readings. Introducing archival recovery projects as a pedagogical strategy presents students with a way of reading that considers the historical, social, and political contexts related to the initial development of an archive, its contemporary significance, and the larger role recovery plays in literature. These readings ask us to consider the site and modality of production. For example, the first alphabetically ordered name in Gallery is Hannah Adams. Her portrait includes birth and death dates, photograph with her signature, permissions information for the photograph, a list of pertinent archives, and a bibliography of references to Adams’s life and work.19 The photograph, in particular—her dress, facial expression, position of her hands over a book, and background that contains additional books— gives visibility to her place in the Gallery beyond a list of literary works or references to this work. However, the second portrait of Jane Addams only includes a list of pertinent archives and a few references. While photographs of Jane Addams are available, one is not included in the Gallery. Perhaps, it is missing because permissions were difficult to obtain, -be cause it was misplaced during an update, or because her work was deemed less prominent than other authors’ work at the time. Whatever the reason, these speculations reveal the kinds of questions that audiences might ask about missing information when reading portraits sequentially in the Gallery. This “site of audiencing,” or “process by which a visual image has its meanings renegotiated, or even rejected, by the particular audiences watching in specific circumstances,”20 introduces invites query about differences in recovery between writers and the implications of those differences. The Gallery’s layout, alongside portraits’ omissions, cultivates What We Want Students to Remember:… 11

students’ awareness of positionality as critical readers residing within the privileged academic space of the classroom. Even though its composition and contents reflect the decade‑old values that produced it, the Portrait Gallery continues to provide avenues for contextualizing women’s writing. That scholars may now find other methods to locate archival and scholarly sources on American women writers does not render it obsolete; rather, the Gallery now offers an invaluable resource, or “learning legacy,” for understanding early visions of digital recovery scholarship within a vastly changing digital landscape.21 As Barbara Biesecker argues, “whatever else the archive may be—say, an historical space, a political space, or a sacred space; a site of preservation, interpretation, or commemoration—it always already is the provisionally settled scene of our collective invention of our collective invention of us and of it.”22 This Portrait Gallery provokes theoretical and methodological conversations about the evolution of recovering historically marginalized writers. We can use it as a course text for re‑inventing how we read in literary studies, as well as how these readings are shaped by digital platforms and information literacy. When students contribute to these readings, they come to view their engagements with the collection as an investment in the lives and literary production of marginalized writers.

The Portrait Gallery Project The Portrait Gallery Project, developed from our question about what we want students to remember from our classes, links research methodologies in women’s literature to course instruction. Using the Gallery as a platform for contemplating differences between subjects’ recoveries and the implications of those differences, students consider • why it might be difficult to recover either texts or biographical/literary production information about historically marginalized writers; • how technology benefits or hinders recovery efforts; • what the implications of a writer’s “legacy” are when only academic audi‑ ences can access materials digitally; and • what these findings suggest about sociocultural and political power structures.

Furthermore, the Project invites readings that focus on patterns of presences and absences, and necessitates conversations about the historical, political, and social contexts that informed these patterns. It relies on collaborative teaching and learning to privilege interdisciplinary, student inquiry toward the recovery and resistance of underrepresented The New Americanist 04/2020 12

writers. And it engenders evidence‑based critical thinking, derived from authentic research methodologies and reflections on process and findings. In spring 2018, we embedded the Project in two courses—Literary & Textual Analysis and Women’s Literature—taught at our separate institutions. One of these institutions was a small, private liberal arts college in the U.S. Northeast; the other constituted a large, public regional university in the U.S. Southeast. Located nearly 1,000 miles apart, the Project connected 50 non‑major students, including first‑generation college students, international students, and interdisciplinary students whose previous experiences with university English courses varied widely. In the private college, Literary & Textual Analysis fulfilled a humanities general education requirement to equip new undergraduates with a toolkit of literary methods—close reading, critical theory applications, and information literacy—that could transfer to learning situations across disciplines. The syllabus contained writers represented in the Portrait Gallery exclusively. In order to introduce historical “gaps” in representation and inclusion of women’s voices in the American literature canon, the course began by examining tables of contents from anthologies, starting in the late 1800s. Through activities designed around these anthologies, students witnessed changes in inclusion, categorization, and representation to build an understanding of what constitutes a “canon.” Working chronologically through readings by diverse authors like Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Winnemucca, Sui Sin Far, and Zora Neale Hurston, students referenced this early exercise throughout the semester to discern exactly when (or if) an author was included in the “canon.” In the public university, Women’s Literature was a 300‑level English elective, cross‑listed with Women’s and Gender Studies. Approximately 50% of the students were non‑humanities majors, and 50% were English Education majors (advised through the College of Education), who might implement course experiences in future high school classrooms. The syllabus focused on women’s literary production in context, 1791–1891, to consider relationships between literary histories and canonical cate- gorizations; how the historical, social, and political contexts of the early American republic enabled and/or inhibited women writers’ literary production; and the connections between authors’ reform initiatives and the role of contemporary recovery efforts. Students read works like Catharine Read Williams’s Fall River (1832), Sarah Alice Callahan’s Wynema (1891), and Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper’s) Forest Leaves (ca. 1840s), alongside articles about recovery processes in Common‑place: The Journal of Early What We Want Students to Remember:… 13

American Life.23 They also completed a transcription exercise in the Library of Virginia’s Transcribe, conducted keyword searches in Fanny Fern in the New York Ledger, and researched pre‑1920s magazine publications in the university’s on‑site periodicals collection for a final course paper.24 Both courses implemented the Project in two phases, occurring at the beginning and end of the semester. Designated “workdays” allowed us to vet questions that arose at every stage. By separating the Project into phases, students could reflect on methodological processes through class exercises, readings, and discussions, not immediately related to the Project. The two‑phase structure also identified patterns of student concern so we could revise procedures or create supplementary materials before the next phase. During the first phase, a “Project Guidelines” handout introduced students to how literary analysis circulates texts and ideas with communities beyond our classrooms and institutions, while also providing a brief overview of the Gallery’s history, a section on sanctioned sources, a project outline for both phases, and a presentation rubric. In Phase One, we assigned three authors from the Gallery (one author whose work was included in the syllabus’s required readings, one author with a robust presence in the gallery, and one author whose portrait was missing significant amounts of information) to groups of 3–5 students each. In Phase Two, we joined Phase One groups from each institution, so that groups of 5–7 students collaborated between universities. Each combined group researched two instructor‑assigned author portraits (one replete with information and one completely devoid of information) and one group‑selected author portrait from the Gallery, arranging communications through a group‑elected “Communications Director” in Google Documents. Before the Project, most students reported that they completed little to no secondary research in prior courses. None visited the university’s special collections or explored a digital archive previously. To address these concerns, we emphasized peer collaboration, modeled after our own work together. We monitored students’ collaborations and findings with Research Logs (fig. 1) in which students recorded their evaluations of information currently on the Portrait Gallery: birth and death dates, authors’ photographs, archives associated with an author, and bibliographic references for reliability, currency, and accessibility. For portraits filled with information, students ascertained the portrait’s accuracy and time- liness. For fleshing out empty profiles, they turned to vetted print and digital sources. Groups recorded this information and their sources, even when their findings proved unhelpful, to trace progressions of discovery. The New Americanist 04/2020 14

Throughout both phases of the Project, students worked with the same group and used tools, such as team charters and task schedules from Joanna Wolfe’s Team Writing (2010), to manage workloads.25 As research continued into Phase Two, they developed and practiced methodological approaches that connected research to course readings and discussions. Google Documents and university Learning Management Systems (LMS) provided forums for disseminating information. We planned class time to explore the Gallery, to navigate external databases like Women Writers Online and Archive Grid that might provide helpful for recovering information, and to discuss the unevenness in the amount of information among portraits. We also designed supporting materials like a “Best Bets” handout for locating credible archival resources. By priv- ileging collaboration—and by modeling how we collaborate with each other in teaching and research—students came to view themselves, not as individuals completing coursework in a vacuum, but as participants in a larger network of ongoing scholarship towards a more comprehensive and inclusive American literary history. Group “meta‑reflections” in both phases of the Project prompted students to critically consider how engagements with the Gallery expanded upon and/or complicated readings and discussions about texts and contexts. Meta‑reflection questions, presented in class at the end of the term, included broader considerations, such as How might you apply what you learned from this project to future research assignments, within or outside of the English discipline? and To what extent did your virtual collabora‑ tion with student scholars at another university change your process of re‑ search? During our planning, we anticipated that students might write about experiences with university libraries research for locating and vetting information, and how this information necessitated re‑readings or counter‑readings of course literary texts. We hoped that they would enjoy collaboration, as we do in our work. However, as meta‑reflections revealed, the focus became less about learning outcomes; foundational readings and discussions; time and resources; or collaboration.26 Instead, challenges derived from “getting used to not having all the answers.”27 These challenges, frustrating at times, nonetheless led students to important discoveries beyond the Project’s initial scope, especially insights about relationships between access, privilege, and information. Particularly during Phase One, students felt frustrated when conduct- ing research, since beyond identifying “gaps” in the Gallery, they often discovered “something” but didn’t know quite what to make of it. They frequently found that, in the decade or so since a site’s links were associated What We Want Students to Remember:… 15

with a portrait, the linked site no longer existed, or information moved as part of a site‑wide renovation. Many observed that archive‑based research takes a lot of time, compared to previous college research assignments, because it is necessary to pursue information beyond the links provided in the portraits. As one group observed, “we are used to searching for something on Google, clicking the first result and having exactly what we need,” but for this Project, “you need to be diligent in the information you choose, and you have to be careful to make sure that anything you use is accurate.” Such comments reflect a heightened understanding of the importance of knowing what sources to use and how to use them. Some students found that different spellings of authors’ names (e.g. Elizabeth Keckley/Keckly) or pen names v. given names (e.g. Sui Sin Far/ Edith Maude Eaton) could produce different search results, while others reported unexpected findings, such as discovering information about Anna Katharine Green even though they were researching Sarah Payson Willis Parton. As one group described it, the more “sleuthing” they ac- complished, the more they noticed “something that was surprising about the research process”: “One source could lead you to another... [and] you would then stumble upon information that you maybe didn’t find in your last source.” These initial observations expose some of the barriers to sup- plying a complete digital portrait for each author in the Gallery. Meta‑reflections also revealed how students developed and contemplated individual and collective research methods in response to Where might we find information about an author when she does not have her own archival legacy. One group reported that “a ‘key’ to successful research is finding thorough and reliable sources, both to collect information from and to lead to other sources.” While some groups began by “Googling” to generate the broadest possible array of sources before evaluating them in Phase One, most groups started with bibliographic references and used library databases to find the original article and to mine its bibliography by Phase Two. They developed problem‑solving processes to address research issues and identified specific methods for collaborations that streamlined tasks and took advantage of strengths represented by their group’s individuals and institutions. Students reported that working with another institution’s classroom refined their own research and collaborative work methods. One group explained that they “worked more on making sure the sources for [an author’s] legacy were reliable and verified the information,” while their partner group from the other university “worked to give detail about what the sources had to offer[,] such as images and publications.” Overall, The New Americanist 04/2020 16

reflections about collaborating between two universities ranged between praising “a source of further collaboration” that provided “an extra net of support in our research....to check [for accuracy] and [to] discuss our findings” to regretting a “breakdown of communication.” Yet, no matter the group’s position on this continuum, all participants demonstrated a keen awareness of the collaborative aspect of recovery. Group work experiences, as one group wrote, “help[ed] build our understanding of research in recovery and in literary studies because we now understand that it is basically a collaboration of multiple people, helping you to recover someone or something.” For instance, reading Johanna Ortner’s account of the process of recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves alongside the recovered collection of poems, enabled students to consider how Harper’s involvement with the Abolition Movement may have rendered the pre‑Civil War publication missing until Ortner’s twenty‑first century discovery.28 In the same way that the Gallery invites questions about a text’s disappearance and recovery, Ortner’s discovery draws upon more than a century of recovery efforts and demonstrates the ongoing need to recover texts from different stages of an author’s oeuvre to trace the reception of their work within various historical, social, and political contexts. Connecting class discussions to Gallery research, another group noticed that “using different sources of readings, pictures, and essays from multiple people allow us to gain a better understanding of the context in which our authors were writing about,” suggesting that the Project helped them to gain a better understanding of contexts than texts alone might permit. They then brought these contexts to bear on course texts, noticing discrepancies between women writers’ archival presences and materials. For instance, one group, assigned to Margaret Fuller and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, surmised that “while Harper was very successful, educated, [and a leader in important organizations and social movements like Fuller], she was an African American woman....which, [they believed, was] the reason why it is more difficult to find information on her.” Another group noticed that Sarah Winnemucca’s portrait yielded only “information on her work as a Native American activist” because they were “unable to find any information on her writing.” Like the discussions surrounding Harper’s life and work, this group acknowledged that “it might have been easier [to find] information on the other authors since they were not a minority.” While African American and indigenous women found and created nineteenth‑century contexts—however limited—for their work, literary history and canon formation created new What We Want Students to Remember:… 17

contexts that de‑valued contributions by both women and people of color, doubly excluding writers like Harper and Winnemucca. Students’ observations about biographical and/or literary accessibility conclude that the presence of these obstacles demonstrates women writers’ persistence in the literary marketplace: “These women persisted and continued to write numerous publications, in spite of the obstacles they faced.” In discussions of these marginalized women, as a class we worked to expose the hierarchical structures underlying canon formation and to understand the obstacles that these structures imposed for these women and for re- searchers today. Students persisted in the face of obstacles to information in the present day and took note of the accessibility issues they faced. As one group tested outdated links on individual portraits, for example, they found that “along with having to find a new link, most of the links required access that we did not have” from “other colleges libraries....we could not access the information because we are not students there and only students have access to that. That made it very frustrating also because that limits the sources that we can use.” Other groups pointed out “dead ends,” which occurred when links lead to information “blocked by a pay- wall.” When digitized archives did exist, they again aired frustrations because many archives required institutional access or even payment for use. Technological access did not always prove helpful in finding information about once obscured writers, even when students looked to male rel- atives’ or publisher’s archives to locate items like dates and photographs. These barriers brought privileged positions into relief, since searches in databases like the MLA International Bibliography or JSTOR were made possible by academic credentials. Groups argued unanimously that information about women’s literary lives and production should not be limited to university affiliations but should be available for public consumption. To ask Whose legacy remains accessible and why, students considered the power dynamics that structure canon formation and the recovery efforts that attempt to amend these dynamics. In their reflections, groups found it interesting that there would be an extensive record for one author but almost nothing about another author within the same literary time period. When researching Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Katharine Green, and Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson, for instance, a group explained that while we might

thin[k] of most female authors as being equal within the time period of our research, but when we look at the amount of readily available information on The New Americanist 04/2020 18

these authors [,] it is clear that is not the case (or at least not equal in the context of research). There was a plethora of information on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She had 18 Legacy references alone, more than our other two authors combined. On the other end of the spectrum, we have Anna Katharine Green, who had absolutely no information on her portrait... outside of her name and birth/death dates.

Findings also initiated critical analysis between biography and literary production. One group observed similar narrative strategies between reform initiatives in Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema (1891) and Zitkála‑Šá’s American Indian Stories (1921), after learning about Zitkála‑Šá’s political activism through their research.29 Their research reflected diversity among the American women writers who lived, wrote, and worked during the same time period, but just because writers were contemporaries, it did not mean that equal amounts of information would exist in the Gallery for each. Since our selections for assigned authors similarly reflected the diversity of writers, time periods, and experiences brought together in the Gallery, some of the most exciting responses developed from How do the archival patterns/connections between authors’ lives and literary production inform our thinking about recovering marginalized writers. Students reflected on what information existed about women writers, and more importantly, on larger conversations about the historical, political, and social contexts that influenced author’s lives and literary productions. Because of the diversity inherent to experiences of “female,” students resisted universaliz- ing characterizations of “women’s writing.” For example, after working with the portraits of Anne Bradstreet, Rebecca Harding Davis, and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, students asserted that “many of these [authors’] works describe similar things [about home, family, labor, and identity], but they each provide a unique perspective of what is being discussed.... Whether to advocate, inform, or entertain, these works prove to be significant towards our understanding of contemporary topics/issues and those that preceded us.” Another group working with Susanna Rowson, Christine Quintasket, and Zora Neale Hurston synthesized each author’s contributions to cultural perspectives: “Zora Neale Hurston had a part in the culture movement in New York. Christine Quintasket talked about the connections of cultures between European Americans and Native American. Susanna Rowson was the first women to open a school just for girls, allowing them to have a serious and thorough education.” In this way, the Gallery invites students to make connections between authors’ What We Want Students to Remember:… 19

biographical experiences, sociocultural backgrounds, and literary time periods, without diminishing the unique legacy that each author brings to literary history. Observations about relationships between biography and production informed group and class discussions about How does the work of recov‑ ery change our readings/interpretations of women’s writing or offer new frameworks for interpretation. While completing a reading of Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863), students became intent on figuring out why Alcott’s account of the seemingly selfless work of a nurse empha- sizes the first person “I” of Nurse Periwinkle and focuses more on her “tribulations” than those of her soldiers. Posing the question to the group researching Alcott for the Gallery, the class discussed how Alcott’s goal to become a writer took shape alongside the compilation of her “authorial archive.” Connecting the group’s archival findings with class discussions about the narrative strategies used in her earliest work and later literary ambitions, students ascertained that the use of first‑person reflects Alcott’s aspirations to fashion herself into an author. Students invoked recovery as a way of evaluating individual authors’ works, while also recognizing the impact of recovery efforts on literary history more broadly, to remark that “through research and recovery... we’re not simply retriev- ing facts, [or] stories... but perspective[s] [about] the thoughts and values of the author that shed more light on what we may or may not know.” Their willingness to attend to what we “may not know” as much as what we “may know” attests to the various strategies of reading, listening, and engaging that the Portrait Gallery Project cultivated. This level of reading, listening, and engaging—or evidence‑based critical thinking that expands upon information literacy—required persistence. More than concerns about individual portraits, students recognized their own roles in shaping literary history and information access. New perspectives on information literacy emerged from discussions about who does and who does not have the privilege to access information. In part, these insights developed because, even though students benefit- ed from access to institutional libraries throughout their university experience, multiple students, including some upperclassmen in Women’s Literature, admitted that they were unfamiliar with the library’s website. The Project induced them to engage databases that they may have otherwise avoided, and as a result, they began to comprehend relationships between the Gallery’s portraits and a trajectory of scholarship. Groups “were surprised to see that most library database articles focused on how the author relates to specific social or historical issues [instead of a summary The New Americanist 04/2020 20

of works or biography]” and grasped the significance of sanctioned sources and verification. One group likened it to “the telephone effect”: “One source could reference another source, and when you read the referenced source, you could see how some information was altered. This realization showed us how important accuracy and precision [are] when it comes to archival work....it is important to verify everything”—a lesson applica- ble to all disciplines’ research methodologies. Examining the archival context of recovered texts, as it appears both in the text’s moment of production and in digital spaces today, reveals a “politicized discursive strategy,” or a counter‑narrative to absenting techniques of canonizing, of researching, and of literary history more broadly.30 Engagement with a singular archive, or collection within an archive, opens up these hierarchies so that undergraduate students, who may not be invited to contribute to research through other scholarly forums, can participate within its discourse community. When students conduct archival research that can potentially contribute to scholarship on marginalized groups of writers, they begin to breakdown social and disciplinary boundaries maintained in the academy, even as they reside within a system that maintains them.

Sustainable Praxis The Portrait Gallery Project incorporates an archival collection into course instruction in order to “think methodically about texts and contexts.”31 These benefits “transfer to other types of research” to develop a “metacog- nitive modality”32 in which the archives serve as “primary sources for creating knowledge rather than mere storehouses for finding what is already known.”33 Even as students invested in the lives and literary production of the writers they researched, meta‑reflections enable them to analyze their observations about accessibility, privilege, and information: First, as one group explains it, “minimal information about underrepresented authors created roadblocks, which often opened up a large space for interpreting what information was available.” These roadblocks compelled them to dig deeper into available research from multiple perspectives and to think about the processes involved in research as much as the findings. Second, students recognized that assumptions about writers’ legacies are not always true. Being a best‑selling or financially independent author did not necessarily guarantee one’s authorial legacy, and the reasons why one author might be recovered or anthologized more frequently can be complicated. Finally, groups concluded that, to sustain recovery, research should be available to populations without university privileges. What We Want Students to Remember:… 21

If an archive constitutes “a growing body of cultural resources reshaped through use,”34 then using an archival collection to study its intended function and potential purposes over time can be a form of recovery that takes a holistic view of the process. This view aims not to emerge single- handedly from an archive with a lost or forgotten text but, instead, to understand how visions and uses of archives reflect patterns of recovery that affect what we read and receive in the present. In this way, the Portrait Gallery Project cultivates what Stephen Brauer calls a “critical praxis,” encouraging connections “between different writers and texts, between the past and the present, and especially between the world and beyond” so that students “become aware of their own learning and to understand the challenges of how to transfer what they have learned to a broader context.”35 Connections take shape as students map the prior collaborations, which contributed to the texts and contexts in the Gallery, and become active participants in their own learning processes, part of a greater meaning‑making process that “creat[es] new truths, provocative theories, modern stories.”36 They also come to understand and value theprocess as much as the result, especially when—as the archives of Native American and African American women demonstrate—those “results” may look different from what we traditionally teach as “literature.” Engaging undergraduate classrooms in recovery work has the mutually beneficial role of continuing the recovery process, while also teaching the information literacy skills essential to our constantly changing digital world. Collaborative reflections between interdisciplinary students, between colleagues teaching at separate universities, and between the students in those colleagues’ classrooms form a platform for thinking about how working together to problem‑solve intrinsically prompts students (and instructors) to re‑evaluate their own roles within social and institutional boundaries. Even though this Project concluded with more questions than solutions, reflections demonstrate investments in work that could potentially impact the field of literary studies beyond the classroom. Students comprehended its urgency because, as one group wrote, “without proper time and resources spent researching and archiving works and authors of the past, they may be lost to time... we can only assume that there are some authors who have been lost.” Groups also reflected on how they were “thankful to this project for introducing [them] to the ways [they] can discover women writers, and for giving us names that we now have background on (and in some sense, an emotional attachment to).” We did not anticipate this “emotional attachment.” Approximately one year after the course, students corresponded The New Americanist 04/2020 22

about the Project’s continued influence on their academic and professional careers. Some changed majors to focus on social injustice issues related to marginalized groups of people; others enrolled in graduate programs to conduct archival work that might lead to future recoveries. Archival pedagogies like this Project offer undergraduate students an opportunity to contribute to initiatives that invest in archival recovery, a sustainable praxis for teaching critical literacy.

Figure 1: Portrait Gallery Project Research Log & Meta‑Reflec‑ tion Requirements

Overview

Use this link to access the gallery and to review the current information: https://legacywomenwriters.org/portrait‑gallery/.

Complete a Research Log for each of your three authors, associating each research discovery (whether or not it proves helpful) with a credible source. For help, use the “Best Bets” document. Remember that your work extends beyond our class; you are contributing to the field of literary studies.

You will be researching to update information in each author’s portrait:

• DATES: Verify information for dates and provide source information for either your verification or any discrepancies that you find in your log.

• IMAGE: If an image appears in the gallery, there is no need to verify the source or to write anything in your log because permissions would have been granted previously. If there is no image, attempt to find one from a reputable source and add this information to the log. Be sure to record bibliographic information in your author’s log about where you attempted to find the image, even if you are unsuccessful.

• PERTINENT ARCHIVES: (1) Check to make sure that portraits’ links work for any listed archive. If they do not work, find the repository (library, historical organization, museum, etc.) and search for an up- dated link to the papers in that repository’s site. If you are unsuccessful, What We Want Students to Remember:… 23

do not worry about it! Try your best, recording your attempts in your author’s log. (2) Use Archive Grid to find other archives for your author. Search at the top by the author’s name in quotation marks, i.e. “Alice Dunbar Nelson.” Do not list the same repository twice in your log. Links to the repositories are provided by Archive Grid when you click on the archive’s title. You only need to copy and paste this link (with your explanation) into your log. If there are multiple “hits,” choose only the top five repositories, as organized in the list. Again, try your best and record your attempts.

• BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES: For continuity between universities, use the JSTOR database to look for bibliographic references (secondary research in Legacy) for your author’s portrait.

Research Log: Complete one per portrait.

Author [Write the name and link of your author’s portrait here.]

Item Bibliography Description Note whether Cite each source Explain what you found. If the source this information that you engage was not helpful, explain why. If the pertains to dates, in MLA format, source provided new or different image, perti- whether or not it information that would potentially nent archives, proves valuable. contribute to an update in the gal- or bibliographic lery, use bolded text to highlight your references. finding(s).

(Add more rows as necessary.) The New Americanist 04/2020 24

Meta‑Reflection: Complete one for all three authors.

In a collaboratively written group reflection (1–2 paragraphs), discuss how the purpose and scope of this project expands upon and/or complicates our readings and discussions about historically marginalized writers. Use these questions to guide your reflection:

• What connections did you make between the authors your researched? • What surprised you about your research process and/or what did you learn from engaging this process? • How might you apply what you learned from this project to future research assignments, within or outside of the English discipline? • How did this project expand upon our course readings and objectives related to recovery and reform in American women’s literature? • To what extent did your virtual collaboration with students at a different university develop your research process? (Compare your response to Phase One.) What We Want Students to Remember:… 25

Bibliography

Berry, Sarah. “Students in the Archives: A Short Report on a Significant Learning Experience,” Currents in Teaching and Learning 3, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 33–41. Biesecker, Barbara. “Of Historicity, Rhetoric: The Archive as Scene of Invention.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 124–31. Brauer, Stephen. “Critical Educators and Active Citizens: Pedagogy and Critical Praxis.” American Literature 89, no. 2 (June 2017): 379–95. Buehl, Jonathan, Tamar Chute, and Anne Fields. “Training in the Archives: Archival Research as Professional Developments,” College Composition and Communication 64, no. 2 (December 2012): 274–305. Burton, Antoinette, ed. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Callahan, Sarah Alice. Wynema: A Child of the Forest, 1891. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Gaillet, Lynée Lewis. “(Per)Forming Archival Research Methodologies,” College Composition and Communication 64, no. 1 (September 2012): 35–58. Gaul, Theresa Strouth. “Recovering Recovery: Early American Women and Legacy’s Future,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 26, no. 2 (2009): 262–283. Gotkin, Kevin, et al. “Undergraduates in the Archives,” Archive Journal (February 2012). Helton, Laura, Justin Leroy, Max A. Mishler, Samantha Seeley, and Shauna Sweeny, “The Question of Recovery: An Introduction,” Social Text 33, no. 4 (December 2015): 1–18. Hendrickson, Lois. “Teaching with Artifacts and Special Collections,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 136–40. Hendry, Julia. “Primary Sources in K‑12 Education: Opportunities for Archives,” The American Archivist 70, no. 1 (Spring‑Summer 2007): 114–29. Kraus, Magia G. “Undergraduates in the Archives: Using an Assessment Rubric to Measure Learning,” The American Archivist 73, no. 2 (Fall/ Winter 2012): 507–34. The New Americanist 04/2020 26

Library of Virginia, Library of Virginia, “Transcribe: Making History,” https://www.virginiamemory.com/transcribe/about. McMullen, Kevin, ed. Fanny Fern in the New York Ledger, https://fannyfern.org/. Ortner, Johanna. “Lost No More: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves,” Common‑place: The Journal of Early American Life (2018), http://commonplace.online/article/ lost‑no‑more‑recovering‑frances‑ellen‑watkins‑harpers‑forest‑leaves/. “Portraits of American Women Writers,” https://legacywomenwriters. org/portrait‑gallery/. Robbins, Sarah Ruffing.Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross‑Cultural Teaching. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Rockenbach, Barbara. “Archives, Undergraduates, and Inquiry‑Based Learning: Case Studies from Yale University Library,” The American Archivist 74, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 297–311. Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, 2nd edition. London: SAGE Publications, 2007. Shafer, Gregory. “Re‑Envisioning Research,” The English Journal 89, no. 1 (Sept. 1999): 45–50. Stymeist, David. “Students Teaching Texts to Students: Integrating LdL and Digital Archives,” College Teaching 63 (2015): 46–51. Tuttle, Jennifer. “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Two Legacy Roundtable Discussions,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 26, no. 2 (2009): 198–241. Williams, Catharine Read. Fall River: An Authentic Narrative, 1832. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Wolfe, Joanna. Team Writing: A Guide to Working in Groups. New York: Macmillan Higher Education, 2017. Zitkála‑Šá. American Indian Stories, 1921. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010. What We Want Students to Remember:… 27

Notes

1 Sandra A. Zagarell, quoted in Jennifer Tuttle, “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Two Legacy Roundtable Discussions,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 26, no. 2 (2009): 198-241, 228. 2 Lois Hendrickson, “Teaching with Artifacts and Special Collections,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 136-40; Julia Hendry, “Primary Sources in K-12 Education: Opportunities for Archives,” The American Archivist 70, no. 1 (Spring- Summer 2007): 114-129; and Barbara Rockenbach, “Archives, Undergraduates, and Inquiry-Based Learning: Case Studies from Yale University Library,” The American Archivist 42, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2011): 297-311. 3 Rockenbach, 311. 4 Ibid. 5 Sarah Ruffing Robbins,Learning Legacies: Archive to Action Through Women’s Cross-Cultural Teaching (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 17. 6 Sarah Berry, “Students in the Archives: A Short Report on a Significant Learning Experience,” Currents in Teaching and Literature 3, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 33-41, 39. 7 Kevin Gotkin, et al. “Undergraduates in the Archives,” Archive Journal (February 2012). This roundtable includes perspectives from Kevin Gotkin (PhD student), Benjamin Hebblethwaite (Associate Professor, Department of Languages, Literature, and Culture at the University of Florida), Timothy Powell (Director of Native American Projects for the American Philosophical Society), Suzy Taraba (Head Special Collections and University Archivist at Wesleyan University), and Sarah Werner (Undergraduate Program Director at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre). 8 Robbins, Learning Legacies, 231. 9 Gregory Shafer, “Re-Envisioning Research,” The English Journal 8, no 1 (September 1999): 45-50, 45-6. 10 David Stymeist, “Students Teaching Texts to Students: Integrating LdL and Digital Archives,” College Teaching 63, no. 2 (2015): 45-6, 46. 11 Tuttle, Looking Back, 198-241. 12 Theresa Strouth Gaul, “Recovering Recovery: Early American Women andLegacy’ s Future,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 26, no. 2 (2009): 262-283, 274. 13 Ibid., 269. 14 Robbins, Learning Legacies, 13. 15 Antoinette Burton, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 9. 16 Laura Helton, Justin Leroy, Max A. Mishler, Samantha Seeley, and Shauna Sweeny, “The Question of Recovery: An Introduction,” Social Text 33, no. 4 (December 2015): 1-18, 1. 17 Ibid., 2-3. 18 Ibid. 19 “Portraits of American Women Writers,” https://legacywomenwriters.org/portrait- gallery/ (October 29, 2019). 20 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, 2nd ed. (London: Sage Publications, 2007): 12-16, 22. 21 Robbins, Learning Legacies, 17. 22 Biesecker, Barbara. “Of Historicity, Rhetoric: The Archive as Scene of Invention.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 156. 23 Catharine Read Williams, Fall River: An Authentic Narrative, 1832 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Sarah Alice Callahan, Wynema: A Child of the Forest, 1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); and Johanna Ortner, “Lost No More: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves,” Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life (2018), http://commonplace.online/article/lost-no-more-recovering- frances-ellen-watkins-harpers-forest-leaves/ (October 29, 2019). 24 Library of Virginia, “Transcribe: Making History,” https://www.virginiamemory.com/ transcribe/about (October 29, 2019) and Kevin McMullen, ed. Fanny Fern in the New York Ledger, https://fannyfern.org/ (October 29, 2019). The New Americanist 04/2020 28

25 Joanna Wolfe, Team Writing: A Guide to Working in Groups (New York: Macmillan Higher Education, 2017). 26 Magia Kraus, “Undergraduates in the Archives: Using an Assessment Rubric to Measure Learning,” The American Archivist 73, no 2 (Fall/Winter 2012): 507-34; Gotkin, et al.; and Hendrickson. 27 Sarah Werner, quoted in Gotkin, et al. 28 Johanna Ortner, “Lost No More: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves,” Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life (2018), http://commonplace. online/article/lost-no-more-recovering-frances-ellen-watkins-harpers-forest-leaves/ (October 29, 2019). 29 Zitkála-Šá, American Indian Stories, 1921 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010). 30 Robbins, Learning Legacies, 13. 31 Lynée Lewis Gaillet, “(Per)Forming Archival Research Methodologies,” College Composition and Communication 64, no 1 (September 2012): 35-58, 39. 32 Jonathan Buehl, Tamar Chute, and Anne Fields, “Training in the Archives: Archival Research as Professional Development,” College Composition and Communication 64, no. 2 (December 2012): 274-305, 278. 33 Gaillet, 39. 34 Robbins, 231. 35 Stephen Brauer, “Critical Educators and Active Citizens: Pedagogy and Critical Practice,” American Literature 89, no 2 (June 2017): 379-95, 379, 390. 36 Shafer, “Re-envisioning Research,” 36. Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold in the Antebellum U.S. Derek Kane O’Leary

ABSTRACT In the largely masculine realm of early U.S. historical societies, it can be hard to glimpse the work of women, whose hands were often present, if obscured, in the crafting of the nation’s historical archives. In the ownership, editing, and transfer of historical papers by certain women to archives in this period, we encounter one of the many spaces where the seemingly sharp line between gendered private and public spheres becomes blurry. The work of Deborah Norris Logan (1761– 1839), the first woman nominated to membership in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, reveals at once the importance and the com- plexity of antebellum women’s engagement with the historical record. This articles examines how she contributed to the major institutions for historical preservation in antebellum Philadelphia, with the aim to encourage more research into the many ways in which antebellum women engaged with the preservation, commemoration, and writing of history.

Key words: archives, gender, antebellum U.S., American Philosophi- cal Society, Historical Society of Pennsylvania The New Americanist 04/2020 30

Introduction: Historical societies in the antebellum United States were masculine spaces. In every state where a major historical society emerged, its members were drawn from the upper echelons of politics, letters, law, science, medicine, and commerce. Nearly without exception, these were men. Working in tandem with its respective state, each society functioned as a historical establishment that directed the social capital of its members to the collection of materials deemed essential to telling the state’s distinctive past. Often, this meant inscribing the state’s history as the central, or at least a crucial, component of the nation’s history. To this end, historical societies tended to collect papers that had been produced by and about men, documenting their exploits in exploration, war, politics, settlement, production, and trade. The very recovery of a document or artifact was often depicted as a masculine, patriotic act of salvage against the rav- ages of time. Within archives, men met, read, borrowed materials, and conceived of histories for their family, town, state, and nation. As these men insisted on the civic necessity of preserving their history, year after year they celebrated their own patriotism: annual discourses, anniversa- ries of historical events, and the meetings to manage archival affairs were rituals run by men; when historical society officers died, they were eulo- gized by other members—archived, in a sense. Across state and national boundaries, the movement of documents and volumes knit together networks of men committed to building archives. This fostered vast fraternal communities working to enshrine their members’ respective pasts. In this masculine realm, it can be hard to glimpse the work of antebellum women, whose hands were often present, if obscured, in crafting and working with the nation’s expanding historical archives. From the vantage point of most historical societies, women could support these institutions only by transmitting property deemed vulnerable while under their care into the secure domain of the archive, where members could superintend the preservation, curation, and rigorous work of researching and writing history.1 This article considers a woman whose engagement with archives from the 1810s to the 1830s challenged that dynamic and blurred the gendered line that typically cordoned off the preservation of public documents as men’s work: Deborah Norris Logan (1761–1839). Deborah Norris was the only daughter in a prominent Philadelphian Quaker family that traced its lineage to the settlement of Pennsylvania, where her grandfather Isaac Norris was a merchant and provincial assem- bly member. She was educated in the new public girls’ school founded in 1755 by Anthony Benezet, a Huguenot French expatriate and leading Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 31

anti‑slavery advocate in colonial Pennsylvania.2 Mainly though, as her daughter later memorialized, she learned at home “with such interest and industry that I have heard her say she gained more in a short time than she had ever done at school.”3 In 1781, she married the physician, diplomat, and politician George Logan, with whom she moved to Stenton, his family’s suburban mansion in Philadelphia, where she resided until her death.4 There, she uncovered and spent years transcribing and editing the correspondence of her husband’s grandfather, James Logan (1674– 1751), who was a leading figure in colonial Pennsylvania, “the companion of [William] Penn and the friend of the Indians,” as her contemporaries saw him.5 When George died in 1821, she came into possession of both Stenton and the family’s voluminous papers from the colonial period.6 In 1818, Deborah Norris glued an ornate calling card from “G.Washington” into her diary, his name scrawled across the faded rectangular paper, with a brief explanatory note written beneath it in her own hand.7 It had been left for her husband by the president, likely when Philadelphia served as the temporary national capital in the 1790s. Deborah Norris was like the many women in the antebellum U.S. who, marginalized from much of public life, took on the household archival burden of preserving such relics and a broader range of genealogical and historical material in their homes. But she was exceptional in the extent of her work uncovering, laboriously arranging, editing, archiving, and then managing the fate of her husband’s family papers, which contained voluminous correspondence with William Penn and official records of colonial Pennsylvania. Through this work, she became widely noted within Philadelphia for her knowledge of local history and the first of only two women to be nominated to membership in an antebellum historical society.8 Beyond her own historical work, Deborah Norris Logan’s experience at the archival threshold of the American Philosophical Society (APS) and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) is significant. Although her influence on these institutions was far greater than that of most women, her engagement with them reveals the flexible terms on which certain antebellum women could participate in the process of building the nation’s historical record in this period. This casts light on the unexamined space between women’s domestic control of manuscripts and the nom- inally public archives to which historical establishments hoped to draw these materials. This article aims to revise the typical scholarly depiction of archival work and historical societies in the early U.S. as strictly masculine undertakings. Rather, the movement of historical materials from The New Americanist 04/2020 32

household to archive provided opportunities for some women to negoti- ate the terms of donating private papers and influence the historical materials available to a wider public.

II. Between household and archive The women who survived prominent fathers and husbands in the early U.S. often came into possession of private documents linked to major public events, which could span from the early colonial period through the Revolution and national founding.9 In these years, historical societies formed in order to preserve and make use of those papers, which their advocates insisted was an important patriotic act. By the early antebellum period, alongside the broader rise of nationalism this swell of historical preservation became a floodtide. By the 1820s, the movement to preserve and commemorate the nation’s colonial and Revolutionary history received greater popular, institutional, and state support than at any point before the Civil War.10 In this context, the number of historical societies, support for them from their respective states, and archival collections and publications burgeoned.11 To function, however, these new institutions depended on the widespread movement of privately held historical materials from households to archives. In the ownership, arrangement, and transfer of historical papers by women to archives in this period, the seemingly sharp line between gendered private and public spheres became blurry.12 Over the past quarter‑century, scholars working at the intersection of historiography, intellectual history, and gender studies have revised our understanding of women’s influence on the writing and preservation of history in the early U.S. Nina Baym’s intensive study of this question explored women’s publications in a range of historical writing, from monographs to poetry.13 She wrote that many authors in these genres “were demolishing whatever imaginative and intellectual boundaries their culture may have been trying to maintain between domestic and public worlds.”14 Meanwhile, Susan Stabile has brought to light women’s domestic genealogical work in the early U.S., using unpublished sources to portray “the house, and the female mind, as locales of knowledge and memory.”15 Deborah Norris’s historical editing remained betwixt these spaces, neither “demolishing” the line between gendered spheres by publishing her historical work nor confining her engagement with the past to her home at Stenton. Instead, she made her edited selections of the Logan family’s papers available for local archives but not for publication. In her complicated contribution to these institutions, she remained at the Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 33

threshold of Pennsylvania’s archives and at arms’ length from its historical establishment. In Deborah Norris’s Philadelphia and across the expanding U.S., the movement of papers from the precarity of the domestic sphere to the security of an archive was presented as a civic responsibility. In the wake of historical societies in Massachusetts and New York, the APS (founded in 1743) established its own Committee on History, Moral Science, and General Literature in 1815—generally shortened to History Committee by its members. Like those early institutions, it imagined its archive as a national repository that would include historical materials gathered from across the nation; some ambitious members even considered gathering colonial papers from the Plantation Office in England years before other historical societies and state legislatures considered doing so.16 A group of powerful APS members took charge of the new committee, including William Tilgham, Chief Justice of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court; legal scholar William Rawle; leading Philadelphia physician, Caspar Wistar, and Portuguese scientist and lead diplomat to the U.S., Abbé Correa. The French‑born polymath Peter Stephen du Ponceau, the corresponding secretary for the committee, wrote widely to influential Americans in different states who might donate important historical materials, including to Thomas Jefferson. In the set of tropes familiar to antebellum boosters of historical preservation, Du Ponceau explained to him that, “one of the principal objects of the Committee is to rescue from oblivion a great multitude of interesting tracts of the early history of our country, which at present lie scattered in private hands, trusted only to perishable memorials or to the more perishable memory of man.”17 Private hands and private memories were sites where historical materials decayed, Du Ponceau argued, and only in centralized archives could they be preserved. In tandem with such broader calls to move vulnerable materials from the domestic realm to the archive, the APS hoped to celebrate the colony’s founder as the emblem of Pennsylvania’s distinctive history. Historical societies were especially concerned with securing materials that documented their state’s colonial settlement and that painted a compelling portrait of a founding patriarch. For instance, the New York Historical Society (from 1804) attempted to redeem the reputation of the Dutch founders of New Netherlands; the Rhode Island Historical Society (from 1822) celebrated Roger Williams, the Maine Historical Society (also 1822) tried to redeem the ill‑fated 1607 settlement of Sagadahoc under Sir John Popham, and the Georgia Historical Society (in 1839) argued for the historical significance James Oglethorpe. The New Americanist 04/2020 34

In Philadelphia, William Penn was placed atop the state’s historical pantheon. However, in the eyes of the Historical Committee, the archive of the colony’s founder seemed deficient. Du Ponceau wrote to a prominent local merchant, Samuel Coates, in 1816 to lament the especially sorry state of Penn’s manuscripts. “No body had yet thought of collection with holy zeal the precious relicks of a man to whom Heathen, Greece and Rome would have raised Altars. Many of the memorials he has left behind him are suffered to moulder away and perish scatered in the hands of various individuals.”18 As in other states over the following decades, preservation of historical materials was a means to refute the claim that Americans neglected their past, a regular invective from European travelers and critics. In this sense, archiving the papers of a colonial patriarch such as Penn defended national identity. But venerating Penn through his papers also served the particular interests of Pennsylvania’s inchoate historical establishment. Penn helped to distinguish Pennsylvania from other states and enabled some of the living to perform a sort of collective genealogy that linked their imagined historical community to one distinctive figure. As the first institution to promote the collection of Pennsylvania’s historical materials, the APS hoped to situate Penn at the center of their state’s history—and colonial Pennsylvania where it “deservedly stands in the foreground” of the nation’s history, in Du Ponceau’s words.19 For Du Ponceau and the rest of the Committee, the Logan household at Stenton held essential materials for illuminating Pennsylvania’s colonial period and Penn’s life in particular. “Biography of James Logan WANTED,” the Committee emphasized from its earliest meetings.20 In the spring of 1815, just weeks after she started the diary she would keep for the next quarter‑century, Deborah Norris was at home in Stenton. One day it was her “Lott to put the Library to rights.21” She recorded her excitement at having, “discovered in a very old box a treasure of–Old Papers–many Books of Letters. James Logan to William Penn, Folios of Letters. __From Hannah Penn, and many others!”22 Just a month later, two members of the APS Committee visited the Logans at Stenton to announce their undertaking and, she recorded in her diary, “applied to Dr. L. in their name for any information which he might possess of the early state of the Province.”23 Apparently, the Logans did not inform the Committee of Deborah Norris’s recent uncovery. The Logans were popular figures in Philadelphia, however, and over the following year the news spread to the APS Committee about the “treasure of historical documents” that they had in their hands. Writing to George in 1816, Du Ponceau flattered him that, “the honorable fame Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 35

of your family, of that of Mrs. Logan, of the ancestors of your children on all sides, is intimately connected with the objects and endeavours of our Historical Committee.” This, the Committee intended, should be “transmitted in its purity to posterity, and they will spare no efforts to obtain this end.” Although the coveted papers were held in the hands of the Logans in their private residence at Stenton, the APS suggested that the papers remained at risk there and that their institution’s archive had a rightful claim to them on behalf of the public. The Logan family papers, Du Ponceau assured George, would be received “with thankfulness, not for ourselves, but as Trustees for the public, for who we will preserve them with religious care.”24 The Committee argued that these papers—as historical sources with almost reliquary qualities—could only serve their proper civic function and receive the treatment they deserved within the APS archives. The Logans were initially enthusiastic to contribute to that collection, which was expanding rapidly as the Committee leveraged its social capital to promote donations.25 Yet, they intended to do so on their own terms. Writing on their behalf, Deborah Norris informed John Vaughan, a wine merchant who became a constant advocate of the APS, about her plans to assist the Committee. “My leisure has been chiefly employed for some time past in endeavoring to preserve for Posterity memento’s of the age that has gone by,” she explained, which she was transcribing page by page from “the great mass of old Records and papers” left by the Logan family at Stenton. She imagined forming “a Cabinet of them which might be of great advantage to elucidate the early history of Pennsylvania.” The “Gentlemen forming the Committee” would be welcome to visit, access, and make copies of these documents—as if visiting an archive. For the moment, she maintained these boundaries and expressed no plan to convey these original papers or her transcriptions to the APS archive.26 However, her interest grew in sharing the Logan papers with the APS and a broader public. Later that spring, Caspar Wistar, who was a leading physician and Chair of Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, could report to the Committee that the APS would be able to publish portions of the Logan papers transcribed by Deborah Norris.27 By 1817, she was arranging the mass of disorganized papers in earnest, transcribing selections, and making editorial comments on them. The Committee sent representatives and regular correspondence to Stenton to check on her progress. In late 1817 her first major transfer of documents arrived at the APS archive, comprising selected transcriptions of Logan’s correspondence with Penn and others, original manuscripts of proceedings from The New Americanist 04/2020 36

Pennsylvania’s colonial council, a cash book kept by Penn, and sundry other documents.28 Although these papers all descended through her husband’s family, Deborah Norris became their primary custodian, and both the treatment and fate of the Logan collection were increasingly in her hands. The Committee sought the family papers of George Logan, whom they encouraged to join the Committee, though he never did. While George was the social and physical intermediary between Stenton and the APS archive, Deborah Norris performed the intellectual and editorial labor of arranging them, deciding which documents to transcribe and adding editorial notes with historical context and commentary. She eagerly undertook this solitary work, which led to her major contributions to the APS archive. At intervals from 1817 until 1820, she produced three further volumes of transcriptions and an appendix, which George Logan conveyed to the Committee. In all, it amounted to around 1000 pages. The Committee’s recording secretary, in turn, made a copy of each volume for the APS to retain before returning the original transcriptions to Stenton.29 In the process, her reputation in Philadelphia as an important historian grew, and she was gratified at one point in the editorial process to note that, “the historical committee of the P. Society have mentioned my work with much approbation.”30 Deborah Norris and the Committee were at odds over the fate of the volumes, however. Especially as her husband’s health deteriorated, she determined how—or whether—the volumes of the complete correspondence between Logan and Penn would be published. The Committee anticipated publishing the materials in some form under the aegis of the APS. They repeatedly sought confirmation from Deborah Norris about whether they could move forward with this potentially lucrative project, which they imagined filling two 800‑page volumes, published by them “in pursuance of their general design of throwing light on the Hist. of Pennsylvania.”31 This would have been the first major publication of historical materials by the APS. She hesitated to see the work, including her editorial comments, published. Upon starting to arrange a new selection of correspondence in 1817, she wavered on the proper location for her books, “which if not to be published, I mean for the Loganian library.” This was a large collection of books from her husband’s family that had been donated to the Library Company in Philadelphia; although she never did so, to add her transcriptions to that collection—rather than publish them as the product of her own editorship—would have folded her work inconspicuously into the Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 37

larger legacy of Logan’s family.32 She and her husband had consented previously to the APS publishing the volumes in some form, but as his health declined severely in the spring of 1820, publication was far from her mind. When a number of Committee members visited her to propose publishing her work by subscription in two volumes, she objected to the rear- rangement of her four‑volume series.33 The prospect of publishing lapsed by the end of 1820, and when George Logan died the following spring, Deborah Norris was bereft: “There seems to be nothing in store for me in this world, but what will [sic] loose by comparison with the Past.”34 Aside from a eulogistic sketch of her husband that wrote soon afterward, she turned away from the intensive editing of historical papers and interest in sharing them beyond the APS archive and her library at Stenton. In the years before her husband’s death, Deborah Norris’s engagement with the historical materials uncovered at Stenton and with the Historical Committee of the APS revealed her complicated sense of where these papers belonged, in what form they should be preserved, and for which readers. On one hand, she shared many of the assumptions that moved the Historical Committee, from her conviction about the importance of preserving American history to her sense of the grander arc of history that these documents attested to. Logan uncovered the masses of colonial papers and following the formation of the Historical Committee she undertook to arrange and edit them on her own initiative and according to her own plan for. Her abiding belief in the importance of preserving history, as well as anxiety about its loss, inspired this project. Opening her first diary in 1815, she mused, “I have frequently reflected on the prob- ability that a great mass of curious and interesting facts and information are lost to Posterity from a want of Record.”35 In her decades‑long diary and daily exchanges sharing reminiscences and historical anecdotes with other Philadelphians, she understood herself as a chronicler, contributing to the public’s knowledge about the city’s past. Like so many antebellum manuscript collectors and historians, preserving this local past also reflected her belief in the exceptional future of the nation. In one poem in 1820, recorded in her diary soon after the comple- tion of her editorial work on Logan’s papers, she sighed, “Whilst years, like waves, oblivious roll,/The future vail’d, the present life/Not worth enjoyment or delight,/The Past–a treasure to the soul.” Yet, in tandem with this backward look, she saw the progressive arc of the nation’s history:

For I have marked an empires birth, Have seen its Constellation rise The New Americanist 04/2020 38

With radience glancing o’er the Earth. Daring the Sun with stead eyes, I saw her Eagles mount the skies.36

In this soaring vision of American history, she placed Pennsylvania’s past as a distinctively compelling part. Introducing the first volume of her transcriptions of Logan’s correspondence, she explained her approach to the colonial papers at Stenton:

In contemplating the sudden rise of Pennsylvania to her present state of wealth, strength, and resources, the mind becomes curious to trace the steps of such prosperity. I flatter myself that I am performing an acceptable service to my fellow‑citizens in discovering to their view some of the remote rills and fountains which are the sources of the majestic river which we now survey.37

She depicted her state’s past as a panoramic landscape that the living could survey, be inspired by, and imagine themselves within—a historical lens which she shared with the Historical Committee members and, a few years later, the new Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Although Deborah Norris was eager to make this past more visible by salvaging, transcribing, and archiving the papers at Stenton, she remained ambivalent about actually publishing the collection. From the start, she was unsure about publication. The project suited her fondness for seclusion in Stenton’s library and interest in her city’s colonial and revolutionary history, which she eagerly recounted with friends. But it ran against her uncertainty about whether to place herself as an editor‑historian before a reading public. In her diary, which she often claimed was unfit to be read, she regularly demeaned the quality and interest of her writing and the “undignified state of [her] own mind.”38 As she finished her work on the correspondence in early 1820 and the prospect of publication loomed, she wavered even more. “I am in an early state of mind about it at present time,” she recorded in her diary,

and yet when I think of the fastidiousness of readers of the present time, and the ill natured severity of criticism, I must look forward to censure instead of Commendation…well, be it so. The work however has furnished me amusement as well as employment, and I flatter myself that some few will be obliged to me for preserving the records of the time that is past.39 Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 39

Despite her confidence in the importance of preserving these materials, her anxiety about how the volumes would be received was enough to defer their publication well beyond her lifetime (until its publication in two volumes, with various additions of materials and editorial comments placed alongside her own, by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1870).40 Similarly, she decided against publishing the biographical sketch of her “beloved Dr. Logan” that she authored the year after his death. “I have not the vanity,” she left in her diary, “to think it will be thought much of by any at present, or have the chance of being handed down to Posterity:—but the writing of it has been a satisfaction to myself; it has been a willing tribute paid by affection to his honored memory. I have wished for talent, that he might not be forgotten–but vain is the wish.”41 Deborah Norris hoped to preserve the past, especially the patrilineal line she had married into, from James Logan through her husband, but to herself and others she persistently questioned her ability to do so. In selecting, transcribing, and lending certain documents to the APS, Deborah Norris performed the civic responsibility that the Historical Committee called for while exercising exceptional control over the movement of historical materials between her household and this archive. She and her husband allowed the Committee to copy her selections of these colonial papers and keep a small number of manuscripts, but Deborah Norris ultimately objected to their publication. Rather than safeguard- ed by the APS or reproduced for a broader reading public, the originals belonged at Stenton, a refuge which she poetically described elsewhere as, “My Peaceful Home! amids’t who’s dark‑green/And sylvan scenes my waning life is spent/Nor without Blessings and desired content—.”42 Over the next few years, however, she would continue to navigate the uncertain threshold between her control of these papers within this domestic space at Stenton and the appeal for them made on behalf of the public by the men who formed the historical establishment in Philadelphia.

III: Belonging and Pennsylvania’s Historical Establishment By 1825, the APS Historical Committee had lapsed, and the HSP established itself as the major institution for gathering the state’s historical materials and narrating its past. Like the Historical Committee, its officers sought to obtain and publish the Logan family papers still held by Deborah Norris. In doing so, the HSP tendered a measure of belonging in the archival community they were rapidly expanding. But her beliefs about where these papers belonged, whether their preservation should lead to publication, and what role she should occupy in relationship The New Americanist 04/2020 40

to Pennsylvania’s archive and historical establishment all kept her on the archival threshold during her lifetime. This new institution included several members of the defunct APS Committee and to inspire donations of historical materials they invoked a similar imagery of ruination and salvage and envisioned a similar narrative of Pennsylvania’s exceptional history. Like the other historical societies chartered in the 1820s, Pennsylvania’s was conceived with the mission of “elucidating the history of Pennsylvania.”43 In this familiar romantic trope, the living cast light on the dark recesses of history, such that they could be illuminated within the historical record. At first, they met in the rooms of the local phrenological society, lacking their own permanent physical space to secure historical papers. They did not, however, hesi- tate to imagine one and call on citizens to fill it. “All should be excited to throw into one receptable whatever they possess of original or instruc- tive matter–not to be locked up until it moulders into oblivion–but to be subject to the immediate process of careful investigation,” announced the Society’s founder and president, William Rawle, who has also been a founder of the APS Historical Committee.44 More so than the cosmo- politan community and scientific focus of the APS, the HSP positioned itself as a crucial civic institution that would serve Pennsylvania. Its officers urged citizens to “feel a common, it may be said a patriotic, interest in contributing to the general purpose.”45 By contrast with the APS Committee, the HSP built a much larger and lasting network of members and deployed a collecting agenda more focused on documenting the distinctive history of their state. Among the bevy of historical societies founded in the 1820s, the HSP may have been the most explicit about the historical narrative that its archive would document. A common claim among early historical societies was that they simply gathered, and did not tell, history. The architects of these archives posited the existence of a finite historical record that they sought to comprehensively gather; posterity and the future historian would make what use of these materials as they saw fit. Advertising its first volume of Memoirs in 1825, the HSP insisted that, “the Society does not undertake to compose a history; its desire is to collect materials for history.”46 In practice, however, its officers predetermined the contours of its archival collections based upon their notions of what their state’s history should look like. Upon its founding, Rawle urged the formation of ten standing committees, composed of seven to twelve members each, which would focus on different components of the state’s history: “1. On the national, origin, early difficulties, and domestic habits of the first Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 41

settlers. 2. On the biography of the founder of Pennsylvania and his family, and the early settlers….” The other committees aimed to document exceptional individuals; Indian history and culture; the growth of colonial Pennsylvania, including its legal, literary, and medical accomplishments, and, finally, “the progress and present state of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce.”47 These committees emplotted Pennsylvania’s history and the progressive arc that Americans could trace through its archive, from humble founding, through expansion, and into its recent accomplishments and prospects. Upon this stage, the HSP summoned Penn as the hero. Through its circulars to members, the HSP laid out collecting goals that aligned with this historical vision of the state, which they asked their expanding membership to fill in with archival materials. The HSP was even more intent than the APS to gather the papers of William Penn, whom they revered as a distinctive founder within the exceptional history of their state. The corresponding secretary of the APS Historical Committee, Du Ponceau, became an HSP member.48 In a published essay on Penn, Du Ponceau claimed that he “stands the first among the lawgivers whose names and deeds are recorded in history…. The character of William Penn alone sheds a never fading lustre upon our history. No other state in this union can boast of such an illustrious founder.”49 This hagiography of Penn served such Pennsylvanians’ aim to tell an exceptional history of their state, whose significance transcend- ed their own borders and had a special place in the nation’s history. The HSP hoped to illustrate a colonial history for Pennsylvania distinct and from those to its north and south—defined by peaceful industry, virtue, and fair relations with American Indians, rather than violent expropria- tion, greed, and religious intolerance, as they saw it. “We shall trace, step by step,” Rawle promised the historical society in his inaugural address, “[Pennsylvania’s] own internal peace and order and happiness in the out- set; its abhorrence of all violence and vice.”50 Indeed, some members located Penn and their state as exceptional within an even grander history of nations. As Pennsylvania philanthropist Edward Bettle read before the historical society in 1826, in the years since “the great sage and lawgiver of Pennsylvania landed on her shores, from the humble and unpretend- ing efforts of this youthful member of the commonwealth of nations have arisen many of those plans of benevolence which are now adopted zealously and prosecuted by the most enlightened philanthropists of all countries.”51 Penn was the focal point of the collecting aims and rituals of the HSP. Praise for his extraordinary virtue echoed year after year in Society The New Americanist 04/2020 42

meetings and public events.52 At HSP meetings, salvaged letters and sundry other documents from Penn were regularly read aloud to the assem- bled in a sort of regular, staid historical recreation; others were published in the Society’s Memoirs and circulated to members. Thus Penn moved from an original document in a house, to a public performance, to a published volume for a wider—if still exclusive—audience. Collecting Penn’s record inspired a wider range of activities, which both extended the historical society’s network and enshrined Penn at its symbolic center. The exact location in Philadelphia of the famed 1682 treaty “between the pa- cific founder and the Indian natives,” which “in all its features, has no parallel in history,” excited ongoing debate, and Du Ponceau spent years leading a committee meant to determine it.53 The HSP called on the state’s House of Representatives to let “ancient papers” lying around in state offices be examined, “from which some useful precedents and principles might be gathered.”54 Its officers also sought Penn’s papers over- seas, such as those held at his grandchildren’s mansion, Stoke Park, in Buckinghamshire, England. The Society’s correspondent there explained to John Penn—the proprietor of most of Pennsylvania upon the out- break of the Revolution—that, “the great repository of his grandfather’s papers” was in Philadelphia, where he should send selections, especially “anything authentic representing the interesting relations between savage and civil owners of the soil, while these lived in a state of fraternity.”55 Penn, responding from the Isle of Portland, where he was governor, was glad to help. Soon afterward, he and three other English descendants of William Penn were nominated honorary members. Over the years, sundry artifacts related to Penn were donated to their archive. From 1827, the HSP derived its emblem from a donated silver coin that depicted Penn shaking hands with an American Indian, the words “By Deeds of Peace” engraved on it.56 In 1845, the Society’s council of officers received a lock of Penn’s hair encased in a ring from one of his descendants, which they resolved that the president must wear at all future meetings.57 Beyond these clubby rituals, the HSP orchestrated larger public celebrations of Penn, such as a 200th birthday in 1844 and a 170th anniversary of his landing in Philadelphia, dated to November 8th, in 1852. To the large crowd that evening at the United States Hotel for an eight‑course meal, one orator marveled that,

In the short space of eighty years, Penn’s woodland was converted into a cultivated country, rivalling, in some districts, the husbandry of Belgium. Savages were made to yield their land willingly, for a fair equivalent, to the Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 43

industrious settler. And civilization (with brotherly love) was established in all our borders, solely by the mild influence of Quaker rule.58

From the society’s founding through the antebellum, its collecting practices and rituals sustained a narrative that remained largely consistent: unlike in other colonies, Penn spread civilization through a consen- sual process with indigenous peoples, leading to a prosperous and virtu- ous community. Within such a historical consciousness and culture, any scrap of paper lingering from Penn could substantiated a narrative that linked the local into a story of national import. The HSP hoped that the Logan‑Penn correspondence could be placed among the first and most significant pages of this history. Rawle delivered his inaugural address at the University of Pennsylvania in late 1825, to a packed audience “of citizens and strangers, including many ladies.”59 He announced that, “there is still reason to believe that many private documents are still in existence, which would present to us, in colors strong and true, the enlightening, vivifying, and chastening power of [the founder of Pennsylvania’s] genius on all around him.”60 Such correspondence would serve not only to document Penn’s life and colonial world but to embellish a portrait of him that would show the general character of colonial Pennsylvania. As former members of the APS Historical Committee knew well, a collection of manuscripts from and about Penn remained at Stenton, archived in Deborah Norris’s domestic “cabinet” but well outside the centralized archive they hoped to build. Even before forming its committees or announcing its undertaking to a broader public, the officers of the newly founded historical society appealed to her for the manuscript correspondence in the summer of 1825.61 They reasoned at a meeting beforehand that Logan would be ready to transfer her selections of Logan’s correspondence with Penn, “which she has collected and arranged, in order for its publication by this society.”62 By that point, Deborah Norris thought otherwise. When her neph- ew Isaac Norris dropped in at Stenton on behalf of the HSP the following week about publishing her volumes of transcribed manuscripts, she balked. “I asked a little time to reflect upon what I had but to do,” she recorded in her diary, which fended off the HSP request for the moment. Although she and her husband had discussed publication in some form with the now defunct APS Historical Committee, the prospect of publication in any form had become daunting. She confided to her diary that, “now, unprotected, and consciousness of my own deficiencies, for the The New Americanist 04/2020 44

share which I may take in the work, I dread to come before the publick, and had rather the Publication were deferred. I dread blame, and I want not praise.”63 She felt greater confidence to edit, archive, and publish from the Logan collection during her husband’s lifetime, when he had authorized it. As a widowed editor facing the prospect of public judgment, her perspective and relationship with the archive shifted. Her transcribed and edited volumes had already been copied by the APS, she concluded, and that would have to suffice. Over the following year, she continued to rebuff the HSP and express her deeper ambivalence about publication. When a larger clutch of HSP members visited the next month to encourage her, she happened to be out, but “knowing their errand,” she admitted, “I cannot say that I was sorry I was from home, tho the conversation of good and sensible men is on all occasions a great pleasure to me.” Explaining her opposition to their proposal, she expressed again the sense of inadequacy that the thought of publication produced in her, as well her unease at turning down the HSP. “Yet as I had resolved in my own mind to have declined acceding to their request to save myself the anxiety, and perhaps mortification, which the publication might produce, I should not have been as compe- tent to have met and combated their reasons, as I could wish, in conversations.”64 For Logan, angst about the public reception of her work on the volumes of colonial correspondence went deeper; while she was committed to the preservation of the historical materials, she questioned whether the preservation of her own thoughts and life mattered as part of the historical record. Writing later that very day about the fate of her diary, she addressed her imaginary reader: “But pray who obliges you to read?__ shut the Book–Burn it–or consign it to the Bats and Owls, I care not. The folly and vanity of every thing human, of Posthumous fame–(or to me a much more suitable phrase,) Posthumous Remembrance, flash- es full upon me.” 65 When the next HSP emissary, Pennsylvania’s U.S. district attorney Charles Jared Ingersoll, visited to repeat the request the following week, Logan explained to him about the collection that, “its preservation I wished, but if that was secured, a delay of the publication could do no harm.”66 As far as her edited volumes were concerned, they would remain in their ambiguous archival state: selected, transcribed, and edited by her; lent to the APS where they were copied and archived by a committee that was not permitted to publish them and, in any case, no longer existed; available for viewing by APS members, but not for a broader public. The originals remained with her at the Logan estate of Stenton. Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 45

This impasse notwithstanding, in recognition of her contribution to preserving the state’s colonial archive, the HSP nominated Deborah Norris Logan as one of its first few Honorary Members in 1826—the only woman to receive any membership status there prior to the Civil War. In the context of the membership networks developed by antebellum historical societies, this was a highly uncommon recognition of a woman’s belonging.67 In practice, the stewards of the HSP positioned themselves at the hub of an archival community that they knew would be made up of men, but from the Society’s inception, the possibility of women members was at least envisioned. President Rawle announced in 1825 his vision for a historical society that was more expansive and inclusive than in other states. “The members of an historical society,” he conceived, “ought to be numerous, perhaps unlimited.”68 Although this was far from a literal call to universal membership, it did reflect the sentiment common among historical societies that they worked on behalf of a far larger community that had a stake in these archives and historical narratives. At the same time, that statement captured the distinctiveness of Pennsylvania’s archival undertaking. On Rawle’s initiative, the historical society set up three tiers of membership: Contributing Members, who were located within Philadelphia; Corresponding Members, in residence elsewhere in Pennsylvania; and, lastly, Honorary Members. Members in this group could be in “any part of America, or elsewhere, and females may be admitted into it.” Concluding the long address, Rawle justified this last tier of membership by arguing for the intellectual equality of women, “whose attainments in science are only less frequent because they are habituated to content themselves within the sphere of domestic duties, but who have so often shown that occasion alone is wanting for advances to the highest rank of mental improvement–they are not excluded.” Among historical societies in this period, this seems the only instance where founders actively envisioned women as possible members and went so far as to inscribe it in a society’s constitution.69 This relatively inclusive policy and the recognition of Deborah Norris’s substantial contribution to Pennsylvania’s colonial archive nonetheless imposed limits on her belonging within the archival community of the HSP. The three‑tier separation instituted by Rawle was mostly practical, based on proximity and physical relationship to the archive: Members in Philadelphians could “contribute” through more active donations and attendance at historical society events; members living elsewhere in the state could “correspond” with local historical materials for the centralized archive; and others, wherever they were geographically, could be The New Americanist 04/2020 46

“honored” for their contributions to historical collecting and writing or the prestige they lent the Society. These tiers, however, were also symbolic designations. Philadelphia was the epicenter of the state’s history. Sites bearing the strongest historical associations marked its landscape and urban geography. Contributing Members were nearest this, typically living in Philadelphia; Corresponding Members farther from these sites, and Honorary Members might be well beyond the geographical boundaries of the state. Despite Deborah Norris’s physical presence in Philadelphia, her “honorary” status placed her on the symbolic fringe of its historical establishment. She joined this last, motely group, which at different points com- prised descendants of William Penn in England, outstanding American statesmen, and leading historians and collectors in other states or abroad, such as the Paris‑based Irish‑American diplomat and man of letters David Bailie Warden and the Danish archaeologist of Norse colonial settlements, Carl Christian Rafn.70 Logan was at once encompassed within the historical community of the society and distanced from it. Indeed, even Logan was taken aback at both the nomination and the membership policy that made it possible. Writing to Sarah Watson in 1826, she found herself “at a loss to know what could have given rise to a report that I had joined the Historical Society. I believe they have no Honorary Members, and if they had they do not want women–and thee, my dear, know my sentiments on the retirement and modesty which I think we ought never to lose sight of.”71 Nonetheless, she soon was listed on its official membership pages, printed in the historical society’s next Memoir and made known to Pennsylvanians invested in preserving and narrating the state’s history.72

IV: Deborah Norris Logan’s archival legacy Although Logan remained on the margins of the HSP and never published her work on colonial Pennsylvania, in other ways she engaged with history writing in the years after she ceased working on the Logan collection. Popular among the Philadelphia elite, Logan also welcomed visitors to Stenton and maintained correspondence with historians undertaking genealogical and historical projects. Among them was her friend John Fanning Watson, or “the Antiquary,” as she referred to him in her diary—in reference, perhaps, to Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary, which she had enjoyed reading years earlier.73 After winning praise for her own contributions to the APS, she met with him throughout the 1820s, helping him with primary sources from the library at Stenton, Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 47

historical anecdotes, and encouragement for his research and writing on Philadelphia.74 Although he would in fact emerge as the leading chronicler of the city’s history, he may have been the anonymous editorialist who in 1826 imagined that she could herself redress Pennsylvania’s troublingly lack of a state history. “How much is it to be regretted that we have no correct History of Pennsylvania,” lamented the editorial in Philadelphia’s Saturday Evening Post in 1826, but “there can be no person more fitted and more able” than Logan, he continued, “to write the History of her native state.”75 She never did, but she did critically the draft of his Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Older Time (first published in 1830) in order to ensure that her family’s ancestors were cast in a favor- able light.76 When Logan disapproved of how Watson had depicted the colony’s founder and Hannah Penn, his wife, in his Annals, he made ad- justments.77 He publicly praised her for her help, feeling “so usefully indebted for many facts of olden times.”78 During her lifetime, the copied volumes of her selected manuscripts and donations of original materials to the APS also became source material for other historians, although in the process her contribution could be occluded. Letters authored by Penn and “Contributed by Mrs. D. Logan of Stenton” were read aloud at HSP council meetings.79 Materials such as Penn’s cashbook appeared as sources in speeches delivered at the society. The copies of her transcriptions at the APS also passed into the hands of men who belonged to these societies, where they could publicly make use of them. Joshua Francis Fisher, a relative descended from the Norris branch of her family, drew often on the Logan papers. In 1829, for instance, he delivered an account of the “Early Poets and Poetry of Pennsylvania” to the historical society in 1829, which was published in the third volume of their Memoirs. He emphasized, “I have had in my hands several copy books of the familiar letters of James Logan, and find that his name must be added to the catalogue of our early poets.”80 Speaking to the historical society a few years later, Fisher again drew on Logan’s correspondence in a “Discourse on the Private Life and Domestic Habits of William Penn,” which was published in the society’s next Memoirs.81 Other writers continued to benefit from her work after her death, such as Samuel Janney’s often republishedLife of William Penn (1851), which drew heavily on the copied correspondence in the American Philosophical Society, for which he praised Deborah Norris.82 Her contributions to the APS also led to state‑funded publications of historical materials. In 1837, Du Ponceau, then president of the HSP, praised her for having “devoted a considerable part of her time to classing and arranging” the Logan’s correspondence The New Americanist 04/2020 48

with Penn and others, “which she has enriched with historical notes that add greatly to their value.” He also reported that the Provincial Council minutes from 1693 to 1716 kept by James Logan, which Deborah Norris had donated to the APS in 1817, would be published by the Pennsylvania legislature, following a joint petition by the HSP and APS.83 She did not publish history during her lifetime, but in the many anno- tations she made to the Logan papers, one can catch glimpses of her own historical writing. In particular, she defended the significance of William Penn’s home at Pennsbury in understanding the colonial period and Pennsylvania’s history more broadly. In a note to a 1700 letter from Penn to Logan in which the former writes about both a legal dispute and re- quests sundry household provisions, she explains: “This mixture of affairs of government and interest with domestic wants and orders may occasion, at this time, a smile; but it naturally arose from a state of things in a new‑settled country, with everything to attend to.”84 Reflecting on another letter from Hannah Penn to James Logan in 1700, she went further to argue for the colonial household’s importance as a site for public affairs, and domestic concerns as crucial to the development of a colony. Contrary to how John Fanning Watson had appraised such letters, she found that they, “afforded me a panorama of life and housekeeping, incident to a new settlement…And the mixture of affairs of government with the mention of domestic wants and economy is perfectly natural.” Given that Watson published his Annals in 1830, a decade after Deborah Norris’s initial arrangement and transcription of the correspondence that she shared with the APS Historical Committee, this note also suggests that she revisited and amended the edited volumes at Stenton during the subsequent years.85 During her later life and afterlife, however, it was not she but others who presented her archival work to the public. When Deborah Norris died in 1839, her long‑time correspondent on historical matters, John Fanning Watson, was effusive in eulogy. He remembered her as “deeply embued with Christian affections and graces,” and “of a superior order of female excellence and intelligence.” “Her modesty and unwillingness to meet the public gaze,” he continued,

did not allow her to come before the world in her proper name; but it is known to some that she received the emphatic name of ‘the female historian of Pennsylvania,’ as due to her for the large manuscript collections of historical papers which she had compiled and elucidated for future public instruction. She delighted to live in the memory of the past…86 Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 49

The officers of the HSP likewise mourned the loss of their “cherished associate…a lady whose pure virtues, mental endowments and attrac- tive gentleness of manners rendered her the ornament of this Society.”87 This was one of the many small eulogies by historical societies—a type of self‑archiving—in which they recognized the passing of a member, at once inscribing them into the archive; for an antebellum woman, it was exceedingly rare.88 In the eyes of its officers, Logan was part of this archival community, surely, but as one who “ornamented” rather than constituted it.In the decades after her death, her work on the Logan collection was depicted as a civic duty that she performed alongside her domestic responsibilities while never neglecting the latter. This reflected HSP president Rawle’s sense of how American women could thread the needle between fidelity to domestic duty and civic contribution to the nation’s literature. As he argued in his inaugural address to the historical society in 1825, during the year when the HSP sought to publish from the Logan papers:

The wife, the daughter, or the sister, have been contemplated, like the Lares of ancient mythology, as only the guardians and the ornaments of a sacred home. But without abridging these endearing characters, the wife, the daughter, and the sister, may be admitted and encouraged to cultivate many branches of literature.89

In a literal sense, through her work on the Logan collection at Stenton she could perform both the guardianship of the home and cultivation of national literature. An image of Deborah Norris rising early to work on the Logan papers became popular. Lamenting her passing in 1839, Philadelphia’s Quaker The Friend marveled that, “she was such a rigid economist of time, as to accustom herself to rise often before the dawn, that her domestic duties might not be infringed upon by her literary pursuits.”90 Three decades later, once the bulk of Deborah Norris’s edition of the Logan‑Penn correspondence were published by the historical society, these “literary pursuits” and the depiction of her labor were understood in roughly the same terms. Deborah Norris’ daughter, Maria, likewise lauded her mother’s industrious use of these hours in a biographical sketch authored in 1851. She recalled that “while everything in her household was arranged and attended to with the most scrupulous exactness, it was her happy faculty to find timefor all…When copying the correspondence between William Penn and James Logan, etc., she would not permit that voluminous work The New Americanist 04/2020 50

to interfere with her daily occupations, but chose the ‘early hours’ for her work, when others slept.”91 When an edited and enlarged version of transcriptions was published in 1870, the editor similarly emphasized the rhythm of her work. “A lady of remarkable method, industry, and intelligence,” the preface to the Penn‑Logan correspondence read, “she rose long before sunlight in winter, and at daybreak in summer, for the purpose of fulfilling the duty which she had assigned herself.”92 This insistence that in the work of preparing the correspondence for donation her “pen did not engross to the exclusion of domestic duties” served several purposes.93 It was a mark of the industry and intellectual rigor employed in compiling and copying the letters, which attested to the reliability of the donated and then published texts. Moreover, by evoking the image of Deborah Norris performing this morning ritual, these remembrances celebrated the very act of preservation and donation on which archives depended. At the same time, they emphasized that her diligent work managing the papers inherited from her husband fit within the broader maintenance of his patrilineal estate. Her contemporaries and eulogists lingered on the domestic context in which she prepared these public papers because they wished to make her archival and domestic labor compatible. Both the historical society’s mediation of her membership and her own ambivalence about it reflected the conditions for women who contributed to public intellectual life during the antebellum, which often required them to square their intellectual work with dominant expectations of them as women. As Nina Baym has explained of literary women more broadly, praise of their work “emphasized their competence in, and even their enhanced performance of, traditional womanly tasks.” Mary Kelley has similarly argued of women’s intellectual accomplishments in this period that “the claim that women’s learning was dedicated, not to self‑actualization, but to social improvement” helped to justify their participation in questions of public concern.94 By depicting the harmony of Deborah Norris’s documentary and domestic duties, her eulogists could validate her contribution to the archive while keeping her and her work on its threshold. In death, she remained a potential source of historical materials for Philadelphia’s archives. In 1839, the HSP officers sent their formal resolution commemorating her work to Albanus Logan, her eldest surviving son—with a request that might have taken her aback. President Peter du Ponceau and the other officers sought any papers left behind by Deborah Norris at Stenton, “which may relate to herself, or the early history of her favorite State.” Here, like his mother, Albanus found himself on the Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 51

threshold between documents kept in the domestic realm and the cen- tripetal force the public’s archive. Albanus had to disappoint them, noting that her diary, “written for her family and containing her everyday thoughts and feelings was the principal subject of her pen during the latter years of her life,” and he could not part with it.95 In 1934, her granddaughter, Maria Dickinson Logan, would donate the seventeen volumes of diary to the HSP.

Conclusion: The men most eager to build archives in the antebellum saw a landscape of unrecovered documents obscured within domestic spaces. Through this gaze, women often stood on the domestic threshold, separating private papers from the archive. Compared with the many men who preserved and worked with historical papers in this period, the geographical or physical space in which women could do so and their financial resources and social capital that they had at their disposal were generally far more constrained. But as Deborah Norris Logan’s work on the manuscripts at Stenton shows, it was possible for certain women to influence the building of American archives in this period, as well as the terms on which women contributed to them. In salvaging, editing, and donating her late husband’s family papers, Logan performed an archival act that worked along the gendered bound- ary between domestic and archival spaces—between household preservation and publication. The New Americanist 04/2020 52

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American Philosophical Society Archives. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA. Armstrong, Edward, ed., Correspondence between William Penn and James Logan, Secretary of the Province of Pennsylvania, and other. 1700-1750. From the Original Letters in Possession of the Logan Family, with notes by the late Mrs. Deborah Logan, edited with Additional Notes by Edward Armstrong, M.A. Philadelphia, PA: J.P. Lippincott, 1870. Baym, Nina. American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790- 1860. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Bilder, Mary Sarah. Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. “Deborah Logan,” The Friend; a Religious and Literary Journal, 06 April 1839. ProQuest American Periodicals. “Duponceau’s Eulogium on William Penn.” The Friend of Peace, 1824. ProQuest American Periodicals. “History of Pennsylvania.” Saturday Evening Post, 18 November 1826. ProQuest American Periodicals. HSP Institutional Archives, I-1-3; I 4 1. Janney, Samuel M. The Life of William Penn: with Selections from his Correspondence and Autobiography. Philadelphia, PA: Hogan, Perkins and Company,1851. Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Kerber, Linda. “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History.” The Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (June 1988): 9-39. Logan Family Papers, 0379. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. 1, ed. Edward Armstrong. Philadelphia: 1826; republished by J.B. Lippincott, 1864. Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. II. Philadelphia, 1827. Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. II., part II. Philadelphia, 1830. Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. III, part II. Philadelphia, 1836. Deborah Norris Logan and the Archival Threshold… 53

Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. IV, part I. Philadelphia, 1840. Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. IV, part II. Philadelphia, 1850 R.R. Logan Collection of John Dickinson Papers, 0383. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. Stabile, Susan M. Memory’s Daughters: The Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, vol. I. Philadelphia, 1819. Vaux, Roberts. Memoirs of the Life of Anthony Benezet. Philadelphia: James P. Park, 1817. Waters, Deborah Dependahl. “Philadelphia’s Boswell: John Fanning Watson.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 98, no. 1 (January 1974): 3-52. Watson, John F. Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Older Time, vol. I. Philadelphia, 1844 edition. Yale, Elizabeth. Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. The New Americanist 04/2020 54

Notes

1 Women in the early U.S. participated in variety of ways in the writing and teaching of history, rituals of historical commemoration, and the work of preserving historical materials. For the past century, the vast majority of studies of history as a discipline in the nineteenth century have surveyed its leading men, or devoted monographs to outstanding male authors. Some examples include John Spencer Bassett, Middle Group of American Historians (New York: Macmillan Company,1917); David Van Tassel, Recording America’s Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); William R. Smith, History as Argument: Three Patriot Historians of the American Revolution (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1966); Bert James Loewenberg, American history in American Thought: Christopher Columbus to Henry Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster,1972); Arthur H. Shaffer, The Politics of History: Writing the History of the American Revolution, 1783-1815 (Chicago: Precedent, 1975). Over the past few decades, historians and literary scholars examined the broader array of individuals and groups who wrote history in the antebellum. Nina Baym’s work on historical and fictional literature by nineteenth-century women has been the major contribution to this field, see Nina Baym,American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). Other important recent studies examining women’s historical authorship include Kate Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), and Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), who argues that history in the nineteenth century was not only written in spaces dominated by men, but that the very research and writing of what was deemed objective and universal history was strongly gendered as masculine. 2 In writing his Memoirs of Benezet in 1817, Roberts Vaux (a founder of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the following decade), lamented the lack of original papers from Benezet’s life; in doing so, he foreshadowed the language and logic that the HSP would use: “If access could have been had to the stock of original papers, which were no doubt preserved by him, they would minutely and regularly have unfolded, the history of his numerous and various transactions. Instead therefore, of a finished portraiture of the life of this excellent man, the author regrets, that from the relics which have escaped an oblivion so unaccountable, he is enabled to furnish only a mere sketch of some of his features,” see Roberts Vaux, Memoirs of the Life of Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia: James P. Park, 1817), 6. 3 “Memoir of Mrs. Deborah Logan,” in Edward Armstrong, ed., Correspondence between William Penn and James Logan, Secretary of the Province of Pennsylvania, and other. 1700- 1750. From the Original Letters in Possession of the Logan Family, with notes by the late Mrs. Deborah Logan, edited with Additional Notes by Edward Armstrong, M.A. (Philadelphia,PA: J.P. Lippincott, 1870), xli-xliv. 4 Which Mary Kelley examines in depth in Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 5 “History of Pennsylvania,” Saturday Evening Post, November 18, 1826, ProQuest American Periodicals. 6 Deborah Logan Norris’s unfinished memoir of her husband was edited by her granddaughter and published in 1899 under the auspices of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Deborah Logan Norris and Frances Logan, eds., Memoir of Dr. George Logan of Stenton (Philadelphia,PA: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1899). In addition to Susan M. Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), the scarce scholarship on Logan comprises a handful of short articles: Terry L. Premo, “‘Like a Being Who Does Not Belong’: The Old Age of Deborah Norris Logan,”The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107, no. 1 (January 1983): 85-112; Marleen Barr, “Deborah Norris Logan, 55

Feminist Criticism, and Identity Theory: Interpreting A Woman’s Diary Without The Danger of Separatism,”Biography 8, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 12-24; and Amelia Mott Gummere, “Her Contributions to History,” Journal of The Friends’ Historical Society (January 1905): 9-15. 7 Logan Diary, February 1818, vol. 3, Deborah Norris Logan collection #379, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. 8 This claim is based on a survey of lists of members published by historical societies; it is certainly possible that I am ignorant of other women historical society members in this period. 9 In Madison’s Hand, Mary Bilder closely reads James Madison’s shifting revisions of his notes on the 1787 convention to write a constitution. In addition to this type of excavation of how a source forms, we might add that just as James was the last first-hand participant in the convention to die, Dolley Madison, his wife, was the last spouse of these participants to receive the bequest of their personal papers. She thus figures among the innumerable wives and daughters of American founders who found in their hands masses of documents accumulated by the leading figures of the Revolutionary generation. Some, such as Dolley, collaborated to edit and then convey them to the federal government. Others edited and published such papers themselves. Others selectively released and withheld them. See Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 235. 10 A sizeable historiography explores the amplified interest in history during this period, including: Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1978); David Waldstreicher, In the midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), Sara Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), and W. Fitzhugh Brundage et al., eds., Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making from Independence to the Civil War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). 11 The surveys of historical societies include Leslie Dunlap, American Historical Societies, 1790-1860 (Madison, WI: Cantwell Printing, 1944); Walter Muir Whitehill, Independent Historical Societies: An Enquiry into their Research and Publication Functions and their Financial Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); David van Tassel, Recording America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607-1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); and Clifford Lord, ed. Keepers of the Past (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1965). 12 Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (June 1988): 9-39, examines how this construct has been used by historians. Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth- Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), and Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995) all explore in depth how antebellum women wrote across this bifurcation. 13 Baym, American Women Writers. Teresa Anne Murphy has responded to Baym’s study with a more focused analysis of women’s history writing as it bore on the question of political participation in Citizenship and the Origins of Women’s History in the United States (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 14 Baym, American Women Writers, 1. 15 Susan Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004) 10. 16 April 24, 1815 meeting, Historical Committee Minutes, Archives, VIII, 4a, v. 1, 1815- 1820, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA. 17 Peter Stephen du Ponceau to Thomas Jefferson, November 15, 1815, APS Historical Committee Letter book, 1815-1826, Archives, APS. 18 Du Ponceau to Samuel Coates, March 12, 1816, APS Letter book. The New Americanist 04/2020 56

19 Du Ponceau to George Logan, March 27,1816, APS Letter book. 20 30 October 1815 Meeting, Meetings of the Historical Committee, APS. 21 The Logans employed a number of women who performed domestic work at Stenton. 22 Logan Diary, vol. 1, April 3, 1815, HSP. 23 Logan Diary, vol. 1, May 26, 1815. 24 Du Ponceau to George Logan, March 27, 1816, APS Letter book. 25 The APS accession books show the substantial number of donation that the Committee elicited during its brief tenure (Donation book, vol. 1, 1809-1834, APS Archives, Series VII). The Committee publicized its work through its one major volume, which focused on John Heckewelder’s research on Indigenous history and language. Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, vol. I (Philadelphia, PA: Abraham Small, 1819). 26 Deborah Norris Logan to John Vaughan, April 1,1816, R.R. Logan Collection of John Dickinson Papers, 383, Box 6, HSP. 27 May 22,1816 Meeting, Minutes of the Committee of History and Literature, APS. 28 December 31,1817 Meeting, Minutes of the Committee of History and Literature, APS 29 November 3, 1819 Meeting, Meeting, Minutes of the Committee of History and Literature, APS. 30 Logan Diary, vol. 3, February 18, 1818, HSP. 31 May 16, 1820 Meeting, Minutes of the Committee of History and Literature, APS. 32 Logan Diary, vol. 2, May 5,1817, HSP. 33 August 16, 1820 Meeting, Minutes of the Committee of History and Literature, APS. 34 “Memoranda of the desolate state of my mind,” Logan Diary, vol. 4, November 18, 1821, HSP. 35 Logan Diary, vol. 1, 1815, HSP. 36 Logan Diary, vol. 4, March 1820, HSP. 37 Correspondence, vii-viii. 38 Logan Diary, vol. 1, May 15, 1815, HSP 39 Logan Diary, vol. 4, January 16, 1820, HSP. 40 Deborah Norris Logan’s granddaughter, Mary Norris Logan, made her manuscript volumes of the correspondence, as well as other materials, available to the HSP for this publication. Correspondence, xi. 41 Logan Diary, vol. 5, June 15, 1822, HSP. 42 “Sonnet to Stenton,” Logan Diary, vol. 1, March 12, 1815, HSP. 43 2 December 1824, Society Minutes, 1824-1843, I-1-3, HSP. 44 Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. 1, ed. Edward Armstrong (Philadelphia, PA: 1826; republished by J.B. Lippincott, 1864), 39. 45 HSP Memoirs vol. I, 24. 46 Memoirs vol. I, iii. 47 Memoirs vol. I, 18-20. 48 He also spent years leading a committee to ascertain what time Penn arrived in the Delaware River. December 7, 1829 meeting, Society Minutes, HSP. 49 “Duponceau’s Eulogium on William Penn,” The Friend of Peace, 1824, 22, ProQuest American Periodicals. 50 Rawle, “Inaugural Address,” Memoirs vol. I, 42-3. 51 Edward Bettle, “Notices of Negro Slavery as connected with Pennsylvania,” August 7, 1826, Memoirs vol. I, 368. 52 Roberts Vaux, “Anniversary Discourse,” January 1, 1827, Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. II (Philadelphia, 1827), 12. 53 Roberts Vaux, “A Memoir on the Locality of Penn’s Treaty,” September 19, 1825, Memoirs vol. I, 89; 90. In this account, Vaux cites at length a letter from Logan in which she contradicts a popular belief about the treaty location, which she bases on her analysis of both the papers in her possession and her mother’s oral testimony about the colonial period (93-95). 54 William Rawle to Speaker of the House of Representatives of Pennsylvania, December 7, 1829, Archives, Correspondence, I 4 1, 1824-1854, HSP. 55 John Coates to William Rawle, October 25, 1826; John Penn to William Rawle, October 21,1826, Correspondence, Institutional Archives, HSP. 57

56 May 13, 1825, Society Minutes, HSP. 57 February 3, 1845, Council Meetings, 1844-48, HSP. 58 “Celebration by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania of the Anniversary of the First Landing of William Penn,” November 8, 1852, Correspondence, HSP. 59 November 5, 1825, Society Minutes, HSP. 60 “Inaugural Address,” Memoirs vol. I, 42-3. 61 August 1, 1825, Society Minutes, HSP. 62 August 1, 1825, Society Minutes, HSP. 63 Logan Diary, August 6, 1825, vol. 8., HSP. 64 Logan Diary, September 12, 1825, vol. 8, HSP. 65 Logan Diary, September 12, 1825, vol. 8, HSP. 66 Logan Diary, September 14, 1825, vol. 8, HSP. 67 The second nomination of a woman member to any historical society came two decades later. In 1849, Connecticut historian Frances Manwaring Caulkins was the first woman nominated as a full member to the Massachusetts—indeed, of any—Historical Society, recognition for her ample historical and genealogical work on her state’s history and years of lively correspondence with Massachusetts Historical Society president and leading genealogist James Savage. Her works include The History of Norwich, Connecticut, from Its Settlement in 1660, to January 1845 (1845) and The History of New London, Connecticut, from the First Survey of the Coast in 1612, to 1852 (1852). 68 “Inaugural Address,” Memoirs vol. I., 39. 69 “Constitution,” Memoirs vol. 1, 14. 70 Memoirs vol. 1, 21; Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. II., part II (Philadelphia, 1830), 218. 71 Deborah Norris Logan to Sarah F. Watson, January 6, 1826, Folder 5, Maria Dickinson Logan Family Papers, HSP. Thanks to Dr. Alea Henle for directing me to this source. 72 The only mention of this in HSP publications was among the other honorary members listed in the 1830 Memoirs, 218. 73 Logan Diary, vol. 3, February 8, 1818, HSP. 74 Watson’s historical work is discussed in Deborah Dependahl Waters, “Philadelphia’s Boswell: John Fanning Watson,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 98, no. 1 (January 1974): 3-52. Though not an active member of the HSP, he was an early advocate of the institution, as well as like societies throughout the U.S. (Waters, 15-17). 75 “History of Pennsylvania,” November 18, 1826, Saturday Evening Post, 1, ProQuest American Periodicals. 76 Waters, “Philadelphia’s Boswell,” 35-7. 77 Correspondence, 10. 78 John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Older Time, vol. I (Philadelphia, 1844 edition), 573. 79 “Colonel Robert Quarry’s Information against the Government of Pennsylvania,” March 17, 1830, Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. II, part II (Philadelphia, 1830), 191. 80 Joshua Francis Fisher, “Some Account of the Early Poets and Poetry of Pennsylvania,” July 15, 1829, Memoirs vol. II, part II, 103. James Logan’s correspondence surfaced elsewhere as evidence in the Society’s Memoirs, such as William Parker Foulke’s “Notes Respecting the Indians of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,” in Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. IV, Part II (Philadelphia, 1850), 188-219. 81 Fisher, “Discourse on the Private Life and Domestic Habits of William Penn,” Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. III, part II (1836), 65-102. He was also an avid collector of Penn’s scattered letters, and in 1840 he donated a number that been read aloud over the years at the historical society’s meetings. Francis added some prefatory remarks to the reprinted copies of these letters in the historical society’s 1840 Memoirs: “My profound respect for the character of William Penn will not be doubted.” See Fisher, “Inedited Letters of William Penn from the Originals or Authentic Copies, read at various meetings of the Society,” Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. IV, part I (Philadelphia, 1840), 169-170. 82 Samuel M. Janney, The Life of William Penn: with Selections from his Correspondence and Autobiography (Philadelphia, 1851), 455. The New Americanist 04/2020 58

83 Peter S. Du Ponceau, “Inaugural Discourse,” June 3,1837, in Memoirs vol. IV, part I, 15-16. 84 “Memoir,” Correspondence, 14. 85 “Memoir,” Correspondence, 10-11. 86 Watson, Annals, 573. 87 February 4, 1839, Society Minutes, HSP. 88 Elizabeth Yale discusses the papers that repositories accumulated about their own existence in Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 207-248. 89 “Inaugural Address,” Memoirs vol. I, 84. 90 “Deborah Logan,” The Friend; a Religious and Literary Journal, April 6 1839, 215, ProQuest American Periodicals. 91 “Memoir,” Correspondence, xlv. 92 Correspondence, vii. 93 Isaac Norris, “Mrs. Deborah Logan,” Correspondence, xlvii. 94 Baym, American Women Writers, 29; Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 102. 95 Albanus Logan to Peter Du Ponceau, April 30, 1839, Correspondence, HSP. “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives in the Netherlands in Black Atlantic Traditions of Archival Activism Laura Visser‑Maessen

ABSTRACT This case study of The Black Archives (TBA), located in Amsterdam, examines the emergence, trans‑Atlantic networks, and archivist and activist practices of TBA by locating them in both the Dutch racial context and black trans‑Atlantic traditions of using archives as tools of anti‑racism activism. While TBA exemplifies a broader trend towards community‑led archival activism that Andrew Flinn and others have rooted in post‑World War II identity‑based politics, here it is placed in a longer tradition of especially African American archival activism by black intellectuals, historically black universities and colleges, and civil rights organizations during and after the Jim Crow era—with some of whom TBA’s founders and the activists whose collections they hold are directly connected. This enhances understanding of the nuts and bolts of archival activism and cultural transfer, and illuminates black European identity formation and usages of the Afri- can Diaspora and the United States as reference cultures and organizing tools for twenty‑first century black European activists.

Keywords: The Black Archives; Dutch racism; archival activism; Black Europe; Black Diaspora The New Americanist 04/2020 60

Introduction “Please visit this important place!” These pressing words by former Black Panther Angela Davis after she visited The Black Archives (TBA) in Amsterdam in 2018 are placed prominently on its website. A video of the visit is attached, along with Davis’s statement that TBA’s work “made her feel more at home in Amsterdam than she sometimes feels in the US.”1 Neither that Davis felt this way nor that TBA’s founders tout her endorse- ment as a badge of legitimacy is surprising; it speaks directly to TBA’s identity as the twenty‑first‑century heir to a long black activist tradition that crossed national borders. Founded by Dutch black anti‑racism activists in 2015 and largely sustained through crowd‑funding and volunteer labor, TBA houses the largest black‑centered collection in the Netherlands, with over 8,000 books and artifacts on Dutch black history. The papers of Otto and Hermina Huiswoud, black Surinamese‑Dutch activists connected to influential early twentieth‑century black American, Caribbean, and Dutch activists, represent its key collection and ideological base. TBA is located in the building of the Association Our Suriname (VOS, Vereniging Ons Suriname), which Huiswoud turned into a trans‑At- lantic hub of anti‑colonial activism in the 1950s. Its founders see TBA as an “alternative archive” intended to “challenge dominant narratives which tend to downplay or deny histories of slavery[,] colonialism and its legacies”2 in Dutch educational and heritage institutions. Despite its main function as a knowledge institute, TBA’s creative archival, exhibition, and social media methods, community activities, and function as a safe space where locals, scholars, and activists can exchange ideas have thrust it into the vanguard of twenty‑first‑century Dutch black anti‑racism activism. This case study examines TBA’s emergence, trans‑Atlantic networks, as well as archivist and activist practices (sections 4–5) by locating them in the Dutch racial context and black trans‑Atlantic traditions of using archives as tools for activism (sections 2–3). While TBA exemplifies a broader trend towards independent community‑led archival activism that Andrew Flinn and others have rooted in post‑World War II identity‑based politics, here it is placed in a longer tradition of mostly African American archival activism by black intellectuals, historically black educational institutions, and civil rights organizations—with some of whom TBA’s founders and the activists in its collections are directly connected. This approach enhances the understanding of the nuts and bolts of archival activism and cultural transfer. This in turn illuminates black European3 identity formation and the usages of the Black Diaspora “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 61

and the United States as organizing tools for twenty‑first‑century black European activists. TBA’s archival activism provides a window into the current Dutch racial status quo and the possibilities of social change that left‑leaning black activists see. By reaffirming the importance of resource mobilization, grassroots leadership, and the internationalism of early twentieth‑century black (scholar-)activists for the global black freedom struggle then and now, it captures the intersections of contemporary debates in American Studies and Black European Studies on the place of the transnational and of (dis)continuities in black activism across time and space. Centering on the Netherlands extends these debates beyond the general focus on the United States and larger European nations like the United Kingdom and Germany.

II. Black Archival Activism in a Trans‑Atlantic Perspective As a grassroots institute bent on creating a ‘useful past’ for social change, TBA neatly fits what Flinn terms independent community‑led archives, defined broadly4 as “the grassroots activities of documenting, recording and exploring community heritage in which community participation, control and ownership of the project is essential.” In this definition, community refers to any “group who definethemselves on the basis of locality, culture, faith, background, or other shared identity or interest.”5 Although some of these archives are more political than others, all can be viewed as “sites of resistance.” Unlike local, geographically‑based historical societies, for instance, community‑based archives are “explicitly conceived as an active intervention in response to under‑representation and misrepresentation within the mainstream archive and heritage world, and as an educational resource to challenge, and sustain challenges, to those misrepresentations.”6 While community‑based archives have existed since modern times, their number has grown exponentially after World War II, particularly in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, and especially among groups marginalized by their race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, language, or political persuasion—or a combination, like Black Queer identity archives7. This boom is explained by complex, interrelated developments, like the civil rights era’s push for democratization and the revaluation of bottom‑up history writing. The maturation of ethnic, gender, and post‑colonial studies, new technolo- gies, and minorities’ continued struggles against marginalization accelerated the community‑led archives boom, with successful examples serving as models for twenty‑first‑century ones. Archival activists of this new The New Americanist 04/2020 62

generation, like TBA’s founders, are often aware of recent debates in postcolonial, memory, and archival studies inspired by Jacques Derrida, Anne Stoler, and others. These debates have centered on the need for creating a ‘refigured archive’ that practices participatory and/or social justice approaches, avoids nation‑specific foci, and recognizes archives as subjective knowledge repositories over which power can be exerted by including, excluding, distorting, and appropriating materials, events, and persons.8 Community‑led archives like TBA often utilize a three‑pronged approach of education, contesting history production, and political cam- paigns that tie past struggles to contemporary ones. In this, their relationship with mainstream institutions is central, as community‑based archives exist in opposition to and derive part of their legitimacy from them.9 Their subsequent fight for archival autonomy—defined as “the ability for individuals and communities to participate in societal memory, with their own voice, and to become participatory agents in record- keeping and archiving for identity, memory and accountability purposes”—functions as an integral part of such communities’ overall liberation struggle from institutionalized local and global power structures.10 Achieving archival autonomy accordingly hinges on the ability to establish credibility with the own community as well as mainstream society. Having “an ‘alternative archive’” is not enough, TBA’s founders agree. “It is the engagement with the archive through public programmes and the dynamic interplay between activists, artists, educators and institutions that sparks change.”11 Achieving archival credibility—that is, “the right to make statements about the past, about history, about change, about fate, and, by extension...about the future”12—then depends on the execu- tion of their archival activism. Originally a term coined by Howard Zinn to implore archivists to actively document the voiceless, archival activism now refers to all activities in which professional or self‑ascribed archivists “seek to campaign on issues such as access rights or participatory rights within records’ control systems or act to deploy their archival collections to support activist groups and social justice aims.”13 TBA is thus similar to other black community‑led archives such as London’s Black Cultural Archives (BCA) and the George Padmore Institute that were founded to challenge black invisibility in 1970s‑80s British education.14 But overemphasizing such archives as post‑World War II phenomena obscures the longevity of black archival activism and the significance of such archives’ need for identification with this tradition. Because next to providing inspiration, legitimacy, and connections to the heritage the Diaspora deprived its descendants of, it is exactly “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 63

because of its characteristic foci on the transnational and identity formation as integral for contemporary protest that make this tradition appeal- ing for today’s black archival activists. While many examples of this tradition can be located across time and space, TBA’s archival activism explicitly harkens back to the trans‑At- lantic movement of early twentieth‑century black intellectuals and activists like Arturo Schomburg, W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, Franz Fanon, George Padmore, Aimé Césaire, and Anton de Kom. For various ideological reasons, these figures used or advocated archival activism as essential for realizing a collective, diasporic identity that could serve as “a firm cultural basis for a kind of ‘peoplehood.’”15 This metaphysical nation‑building project could then be channeled in service of decolonial thought, a mode of resistance to the specific intertwined forces of capitalism, imperialism, modernity, and white supremacy that undergirded late nineteenth- and early twentieth‑century Western ‘civilization.’ As Robin Kelley observed, this transnational outlook fundamentally shaped Black Studies from the start, preceding the ‘transnational turn’ in American Studies by almost 100 years.16 In “The Negro Digs Up His Past” (1925), Arturo Schomburg (1874–1938) explained his ideas of archival activism, which were rooted in a mixture of nineteenth and twentieth century African American book collecting traditions and Puerto Rican and Cuban nationalist ones, as a ‘theory of recovery’ for the articulation of a “future imaginary—a connected web of people of African descent who might draw on each other in their minds or through their actions in their pursuit of social change.” In “Racial Integrity” (1913), he already pleaded for academia to facilitate such restoration, while validating black knowledge production created outside: “We need in the coming dawn the man who will give us the background for our future; it matters not whether he comes from the cloisters of the university or from the rank and file of the fields.”17 Schomburg argued for a type of archival activism that allowed “for the comparison of Afrodiasporic communities across difference without discounting those differences. Such unity across difference [he suggested would] give people of African descent the inspiration and intellectual foundation to liberate themselves from the continuing forces of white supremacy.”18 Historians like DuBois, Padmore, and James echoed such views. They were also put into practice by black organizations, societies, and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Howard University. Such activities fit a larger pattern in especially African American history in which black people during and after slavery used (parallel) educational The New Americanist 04/2020 64

institutions, libraries, archives, and (global) black history as an activist mode. Countless black activists were amateur book collectors or historians, and civil rights organizations like the NAACP (1909‑today) and SNCC (1960–1972), whose two clasped‑hands symbol TBA initially adopted as its logo, meticulously documented and interpreted their activities for outsiders as well.19 Although archival activism was central to the (global) black freedom struggle, the ways in which it materialized depended on local circumstances. Similarly, TBA’s brand of archival activism flowed organically from its members’ Dutch‑Afro‑Surinamese roots mixed with local racial realities. An overview of this Dutch racial context and understandings of the Black Diaspora in Europe is therefore needed first to be able to analyze TBA members’ identity formation (section 4) and archival activism in practice (section 5).

III. Race and Racism in the Netherlands and the Black Diaspora in Europe Flinn notes that community history interest rises when communities undergo rapid change and see their identity threatened or ignored.20 For today’s Afro‑Dutch community, this sense resulted from the nation’s post‑World War II transformation to a multicultural society, combined with its continued insistence on what Gloria Wekker termed Dutch “white innocence,” referring to the “dominant way in which the Dutch think of themselves, as being a small, but just, ethical nation; color‑blind, thus free of racism.”21 In fact, despite well‑documented structural racism in Dutch employment, housing, education, and policing, silence and denial define the Dutch white majoritarian approach to race. As Joy Smith captured it: “The willful ignorance surrounding race issues, and its importance, becomes the defense against discussing it. If it is not acknowledged, then it cannot exist.”22 Like many of its European counterparts, the Netherlands exhibits what David Theo Goldberg has termed Racial Europeanization, referring to the disconnect in public perception between European nations’ colonial history and the present‑day presence and unequal position of racial minorities in their midst23. This discrepancy emerged from the over- seas contours of European colonization, Europeans’ tendency to discuss racism through prisms of culture, class, and ethnicity, and integration in terms of assimilation. The emergence of democratic socialism, pre- occupations with the Holocaust, and insistence on narrow definitions of racism as segregation or white supremacist violence further inhibited “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 65

acknowledgments of structural racism. In the Netherlands, these phenomena merged with nation‑specific circumstances, such as notions of victimization during World War II and Indonesian independence that tied in with long‑held misconstrued concepts of Dutch national identity as tolerant and humane. Such ideas date back to its ‘golden’ seventeenth‑century seafaring days: although the Dutch transported 600,000 Africans during the trans‑Atlantic slave trade, set up slave‑based colonies in what are now the Dutch Antilles and Suriname and oppressive non‑slave ones in southern Africa and Indonesia, they viewed these activities through the prism of trade. They believed this separated them from the unchecked brutality of other imperialist powers—an idea echoed in Dutch historiography.24 Silence on race then became a coping mechanism after World War II.25 Until then, the black presence in the Netherlands was small. This was reflected in VOS, founded in 1919 to help Surinamese people adjust to Dutch life. In the 1950s, a new generation, radicalized by postwar decolonization, took over its conservative, pro‑Dutch leadership. Among them was Surinamese‑born Otto Huiswoud (1893–1961) who had mi- grated to New York in 1910 and co‑founded the American Communist Party (CPUSA). He worked with Surinamese nationalist De Kom, A. Philip Randolph, and George Padmore, among others, and befriended many in Schomburg’s circle like Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. He also debated Marcus Garvey in 1927. After the war, Otto and his wife Hermina (1905–1998), a migrant from British Guyana he had met in Harlem, settled in Amsterdam. With Otto’s chairmanship in 1954, VOS morphed into a left‑wing organization advocating Surinamese independence. Huiswoud invited members from his multicultural trans‑Atlantic network, like W.E.B. DuBois and C.L.R. James, to lecture at VOS. After internal clashes over Surinamese domestic politics following the nation’s independence in 1975, VOS returned to its old function as a cultural organization.26 By then, Surinamese mass migration to the Netherlands had com- menced; by 1980 some 80,000 migrants had arrived. They were joined by: descendants of African soldiers the Dutch had deployed to the Dutch East Indies and other, mostly mix‑raced, Dutch Indonesians who migrat- ed after Indonesia secured its independence in 1946; political and economic refugees from African countries like Ruanda; and ten thousand foreign so‑called ‘guest workers,’ many from Turkey and Morocco, whom the Dutch had invited to facilitate the country’s economic expansion in the 1970s. Although the Dutch turned their welcoming attitude into The New Americanist 04/2020 66

a hallmark of their national identity, they lacked long‑term visions for accommodating these newcomers. During the 1980s‑1990s they played catch‑up to help them ‘integrate,’ but created different programs for each ethnic group. This followed the longtime Dutch societal organizational structure of pillarization (verzuiling) that gave religious denominations and political groups their own institutions, but in practice this approach resulted in tolerating such minorities and ignoring them otherwise. Sometimes they were literally invisible: city governments for instance allowed only one Surinamese family per apartment building. By squatting abandoned housing projects in the Bijlmer area, only the Surinamese community in Amsterdam was able to retain its strength. This activism, part of a larger anti‑discrimination movement in the 1970s‑80s, however, coincided with an increased resentment against alleged ‘ungrateful’ newcomers ‘pampered’ by the ‘goodhearted’ Dutch welfare state. After 9/11, backlash against Dutch Muslims reinforced black invisibility, as it expe- dited rightwing populism and framed racism as ‘new’ to Dutch society and confined to Islamophobia27.28 Following the growing belief that colorblindness embodied racial progress better than ‘pillarization,’ Afro‑Dutch invisibility became institutionalized. Academic and governmental support for ethnic organizations and institutes invested in race and Dutch colonial history, like the Center for Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES, 1984–1991) and the Dutch Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy (NiNsee, 2003– 2012), were withdrawn. Dutch schoolbooks already emphasized the East India enterprises of the Dutch and slavery in the United States over its own enslavement of Africans. While critical race discourse became part of Dutch research and teaching output in the late 1990s, it remains scarce. Small black student bodies, resulting from a myriad of causes including structural racism, perpetuate a climate that benefits whites in Dutch academic hiring practices, research funded, and knowledge production paradigms valued. This spurred black students’ and scholars’ alienation and sometimes departure, like Gloria Wekker’s and Philomena Essed’s refuge to American universities.29 The Dutch media’s massive characterization of TBA as ‘novel’ and the remarkably belated move towards decolonizing practices in Dutch heritage institutions when compared to the United States and the United.Kingdom underscores the extent of black invisibility in Dutch collective memory.30 Unsurprisingly, Guno Jones observed it were “students and scholar‑activists in wider society who started a critical re‑reading of this part of Dutch heritage and whom, by doing so, risked serious repercussions for “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 67

their careers.”31 Revived Afro‑Dutch activism, centered on black visibility and representation, then resulted in a National Slavery Monument32 in 2002, the foundation of NiNsee in 2003, and an annual Keti Koti festi- val to commemorate the abolition of Dutch slavery in Amsterdam since 2009. Other activities include decolonizing museums and removing racial stereotypes in the public arena. Efforts to end the tradition of Black Pete (Zwarte Piet), the caricature black helper of Saint Nicholas (the Dutch Santa Claus) whom whites annually dress up as using blackface, have intensified since 2011. Under the umbrella group Kick Out Zwarte Piet (KOZP), activists use the annual Saint Nicholas parade for nonviolent direct action. They have repetitively encountered (false) arrests and violence; in 2017 authorities cancelled their protest altogether after whites blocked their bus on a freeway. In a major victory, organizers of the 2019 parade agreed to abandon blackface; local parades, however, have not. The organizational strength of this new activist ‘wave’ and its success in keeping racism in the spotlight likely facilitated the unprecedented massive turnout at the days‑long George Floyd sympathy protests, organized by KOZP and other anti‑racism organizations, in Dutch cities in June 2020.33 This new movement, which includes TBA, must then also be understood against the background of what Reni Eddo‑Lodge termed a “renaissance of black critical thought and culture” in twenty‑first‑century Europe at large, during which numerous black organizations, institutions, and anti‑racism movements have emerged or been revitalized. Like the U.S.- based Movement for Black Lives, these highlight systemic racism and black invisibility in political, cultural, and educational institutions. Some have begun developing ‘pan‑Afro‑European’ identities through initiatives like the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) and European Network of People of African Descent (ENPAD).34 Conferences, summer schools, and publications on Black Europe are also blossoming, including in the United States,35 through growing Black European Studies (BEST) frame- and networks. Black student bodies are pushing debates on reparations and Eurocentric knowledge production, often through international ‘decolonizing the university’ frameworks, while black European race scholars are increasingly shaking reliance on U.S. scholarship for understanding the, markedly different, black European experience.36 Intersectional frameworks of ‘women of color feminism’ that emerged in the U.S. in the 1980s deeply influenced European black women too. Women like Wekker helped spur several of Europe’s largest transnational feminist and queer of color collectives, such as Sister Outsider and Strange Fruit, that infused The New Americanist 04/2020 68

the Dutch anti‑racist activism from the 1980s to today.37 BEST‑scholars like Stephen Small therefore call for a new “transnational European perspective” that aims to establish commonalities in the black European experience, while celebrating black heterogeneity. Others, like Jacqueline Nassy Brown, prefer more pragmatic definitions of Black Europe as a “ra- cialized geography of the imagination,” in which diasporic meaning is derived from “the situated encounters in which people actually express some form of desire for connection.”38 Such readings of Black Europe, which mirror Schomburg’s ideas of diasporic identity, are similarly detected in TBA’s archival activism.

IV. The Black Archives and Identity Formation through Archival Activism TBA was founded as an extension of the Dutch Afro‑Caribbean social enterprise New Urban Collective (NUC), established in 2010 to foster the socio‑economic advancement and self‑awareness of young Dutch people of color. Its founders are Mitchell Esajas, an anthropologist‑turned‑activist of African‑Surinamese descent; Jessica De Abrue, another anthropologist‑turned‑activist of Portuguese‑Surinamese descent; and the two sons of Surinamese sociologist Waldo Heilbron (1936–2009). Thiëmo Heilbron is a biologist‑turned‑social entrepreneur in sustainability and Miguel Heilbron an economist and engineer‑turned‑social entrepreneur in inclusivity projects. When NUC opened a café in 2015 for organizing meetings centered on Black Diaspora, the Heilbron brothers donated their father’s collection of 2,000 books on Dutch colonial history. Due to the gentrification of the Bijlmer, they moved the collection to the Hugo Olijfveldbuilding of VOS in 2016. TBA then emerged organically after they discovered the Huiswouds’ papers and VOS’s archives in the attic and after a core maintenance team of volunteers was found. Additionally, it houses literature on African American history, the book collections of VOS‑member Frits Corsten and former NiNsee director Glenn Willemsen, and artifacts related to Dutch black history dating to the seventeenth century. Following Waldo Heilbron’s life‑long mission of challenging Eurocentric perspectives in education, TBA uses its collections to advance knowledge of, and celebrate, Dutch black history and fight racism in the present. By providing “a fair and multifaceted picture of Dutch black history and [the] contemporary situation” to black and white visitors alike, it aims to provide a new “perspective to the public discourse” that, in De Abrue’s words, can be “fundamental in the prepa- ration for a truly multi‑cultural Dutch society.”39 “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 69

After all, the twenty‑first century black activist revival, TBA’s founders assert, demonstrates “the necessity of further developing understanding of the language and ways in which Dutch racism manifests itself,”40 with TBA being one tool among many. Before and after TBA’s founding, Esajas and De Abrue have also been involved in ENAR, ENPAD, and KOZP; the revived anti‑Black Pete protests started with their friend Quinsy Gario’s arrest in 2011. Esajas was on the bus stopped by counter‑protesters in 2018 and has regularly been arrested. In 2019, whites mobbed a KOZP‑meeting with fireworks and Esajas’s car was smashed. Such experiences radicalized their positions. “It was emotionally hard because a lot of my friends…were really brutally arrested. Their hair was pulled out, my friend Jerry [Afriyie] was beaten up,” De Abrue recalled, “I’m happy to be among these people because activism is a really lonely place…Everybody is watched by the authorities.”41 It also solidified their identification with Black Atlantic protest traditions. KOZP often com- municates in English and its promotional material showcases connections to widespread European and American traditions of blackface as means for tapping tap international support42 and creating trans‑Atlantic networks. Miguel Heilbron was key in developing the Black Achievement Month with NiNsee, celebrated annually since 2016, and NUC from the start employed Afrocentric educational tools.43 These experiences predisposed TBA members to the idea of achieving archival autonomy as a “grand societal challenge,”44 requiring the type of (archival) activism across borders (geographical, time-, and otherwise) they found in TBA’s collections. But this awareness had begun in childhood and accelerated through the way the ‘black renaissance’ permeated European academia when they were students. Esajas holds an MA de- gree in Anthropology and Business from the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The Heilbron brothers studied at UvA as well, while De Abrue holds an MA in Anthropology and one in Business Anthropology from Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit (VU). All realized their presence was exceptional given that 50% of Amsterdam youngsters have migrant backgrounds but few attend university. Despite high test scores, De Abrue’s teachers advised against her taking the pre‑university track in high school—a frequent occurrence for Dutch students of color. She therefore always “perceive[d] my college attendance as a form of upward social mobility, and a political statement…It was my story and those of my sur- roundings which showed that our experiences are not isolated events but rather formed a structural problem.” Esajas did attend an elite pre‑university high school, the only child of color in his class. From an early age, The New Americanist 04/2020 70

they, and others in their network, resented black history’s glaring absence from school curricula. Summer courses on diversity Esajas attended at the University of Los Angeles underscored this void.45 Such contradictions ensued at university. Although UvA disbanded CRES, several scholars in TBA’s network are doing or have done ground- breaking research on race at UvA or VU, including Waldo Heilbron. Esajas too wondered how he could be arrested for his KOZP‑activism one day, while teaching at UvA the next. Because of such apparent openness, Esajas co‑founded NUC in 2011 to help youngsters of color excel professionally predicated on the notion that “if you work hard enough, you will be fine.” But micro‑aggressions in academia, combined with Gario’s 2011 violent arrest, changed that view. NUC increasingly became a “space to feel safe at the university, not only in our bodies but also in our thoughts,” De Abrue said. Along with Amsterdam United, a city‑wide organization for students of color, NUC organized “I too, am UvA” and “I too, am VU” protests in 2014. Following the example of Harvard students, they spread pictures on social media holding signs with examples of racism they had encountered. Internal turmoil at UvA in 2015 strengthened their conviction that despite academic success, societal acceptance remained ephemeral. When students occupied a university building to mandate democratization, minority students, united in University of Colour, demanded its full ‘decolonization.’ With Wekker, De Abrue and Esajas worked on UvA’s Diversity Commission, erected to subdue the tumult, but only to discover that diversity hiring practices mostly favored white women and Eurocentric curricula remained. Esajas soon traded his job as program manager of VU’s Anthropology Department to work for NUC/TBA.46 They subsequently used NUC as a vehicle for organizing meetings on diversity in education and employment, including a conference with Essed. Such initiatives strengthened TBA members’ relations with scholar‑activists doing research in BEST or decolonizing‑the‑mind (DTM) frameworks, like Small, Kwame Nimako, and others, and with the scholar‑activist networks of NiNsee (which restarted in downsized form) and the Black Europe Summer School Nimako founded in 2007. VOS has a tradition of hosting these scholars too. Alongside befriended (scholar-) activists, Esajas and De Abrue contributed to the academic publication Smash the Pillars (2018). The book applies the DTM‑framework to the Netherlands, while locating the origins of decoloniality theories in the early twentieth‑century transnational black activist movement featured in TBA’s archival activism. These connections enable understanding “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 71

of TBA beyond post‑World War II identity politics paradigms. As its editors assert, “decolonial examination is different than identity politics as we do not seek to deconstruct any given identity found in contemporary Dutch culture by some disincarnated, apolitical, postmodern adventure.” Rather than representing a homogeneous political identity among Dutch citizens of color, the “decolonial imaginary of color,” they argue, is something “transitory, always crossing borders, always moving, but always present” while remaining fluidly tied to the Dutch nation‑state depending on choice or circumstance.47 TBA’s collections then reaffirmed such identifications by spurring what Carolyn Steedman calls the “politics of the imagination.” This is innate to the heritage business, Elisabeth Kaplan explains, as “archivists appraise, collect, and preserve the props with which notions of identity are built. In turn, notions of identity are confirmed and justified as historical documents validate their authority.”48 TBA members similarly retrieve understanding of their lived experiences through their collections and interpretations of them. In interviews and his own writings, Esajas frequently points to discovering material documenting local black resistance to Black Pete and other forms of racism from the 1970s on- wards, like Surinamese‑Dutch magazine clippings on police brutality or the 1978 booklet Apartheid on housing segregation in Amsterdam. The racist language used as justification, TBA members noted, resembles that used to bar refugees from white neighborhoods today. Such discoveries strengthen their sense of diasporic kinship with other minorities of color and their interpretation of Dutch racism as structural and inextricably tied to capitalism. This in turn furthers their resolve to tell these stories as essential for the realization of a true multicultural society.49 Having such knowledge, TBA members argue, is especially pertinent to black youngsters. As natural‑born citizens, unlike their parents, many favor more militant activist approaches but have difficulty finding homegrown models. Esajas often refers to a fellow activist who in TBA’s collections discovered her father’s involvement in the 1970s squatting movement, whose history that generation of often socialist black activists largely concealed out of disappointment or a desire to protect their offspring. Likewise, De Abrue’s mother never shared her own history of activism in the Bijlmer movement. In a poignant illustration of her subsequent internalization of the colorblind myth, De Abrue captured the revelation of knowing “that the reality we (as black youngsters) experience isn’t new…this is important for your identity, how you approach life, the direction in which you’d like to take it. For me, [TBA] is a way The New Americanist 04/2020 72

to cope with that…Telling the stories of earlier generations ensures that you don’t have to question your own reality.” Identity is therefore central to TBA, she stated. “When we open up the boxes we know more about ourselves than we knew ever. Sometimes that can be emotional. I feel ob- ligated to do this, so I can hopefully not only speak about the colonial past, but that racism is a real thing in the Netherlands.”50 The discovery of the Huiswouds’ activism, previously unknown to them51, then helped establish the movement’s longevity beyond the 1970s‑1980s, its inherent internationalist and ‘radical’ bend, and theirs “as a new generation that connects up with that.”52 Being in the VOS building reinforced this, as it is not uncommon for the “material spaces of archives [to] exert tremendous and largely unspoken influences on their users, producing knowledges and insights which in turn impact the narratives they craft.” Esajas for instance noted the significance of KOZP holding “meetings to mobilize people and raise awareness in the space of VOS, continuing the practices once started by Huiswoud.” The movement’s longevity accordingly helped justify their continuation and view of it—to supporters, critics, and themselves alike. TBA’s archival activism, rooted in the Black Atlantic, then solidified such identifications.53

V. The Black Archives: Practicing Black Atlantic Archival Activ‑ ist Traditions TBA’s key to achieving archival credibility is its distinct approach to archival activism. While activism and archival objectivity are not mutually exclusive54, TBA’s success depends on playing creatively within this realm. Its success is predicated on revealing the subjectivity of mainstream institutions, while presenting itself, in Miguel Heilbron’s words, as a counter‑hegemonic yet reputable “knowledge institute in the same vein as the Anne Frank Foundation.” From that, it gains its authority to engage in contemporary social struggles utilizing identity histories, particularly of their Dutch, American, and Surinamese/Caribbean predecessors. Matthias Danbolt’s more metaphysical classification of archival activism as “the way repertoires of activist history are reactivated, reenacted, and re‑embodied in contemporary actions” plays an essential part in this.55 TBA’s archival activism is built on three cornerstones: creating racial awareness, pride, and self‑empowerment. These pillars are maintained through four, mutually reinforcing levels: using 1) education and decolonizing‑the‑mind frames, 2) community formation and resource mobilization, 3) exhibitions, art, and artifacts, and 4) ‘popularizing the archives’ techniques. Central foci are the Netherlands/Europe, the United “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 73

States, and the Caribbean/Suriname, with the rest of the ‘Global South’ (a term its members use frequently) in the periphery. This has three implications for understanding TBA’s archival activism and, by extension, present‑day Dutch black identity formation. First, its continued reliance on the Americas—which is natural given that most black Dutch inhabitants have Surinamese/Caribbean roots and/or have English as a second language56—reaffirms divergences in diasporic practices among black Europeans and thus rightful apprehension of ‘totalizing’ black European frameworks. Second, despite engaging in what Small calls “mobilizing the political power of the Diaspora,” ideas of nation prefigured TBA’s archival activism—just as national identificationsalways stayed relevant for transnationally‑oriented black intellectuals and activists.57 Third, TBA members’ engagement with the Black Atlantic says as much and perhaps more about their contemporary power struggles than about their predecessors’. An analysis of TBA’s four levels of archival activism reveals how this materializes in practice.

Education and Decolonizing‑the‑Mind The direct ideological line between TBA founders’ homegrown views and the black trans‑Atlantic movement of the early twentieth‑century crystal- lized through the Huiswouds, but they looked to Arturo Schomburg as well. In that they are not alone: NiNsee and BCA were explicitly modeled after the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, founded in 1925. TBA members likewise visited it to learn “from black institutes with experience in conserving and presenting black history.” Becoming like the Schomburg is a dream, Esajas noted. “It more or less started like we did, with one person’s book collection. Now it’s a vibrant center, in the middle of Harlem, accessible to anyone with an interest in black history and culture.”58 Like many in this movement, TBA promotes education built on decolonized practices. As Esajas said, “Societal issues did not happen over- night [and] by analyzing the latter from a historical perspective, collective awareness can be created.” Decolonized education is also imperative for black internal transformation, De Abrue added. “Many blacks in the Netherlands wrestle with their identities. Why are they here, why do they have such marginalized positions in society? They lack access to the history needed to constitute that identity. [TBA] helps with that.”59 Its archival activism therefore hinges on reviving forgotten Dutch and European black history, often by explicitly invoking the imagined nation‑building projects of the early twentieth‑century movement. Like Schomburg, The New Americanist 04/2020 74

Esajas and De Abrue contribute to academic and popular initiatives that foreground such histories, write their own, and present them at conferences, including one on Black Europe at UCLA. In Open Cultural Studies, for instance, they made the case for decolonized education by underscoring the irony of Huiswoud’s invisibility in Dutch history considering that Huiswoud already lamented in a 1956 issue of VOS‑magazine De Koerier how “the history of the people is completely suppressed by that of the motherland…National heroes become criminals and ter- rorists while the colonists are presented as paternal, humane and highly developed.” He wrote the passage after hearing Césaire read his paper “Culture and Colonialism” at a Paris conference. When explaining TBA’s mission to Johnny Pitts for his Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019), De Abrue also channeled the Huiswouds. Their story, she said, formed a fortuitous tool for nullifying the complicity of their parents’ generation in the act of forgetting: “[W]hen we opened up this story about the Huiswouds it created a link. People came to us from all generations…They really wanted to speak about it, more so than write about it, which is why our task is to do oral history as well as written.”60 In interviews, blogs, and tours, TBA members explicitly use their own past ignorance of black history to call for decolonized education and reference books that make similar claims, like Esajas’s favorites Marcus Garvey Life and Lessons and Malcolm X’s Autobiography. In one 2016 blog, he quoted passages from De Kom’s We Slaves of Suriname (1934) about resisting Eurocentric education to protest a controversial white speaker chosen for that year’s Anton de Kom lecture. The book and its 2020 reprint feature heavily in TBA’s web shop and its recommended ‘Power to the People’-reading list on its website, alongside works by like‑minded black (scholar-)activists. When asked by a Dutch reporter—in a perfect example of the Dutch insistence on colorblindness—if identifying with such pasts does not increase societal divisions, Esajas countered that false narratives created these schisms: “If we don’t learn in school how diversity in contemporary Dutch society has come into existence, how can we then get rid of stereotypes and racism?”61 TBA members therefore give lectures at educational institutions, made their collections more accessible through crowdfunding‑enabled digitization, and developed a “silenced history” project with a magazine and radio show where they discussed finds from their archive. Aided by teachers and historians, they developed a non‑Eurocentric alternative to the official poster of the ten eras in Dutch history taught in schools for the government‑sanctioned revision of the so‑called historical canon62. “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 75

The poster—on sale at TBA—offers new names and emphases, like -re naming the 17th ‘Golden Century’ the ‘Age of Colonialism and Trade Capitalism’ to better encompass black experiences. The poster was launched at TBA in 2019 with roundtable discussions on the need to di- versify Dutch history education, but it continues to invite interested parties to contribute suggestions for additions.63 Other TBA activities include organizing debate nights, movie screen- ings, annual “Books and BBQ” festivals, and lectures featuring black (scholar-)activists like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Opal Tometi. With former Black Panthers Emory Douglas and Katherine Cleaver they organized an international symposium in The Hague that featured artifacts from TBA to prompt discussions on the role of culture in today’s black freedom struggle—a point they underscored by organizing an event that included Dutch politicians around VOS documents related to the forgotten history of Keti Koti memorials to debate lingering legacies of Dutch slavery. TBA also collaborates with mainstream institutions, like the Tropenmuseum, as long as it can maintain control. Avoiding cooptation is a direct lesson from VOS—one of the few Dutch‑Surinamese organizations still in existence due to its rejection of governmental subsidies—but it is an extension of minorities’ overall liberation struggle too, as “silence can be a method used by the marginalized to deny [mainstream] archives their records as a way to exercise their power over the powerful.”64 Yet carrying the “weight of history,” Danbolt found, often carries unintend- ed consequences for archival activists, including “a feeling of political exhaustion.” Their inclusion at the Rijksmuseum’s Night of History for instance underscored the heartbreaking longevity and grassroots‑base of their struggle, De Abrue sighed: “Our inclusion…did not come out of nowhere. It is the result of decades of Dutch activists pushing awareness about our shared history.”65

Community Formation and Resource Mobilization VOS history and the long‑standing African American traditions of grassroots activism and of using black independent or parallel institutions and indigenous resources like HCBUs, churches, and pre‑existing social organization networks as vehicles for social change and as insulation against exhaustion—a practice Aldon Morris termed resource mobilization66— influenced TBA as much as the imagined community projects of early twentieth‑century black (scholar-)activists. While Heilbron’s collection was the catalyst, the role HCBUs played in sustaining the American movement and Esajas’s experiences with the Martin Luther King archive The New Americanist 04/2020 76

at Morehouse College were prominent in TBA’s formative stages. In Atlanta, where he went in 2016 for a John Lewis Fellowship program, he was exposed to King’s ‘radical’ post‑1965 legacy and ‘long civil rights movement’ frameworks in Black Studies. He also joined local Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. These experiences spurred his homegrown ideas on organizing and structural racism. In words echoing King, BLM, and their predecessors in the black radical tradition, he concluded that for achieving “black liberation…the organizing principles of the neoliberal capitalist system which inherently feeds off a global and national ‘racial caste’ of black and non‑white people must be addressed.” The Dutch movement should therefore mirror the American ones’ investment in education and international alliances to “develop a comprehensive vision and agenda focused on the root causes of the problem.”67 TBA could foster this through becoming a source of institutional support for the local (activist) community. Next to workshops and consul- tancy on topics ranging from colonialism to ending job discrimination, it provides community services like rental space for meetings and access to Humphrey Lamur’s registry of Surinamese slave family names. To promote the black vote in city elections, it invited election candidates to discuss political participation and published the Black List, a local initiative that listed Afro‑Dutch grievances, on its website. But community formation is predominantly created through functioning as a network‑hub and a ‘safe space,’ like Huiswoud used VOS and which the organization institutionalized by acquiring its own building. Independent black institutions worldwide have always harbored that function. In the United States, particularly black churches and HBCUs fulfilled that need, including for international students like Esajas. The desire for safe spaces increased during Black Power, including in SNCC as black workers felt inhibited at integrated meetings. Today’s right‑wing extremism, Esajas argued, made a space like TBA, where they can “exchange ideas and just be,” even more urgent. After the violent reactions to the 2018 KOZP‑protests, TBA for instance co‑organized a meeting with black experts on activist self‑care.68 The support of older VOS members, like Ivette Forster and Delano Veira, and (scholar-)activists fulfill a similar function, with people like Wekker and Essed serving as mentors and providing their younger counterparts with the language to bolster and articulate their own arguments. This underscores the significance of black scholarship as well as generational waves in the black freedom struggle. SNCC for instance relied on older activists from the NAACP and the 1930s radical Harlem climate, like Ella Baker, while BLM uses SNCC and Baker as role models. Yet SNCC “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 77

and BLM simultaneously have used generational differences to underscore their uniqueness. Similarly, Esajas and others have stressed how the new Dutch ‘wave’ is more upfront, captured in the shift from the 1980s slogan “Black Pete is Black Grief” to “Black Pete is Racism.”69

Exhibitions, Art, and Artifacts TBA’s archival activism reflects its members’ journey into black history, following leads from their collections, research trips, and people in the networks they established along the way.70 In this sense, it represents an archive of their activism—in alignment with Danbolt’s metaphysical theory of archival activism. Because they experienced this journey as trans- formative, they aim to extend that experience to others by translating the relevance of their collections for today in an accessible manner. This also enables using the question of archival accessibility in itself to challenge Dutch racial‑capitalist structures. In one 2018 blog, Esajas argued that local racial realities could be amended by heeding black radicals’ lessons on racial capitalism. Yet “the time to delve into [that] literature,” he lamented, is “a privilege not many have.” TBA therefore merges its educational and community activities with accessible pop‑up exhibitions, artwork, and tours. Although this is not novel—Schomburg already made exhibitions integral to his archival activism—it is a lesson Dutch activist history reinforced; culture has been part of the anti‑Black Pete movement and VOS’s community outreach for decades. Waldo Heilbron had wanted to build a museum in the VOS building as well.71 During TBA tours, artifacts and primary documents are shown to explain Dutch black history and contemporary racial realities, like the booklet Apartheid; Otto Huiswoud’s FBI‑file; a book Langston Hughes gave to Hermina; and a so‑called wisselbrief, a Dutch government letter awarding financial compensation to a slaveholder after slavery’s abolition in 1863. Because this letter is also in the Rijksmuseum, it can be used as a teaching device on decolonial practices, De Abrue argued: “[W]e then explain how emancipation resulted from hard‑fought resistance, like Tula’s slave uprising in Curaçao in 1795. You don’t hear that [at the Rijksmuseum].” A small, permanent exhibition on blackface engages the present directly: next to Dutch children’s books from the 1940s and other artifacts from across Europe depicting racial stereotypes, protest signs from KOZP are placed. The trans‑Atlantic is also visible in the books featuring black radical thought and the Dutch newspaper articles from the 1960s‑1970s on the American black freedom struggle that are displayed on tables. In this sense, TBA mirrors Schomburg’s tactic of creating a “unity The New Americanist 04/2020 78

across difference” through placing artifacts from across the Diaspora in non‑linear structures at exhibitions, forcing visitors to consider the shared relations between objects and people across historical contexts and the gravity of the disjunction the Diaspora wrought on its descendants.72 Blurring the lines between an archive, museum, community center, safe space, and art institute—a combination that helped TBA win the 2018 Amsterdam Art Prize—is in fact key to its archival activist success. TBA’s 2019 exhibition “Our Tori: Stories of Surinamese Communities in the Netherlands,” for the 100‑year anniversary of VOS, put decolonizing‑the‑mind frameworks in practice by linking the past to the present needs. Marketed explicitly as an exhibition that celebrated forgotten black achievements, it was built around seven portraits of important VOS members, painted by seven Surinamese‑Dutch artists and supported with artifacts from TBA. Particularly black female role models were foregrounded, such as the story of Ivette Forster, host of the first black Dutch TV‑show between 1987–1990. As a longtime anti‑Black Pete proponent, the exposition also used Forster in part to show that movement’s longevity, which in turn legitimized their own KOZP‑activism. Visitors were encouraged to contribute own stories too. Such participatory approaches help democratize history practices and tighten relations with the community. Following the example of VOS, TBA used Keti Koti festivities to crowdfund its 2017–2018 exhibition “Black and Revolutionary: The Story of Otto and Hermina Huiswoud,” thereby giving the Afro‑Dutch community a sense of ownership of the project. 700 donors responded, raising €20,000 within weeks. This, TBA members felt, showed “the broad support and need for these kinds of ‘alternative archives.’”73 The “Black and Revolutionary” exhibition, which attracted 2,500 visitors, is the clearest example of how TBA’s archival activism relies on the power of Black Atlantic identities. Through the Huiswouds, their own activist concerns were inserted and legitimized by turning past and present movements into one historical continuum that justified the continuation of the black radical tradition. Six chapters highlighted the Huiswouds’ migration to New York; their roles in VOS and the CPUSA; their global travels; collaborations with De Kom; and Otto’s imprisonment in Suriname in 1941. Panels using accessible language explained the concept of imperialism, Surinamese and African American migration patterns, and black communist ideology. The chapters were supported with artwork by Surinamese‑Dutch artists Iris Kensmil, Raul Balai, and Brian Elstak; a Dutch news clip describing colonialism as benevolent “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 79

paternalism; an interactive panel where visitors could learn about the places the Huiswouds visited for the Comintern; and artifacts from TBA’s collections like photographs and material on Huiswoud’s activities for a solidarity protest against Patrice Lumumba’s assassination.74 The panels explicitly aimed to intervene in visitors’ historical memory. The one on Surinamese migration intended to challenge hegemonic tales about Caribbean migration; Hermina Huiswoud’s work was included to reflect current recognition of black female activism; and the stress on black communism intended to balance the overemphasis on the 1960‑70s U.S.-based movements in black freedom struggle renditions. De Kom’s inclusion served to question the Huiswouds’ invisibility in Surinamese history75. The panel on Huiswoud’s imprisonment—illustrated with wall paper of his FBI‑file—challenged World War II memory by illustrating the juxtaposition between the Dutch as victims of aggression during the war and their own behavior in the colonies. Explicit parallels were drawn with the present, such as panels on how social awareness during the Harlem Renaissance spread through newspapers and the similar function of social media today. Elstak’s mural of Garvey and Huiswoud on opposite ends made visitors contemplate working‑class solidarity and cross‑cultural alliances for activism then and now. In a video installation, Balai connected Huiswoud’s imprisonment to Dutch authorities’ treatment of KOZP‑activists, some of whom Kensmil celebrated in charcoal portraits.76 As exhibition participants and interpreters, the artists’ and TBA members’ work simultaneously became secondary and primary sources of Dutch black activist history that were more informative of the current Dutch anti‑racism movement than the Huiswouds. One criticism levied at the exhibition was indeed that the Huiswouds’ voices were marginalized in the process. The exhibition and TBA writings about the Huiswouds also gloss over assessments of how representative they were for the African American and Dutch (black) political landscapes at the time; the limits the strenuous relationship between African Americans and Caribbean migrants in early twentieth‑century New York posed on transnational solidarity; the limitations of the CPUSA and 1930s black radical thought in advancing racial equality; and the complex reasons for their demise and invisibility then and now.77 Yet such oversights paradoxically accentuate the exhibition’s power and the strength of TBA’s in- genuity and grassroots movement ownership. After all, this fits a longer tradition of how (black) Europeans have engaged the Diaspora and U.S. connections for contemporary means. European activists during the The New Americanist 04/2020 80

1960s and beyond—ranging from anti‑racism activists to other New Left, environmentalist, and peace groups—appropriated America’s black protest movements for own purposes,78 with the 2020 European George Floyd solidarity protests as the most recent example. Even in Huiswoud’s time this happened: at the 1919 Pan‑African Congress, when DuBois articulated his Pan‑Africanist vision, European and colonial representatives were more narrowly concerned with using the conference to boost their own movements.79 Accordingly, in TBA’s archival activism, the significance of the Huiswouds’ legacy is defined less through their lived experiences than the imaginative power they generate as an organizing tool for today. To spur the type of collective, diasporic identity across time and space that the exhibition emphasized, TBA organized an accompanying summer school on radical black thought featuring Tony Borgues, Hakim Adi, Keeyanga Yahmatta Taylor, and Runoko Rashidi. There, the Huiswouds were used as a catalyst for probing contemporary issues of labor discrimination and cross‑cultural alliances to counter rightwing populism. In one blog, Esajas used Huiswoud’s Lumumba connection to promote Dutch engagement with Pan‑African solidarity movements, like signing a Belgian group’s petition to decolonize Belgian street names; in interviews and tours, he similarly highlights the 1970s correspondence between VOS and the Black Panthers. In another blog, he used the Garvey‑Huiswoud debate to question modern‑day slavery and resurgence of rightwing extremism, concluding with a call to revive Garvey’s race‑centered analyses and Huiswoud’s addition of class and interracial alliances.80

Popularizing the Archives Such blogs on TBA’s website and other writings exemplify the final lay- er of its archival activism geared at popularizing its collections. While TBA’s adoption of the practice emerged organically, it has always been part of black archival activism. Besides organizing exhibits and publishing historical essays in popular black magazines such as the NAACP’s The Crisis and Garvey’s The Negro World, Schomburg for instance lectured on black history in churches.81 The Huiswouds and VOS similarly promoted “consumable narratives” for black‑owned popular magazines. TBA members continue this by providing introductions to black‑centered theater productions like recent Dutch renditions of the Raisin in the Sun‑trilogy, through their own (online) writings, and by cooperating with mainstream media outlets. Their website even provides convenient links to such segments.82 In such segments, they commonly use their collections to discuss “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 81

the present. In one, Esajas discussed finding a 1952 copy of De Tsjerne, a literary magazine in the Frisian language, spoken in the Dutch province of Friesland, that focused on Suriname. Quoting from its foreword, he noted how Surinamese and Frisian elites cherished—or found it useful to project—a shared history of cultural oppression in the Netherlands. He then recounted his disappointment when he found no such sympathy when Frisians stopped their bus during their KOZP‑protests. From there, he explained Surinamese and Frisians’ divergent perceptions of structural racism. Such discrepancies, he concluded, could only be solved through decolonized education. TBA also popularizes archival activism by spot- lighting the value of research‑based activism, meaning the “use of public records for the excavation of suppressed or forgotten history that gained current significance.”83 Esajas for instance devoted a 2019 blog to countering rightwing politician Thierry Baudet’s proclamation of the Dutch representing the world’s “grandest civilization” by describing documents he found in the National Archives that captured how much proponents of ending Dutch slavery in parliament harbored racist stereotypes too. The blog ended with a call to promote the black vote.84 TBA’s online archival activism fits a broader trend of marginalized groups using using the digital realm to create spaces of representational belonging, catalogue grievances, and galvanize support for their power‑struggles in the real world. African American groups particularly use online spaces for networking and documenting (past) abuses for accountability purposes, like projects documenting police brutality.85 Due to the lack of boundaries online (geographic and otherwise) and such fora’s abilities to extend “diasporic attempts of ‘knowledge is power,’” several scholars have argued for seeing such online spaces as modern‑day “Pan‑African sites of resistance” and a direct extension of Schomburg’s counter‑archival practices.86 TBA’s web-, Facebook-, and Twitter‑sites likewise work in tandem to promote activities by TBA members and others in and outside their networks, communicate directly with their followers, and discuss issues of interest to the Afro‑Dutch community. In one blog, Esajas used America’s Black History Month (founded by Schomburg’s friend Carter Woodson) to celebrate local black achievements, like the 2018 publication of Zwart!, a collection of stories by Dutch authors of African descent overlooked by the Dutch literary field.87 Together, TBA’s online archivist practices serve as an extension and archive of the own activism, turning their digital presence into an independent community‑based archive in itself.88 The New Americanist 04/2020 82

Conclusion: The Background for the Future is in the Present By rooting its archival activism in Black Atlantic traditions, TBA benefits in multiple ways. Utilizing the Diaspora and its manifestations in the Americas represents an authentic part of members’ background and the fluid cultural identity that characterizes its descendants. But it also provides a space of safety and legitimacy to discuss racism in a local climate in which it is controversial to do so. Besides sustenance and activist cues, it additionally provides lessons to safeguard its existence. Being classified as “activist” and “amateur” can threaten the fundraising abilities of independent community‑led archives, inhibit mainstream cooperation, and leave them dependent on political whims. A right‑wing newspaper for instance falsely termed KOZP‑activists violent left‑wing extremists, which hindered TBA’s ability to attract sponsors and increased physical threats, although such attacks strengthened members’ activist identification and constituted another organizing tool. Other community‑based archives rooted in the Diaspora, like BCA and the Schomburg, show that existen- tial threats are best overcome through long‑term planning that allows for lasting, mutually beneficial collaborations with mainstream institutions, a steady workforce, and articulations of ‘future imaginaries’ that are not dependent on individuals.89 Strategic partnerships and participatory democracy also alleviate risks of romanticization and alienating community members who do not feel represented.90 At this stage, TBA mostly reflectsa section of the Dutch anti‑racism movement shaped by its geographic location, Afro‑Caribbean roots, and student base. While the Dutch media use KOZP and TBA members as the default voice of the Dutch anti‑racism movement, others within that movement have not. This is not surprising considering the cultural diversity within the Afro‑Dutch and Dutch non‑white populace at large. For example, Dutch black (scholar-)activists have extended ‘decolonizing‑the‑mind’ frameworks to include Muslim minorities91 and occasionally formed precarious alliances with Turkish and Moroccan activists and politicians, but continued fears over Islamophobia eclipsing black concerns keep the relationship between these groups strenuous.92 Despite overlapping organizational memberships, many differences over strategies and direction also exist within the black movement. For instance, other black activists critiqued Esajas’ defense of the University of Colour’s direct action protest at a 2017 event on black women at the UvA that did not feature any black women scholars as a direct and necessary continuation of the black radical tradition’s emphasis on structural racism and intersectionality.93 Neither do all in the Afro‑Dutch community “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 83

support anti‑Black Pete activism94, although they may support other anti‑racism initiatives, as the 2020 Floyd protests show. TBA therefore tries to broaden notions of community identity by encouraging participatory approaches and applying the debates on intersectionality emphasized in its left‑leaning network. Like early twentieth‑century black female archivists such as Dorothy Porter, De Abrue called it her “duty to speak out for the women who might be erased from our history” through TBA’s archival activism. In her writings, she often spotlights Hermina Huiswoud’s seminal role in collecting the Huiswoud Papers. In one piece, she cited Hermina’s support for activist writing and direct action to justify and discuss the forgotten roles De Abrue and other black women played in anti‑Black Pete protests. Likewise, black queer activists’ presence in TBA’s network, like Gloria Wekker, Naomie Pieter, and Wigberston Julian Isenia, led to Pieter’s and Isenia’s creation of the Black Queer Archive at TBA, which documents Dutch black queer history, in 2018.95 Nonetheless, internal divisions in community‑led archives over objectives and function can create tensions or inconsistencies in approaches.96 Some TBA members also emphasize the idea of a knowledge institute, while others are more politically outspoken. But exactly this muddling of objectives and voices help its purpose of creating social change, as it allows for addressing several constituencies at once and uncovering simi- larities over differences. In evoking the diasporic nation‑building projects of the early twentieth‑century black activists, they found one powerful tool for creating such unity within its ranks and outside. In the same vein Huiswoud, Schomburg, and other contemporaries were invested in such projects for their own reasons, reviving them by maintaining the “grand narrative” of a “radical African Atlantic”97 serves a similar purpose for TBA. Its subsequent success and authority created within movement cir- cles in turn spurs those in the mainstream to accept its legitimacy. The ways in which TBA ‘practices the archive’ must be seen as an essential part of the broader cultural, lexical, and spiritual archive of Black Atlantic resistance. Its deliberate situation in pre‑existing trans‑Atlantic networks, semantics, and practices reaches the core of the diasporic experience, both real and imagined. It ties it to a longer tradition of black archival activism, grassroots activism, and resource mobilization beyond the identity politics and community archive boom of the post‑World War II era—a paradigm shift that emerges and is understood properly only when placed inside the Diaspora and, conform decolonial thought, outside conventional Eurocentric approaches to history. This also reaffirms the trans‑Atlantic turn in American Studies, while simultaneously The New Americanist 04/2020 84

illustrating the complexities of diasporic meaning for twenty‑first century black Europeans and of (dis)continuities in black activism. TBA’s archival activism instantaneously validates long‑held critiques of the “totalizing perspective” of any theoretical framework that treats the black freedom struggle in a continuum through time, space, and ideology and provides further evidence for its lasting utility in practice as an organizing tool for twenty‑first‑century black European activists. The processes and networks which inform TBA’s archival activism exemplify the kaleido- scopic and vulnerable position in which contemporary black European activists and scholars find themselves as they are chartering an independent path of their own. But it also shows how (African) American Studies can continue to be a useful tool for fine‑tuning the local black experience, even as the Anglo‑American diasporic framework is more suitable for the Netherlands than black Europe as a whole. TBA members’ choices in foregrounding certain eras and players who recognized the existence of structural racism embedded in intersectional power matrixes, acknowledged rocky yet necessary alliances with whites, and the power of internal transformation reflects their creativity, agency, and Afro Dutch Surinamese/Caribbean identity. But it also reflects the tenacity of the colorblind myth they are fighting and discloses the biggest hurdles and the solutions they see for countering structural racism today. As “the relationships within the imagined community of the black diaspora will continue to transmogrify and change form and function deep into the twenty‑first century,”98 TBA’s archival activism confirms that the background for that future will always be found in the present. “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 85

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Notes

1 TBA website. All the web sources used for this article were accessed between September 5-30, 2019 and June 1-12, 2020. Quotes from Dutch that I translated are indicated with “TLVM.” 2 Mitchell Esajas and Jessica de Abreu, “The Black Archives: Exploring the Politics of Black Dutch Radicals, Open Cultural Studies 3, no.1 (2019): 402, 412. 3 Due to the complexities of defining “black”’ and “‘Europe,”’ I subscribe to Small’s definition of “‘Black Europe”’ as referring to those living in Europe who “identify themselves (or are identified by others) as Black, African, African descent, African- Caribbean, Afro-European, African Americans, or some other national variation, and who trace their origins to Africa and the Americas” (See Small, Questions, 34; Blakely, “The Emergence of Afro-Europe,” 3-28. 4 Terms like “community,” “archive,” “archival activities,” and “archivist” are heterogeneous, flexible, inclusive and exclusive—depending on internal strife, self-definition, impositions from above, and national and cultural practices—and continuously evolving due to scholarly, political, and technological shifts. “Independent” may refer to funding, physical and/or intellectual ownership. See: Flinn, “Archival,” 5-8; Flinn, “Archives,” 20, 27-28, 34; Flinn and Stevens, “Mistri,” 4-7; Manoff, “Theories,” 10- 13; Caswell, “SAADA.” 5 Flinn, “Community,” 152-154. 6 Flinn, “Community,” 153-154; Flinn and Stevens, “Mistri,” 4-8. Quote on 4; Flinn, “Archival,” 4-8. Quote on 7; Flinn, “Archives,” 27-29; Caswell, “Seeing,” 32. 7 See, for instance, Rukus! in the U.K. Black Queer archives are also compiled as subsections within other identity-based archives, such as the Schomburg Center’s Black Gay and Lesbian Archive or the Black Queer Archive at TBA. 8 Flinn and Stevens, “Mistri,” 4-7; Flinn, “Archives,” 19-35; Flinn, “Community,” 154-159; Flinn, “Archival,” 3-5, 12-13; Caswell, “Seeing,” 31-32; Schwartz and Cook, “Archives,” 1-19; Manoff, “Theories,” 9-25; Holton, “Decolonizing,” 224-227; Burton, “Introduction,” 1-17; Gilliland, “Neutrality,” 193, 195; Vukliš and Gilliland, “Archival,” 14-25. 9 Flinn and Stevens,“Mistri,” 7-8; Caswell, “Seeing,” 32; Schwartz and Cook, “Archives,” 30-31. 10 Flinn and Stevens, “Mistri,” 8 and “Archives,” 21; Evans et al. “Self-determination..” Quote on Quote on 337-338; Flinn and Alexander, “‘Humanizing,’” 332. 11 Esajas and Abrue, “Exploring,” 412. 12 Osborne, “Ordinariness,” 54. 13 Flinn and Alexander, “Humanizing,” 329-332, 334-335. Quote on 331; Yaco and Hardy, “Historians,” 254-255; Flinn, “Archival,” 1; Vukliš and Gilliland, “Archival,” 14-18. 14 Flinn and Stevens, “Mistri,” 8-10, 12-15; Flinn, “Archives,” 30; Flinn, “Communities,” 157-158. 15 Kelley, “Phase,” 1050. 16 Kelley, “Phase,” 1045-1047, 1050-1051, 1057-1058, 1067-1073; Holton, “Decolonizing,” 220-222, 232; Parker, “‘Capital,’” 98-117; Weiner and Báez, “Introduction,” xiv. 17 Holton, “Decolonizing,” 218-219, 227, 230-232. Schomburg quoted on 218-219, 227. 18 Holton, “Decolonizing,” 230. 19 Holton, “Decolonizing,” 222-224, 230; Kelley, “Phase,” 1058; Porter, “African,” 17; Parker, “Made-in-America,” 729, 731, 734-750; Jardins, “Librarians,” 15-18; “Colored People’s,” 44-45; “Keeping Negroes,” 30; Knowlton, “‘Negro,’” 23-45; Visser-Maessen, Moses, 211-214. Schomburg was involved in many such organizations and his friends Jesse Moorland and Arthur Spingarn created the archives of DuBois’s and Padmore’s alma mater, Howard University. Apart from writing black histories themselves, black female archivists such as Dorothy Porter and Catherine Latimer unearthed collections on black women to counter their marginalization in history. 20 Flinn, “Community,” 159. 21 Wekker, Innocence, 2. 22 Ibid. Wekker; Essed and Hoving, “Innocence,” 9-13; Weiner, “Ideologically,” 732, The New Americanist 04/2020 96

735-737; Smith, “Carnivalesque,” 233. See also other articles in Dutch Racism (2014) and Smash the Pillars (2018). 23 Goldberg cited in Weiner and Báez, “Introduction,” xi. This can partly be attributed to what Stoler called ‘colonial aphasia,’ referring to the separation of colonial history from national history (Helsloot, “Zwarte,” 1-20). 24 Nimako et al., “Chattel,” 33-44. 25 Wekker, Innocence, 1-25; Essed and Hoving, “Innocence,” 9-13; Ghorashi, “Racism,” 101- 116; Essed, “Voorwoord,” 7-9; Hondius, “Reports,” 273-275; Hondius, Blackness, vii, 1-12, 284-286, 300-301; Essed and Nimako, “Designs,” 281-312; Weiner, “Colonized,” 451; Balkenhol, “Silence,” 278-293; Weiner and Báez, “Introduction” and “Conclusion,” ix-xiii, 199; Salem and Thompson, “Old,” 3-18; Visser-Maessen, “Getting.” 26 James, Holding, 74-75, 88-89, 94, 156, 162, 183, 270-271; Adi, Pan-Africanism, 14-16, 22-25, 61, 105-106, 155-161, 163-174, 194-199, 299-302, 326-327, 387-390; Pitts, Afropean, 139-147; Esajas, “Untold,” 6-8, 14; Esajas and Abrue, “Exploring,” 405-412; Meershoek, “Vereniging.” 27 The backlash against Muslims additionally facilitated what Philomena Essed calls “entitlement racism,” the framing of the right to be discriminatory as a principle of free speech, with rightwing politicians like Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders defending intolerance of Muslims as the ultimate form of ‘saving’ Western ideals of equality, particularly for women and the LGBTQ+ (Essed and Hoving, “Innocence,” 13-18; Essed, “Geleide,” 15-21). 28 Sherif and Rouw, “Inleiding,” 6; Chin, Crisis, 26, 44-49, 64-65, 75-76, 102-112, 136-137, 228-231, 273-278; Ghorashi, “Racism,” 101-116; Pitts, 147-152, 156, 158-159. 29 Essed and Hoving, “Innocence,” 11-12; Chin, Crisis, 273-275; Pitts, Afropean, 159; Hondius, “Reports,” 276-277; Nimako et al., “Chattel,” 37; Weiner, “Colonized,” 450-465; Small, Questions, 165-171; Weiner and Báez, “Conclusion,” 201, 207-208; Jones, “Activism,” 161-173; Guadeloupe, “Acknowledging,” 125-135, 136ft.5; Hoeven, “Perspectief,”; Essed and Nimako, “Designs,” 281-312; Weiner, “Ideologically,” 731-732; Elibol and Tielbeke, “Alledaagse” and “Goede”; Cain, “Decoloniality,” 182-183. 30 “Een Zolder,” NOS; Varsseveld, “Meeste”; Blokker and Chorus, “Hoe,”; Bodegom, “Conserveren.” 31 Jones, “Activism,” 165. 32 Paradoxically, the Monument reaffirmed Afro-Dutch invisibility due to government cooptation and their literal exclusion from its unveiling ceremony (Kardux, “Monuments,” 87-106). Waldo Heilbron was also involved in the Monument’s realization. 33 Small, Questions, 21, 65-66, 172-185; Yaco and Hardy, “Historians,” 263; Nimako et al., “Chattel,” 44-48; Wekker, Innocence, 139-167; Weiner and Báez, “Introduction,” ix, xii, xxi, and contributions Gario, Esajas, and Abrue; Weiner, “Ideologically,” 736-737; Hondius, Blackness, 100, 191, 292; Heilbron et al., “Zwarte”; Henley, “Dutch.” The Floyd protests compelled prime minister Mark Rutte to announce a “major change of heart” about Black Pete that he partly attributed to his meetings with protesters since 2013, but insisted the government should not interfere with its practice (Krever and Woodyatt, “Dutch”). 34 Ibid. Small, 81-89, 100, 97-107, 153-154; Flinn, “Community,” 159; Eddo-Lodge, Why, 235; Visser-Maessen, “Getting.” 35 Ibid. Small, 15, 43, 49-52, 76, 178-179; Tuck and Boehmer, “African,” 98-99; Hondius, Blackness, 9, 13ft.16, 283. See works by Carol Blackshire-Belay, Tina Campt, Tiffany Florvil, Sande Gilman, Sara Lennox, Fatima El‐Tayeb, Onyekachi Wambu, Kehinde Andrews, David Olusoga, Afua Hirsh, and others. 36 Ibid. Hondius, 9; Ibid. Small, 14, 33, 47, 52, 57-58, 104-107, 161, 168-171, 174-176, 193-194; BDG, Black, 25; University of Colour, “Hollow,” 17-30; Weiner and Báez, “Introduction” and “Conclusion,” xiii-xix, 204; Cain, “Decoloniality,” 182; Small, “Introduction,” xxix-xxxi; Campt, “Pictures,” 63-64; Weheliye, “Volk,” 161-165. This American dependency is logical due to the influence of the U.S. and African America as reference cultures for post-war Europe, Europeans’ lack of a discourse that acknowledges racism as an intersectional and structural power domain, and the strength of U.S.-based Black Studies departments; countless Europeans have attended HBCUs for the black- centered education they missed at home. See Salem and Thompson, “Old,” 3; Höhn, “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 97

“Panther,” 154, ft. 75; Wekker, “Another,” 280-281; Parker, “‘Made-in-America,” 730- 731, 737-739; Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (Columbia University Press, 2006); Katherina Gerund, Transatlantic Cultural Exchange (Transcript Verlag, 2013); Klimke, “African,” 91-106; Visser-Maessen, “Getting.” 37 El-Tayeb, Queering, 62-63, 129-137; Kessel and Leeuwen, “End,” 285-297; Meijeren, “Rijke.” 38 Ibid. El-Tayeb, xii-xiii; Small, Questions, 24, 35, 58, 68, 110-118; BDG, Black, 25-26; Brown, “Black,” 201, 209; Weheliye, “Volk,” 161-164; Kardux, “Monuments,” 91. 39 Ibid. Small, 49-50, 159; Homepage TBA; Quote Esajas in Dijk, “Eerlijk”; Quote Abrue in Abrue, “Hoe”; Pitts, Afropean, 136-137; Esajas, “Untold,” 4; Abrue, “Reclaiming,” 64; Esajas, “Zoektocht”; Bolwijn, “Zwarte”; Brummelen, “Black”; Broer and Luimes, “‘Nederland’”; Linge, “Vier”; Frank, “Zoek.” 40 Ibid. “Hoe.” 41 Pitts, Afropean, 162-164. Quote De Abrue on 163; Esajas et al., “Geen.”; Weiner and Báez, “Conclusion,” 246. 42 Such support is vital for the anti-Black Pete movement, as international voices, like the United Nations in 2013 and celebrities like Kim Kardashian in 2019, receive widespread attention in Dutch media. 43 Pitts, Afropean, 162-164; Weiner and Báez, “Conclusion,” 199. 44 Evans et al. “Self-determination,” 338. 45 Abrue, “Reclaiming.” Quote on 69; Pitts, Afropean, 136; Blokker and Chorus, “Dekoloniseer”; Guadeloupe, “Acknowledging,” 125-132; Cain, “Decoloniality,” 181-182; Torsch, “Decoloniality,” 31-35; Broer and Luimes, “Nederland”; Hettinga, “Slavernijverleden”; Bolwijn, “Zwarte”; Rasit and Tielbeke, “Goede.” 46 Ibid. Blokker and Chorus, Broer and Luimes, and Pitts, 136-137, 162. Quote Abrue on 136; Guadeloupe, “Acknowledging,” 130; University of Colour, “Hollow,” 17-30; NUC, “Waarom”; Brummelen, “Black.” 47 Small, Questions, 14, 33, 174-176; Weiner and Báez, “Introduction,” xiii-xix. Quotes on xvii and xviii. 48 Steedman, “Space,” 72-73; Flinn, “Archives,” 22-26; Kaplan, “We Are,” 126. For more on the transforming effect of community archives on staff members, see: Flinn, “Community,” 164-166; Flinn and Stevens, “Mistri,” 10, 12, 17-22; Flinn, “Archival,” 1, 3-4, 8-9, 13; Michelle Caswell et al. “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing,’” American Archivist 79:1 (2016), 56-81, and Steven Fullwood’s entry in Community Archives (2009). 49 Linge, “Vier”; Esajas, “Untold,” 8-12; Bolwijn, “Geshiedenis”; Frank, “Zoek.” 50 Ibid. Esajas, 12; Ibid. Bolwijn; Broer and Luimes, “Nederland”; Quotes Abrue in Driessen, “Toen,” TLVM, and Vassel, “Archives”; Pitts, Afropean, 148-149, 151. 51 Esajas attributed this to the Dutch educational system, since radical anti-colonial writers are acknowledged in the English and French systems, although De Abrue nuanced that the Huiswouds’ communism was to blame too. (Bouwhuis, “Vijf”). 52 Dijk, “Eerlijk.” TLVM. 53 Burton, “Introduction,” 8-11, quote on 10; Esajas, “Untold,” 5, 13, quote on 13; Bouwhuis, “Vijf.” In Afropean, Pitts also notes the impact of the VOS-building on his response to the Black Archives (133, 138, 164). 54 Jimerson, “Archives,” 252-281. 55 Frank, “Zoek,” TLVM; Danbolt, “Here!” 104. 56 The second largest group of blacks in the Netherlands are from West-Africa (Small, Questions, 79). Many come from Ghana (where the Dutch operated their slave trade from), which has English as the official language. 57 Ibid. Small, 191; Elmer, “Black,” 60-161, 165-166; Kelley, “‘But,” 1050-1051; Parker, “Made-in-America,” 738. 58 Small, Questions, 188; Flinn and Stevens, “Mistri,” 13-14; Esajas, “Zoektocht,” TLVM; Brummelen, “Black,” TLVM. They also visited the Tamiment Library, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, Yale’s Langston Hughes archive, Washington, and later Suriname, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Curaçao to research the Huiswouds’ lives. 59 Windt, “Black,”; Dijk, “Eerlijk,” TLVM. 60 Pitts, Afropean, 148; Esajas and Abrue, “Exploring,” 412. For another example, see Heilbron, “Meerstemmig,” 278, 280-283. The New Americanist 04/2020 98

61 Esajas, “Untold,” 7-8; Blokker and Chorus, “Dekoloniseer”; Esajas, “Zoektocht,” quote TLVM; NUC, “Alleen”; Website TBA, sections on De Kom, Huiswoud, and Power-to- the-People-Reading-List; “On the Matter,” Worldpress; Hettinga, “Slavernijverleden,” TLVM. 62 The Dutch government established a commission in 2019 that advises on revising the historical canon taught at Dutch schools, paying special attention to the shadow sides of Dutch history—a move that met with controversy. (“Aanpassen,” NOS) 63 “Lees,” TBA. 64 Carter, “Things,”Archivaria , 215. 65 Danbolt, “Here!,” quote on 105; Hettinga, “Slavernijverleden”; Bolwijn, “Zwarte”; Website TBA, sections “Boekenverkoop,” “Fotoverslag,” and “Lees”; Esajas and Abrue, “Exploring,” 405; Esajas, “Power” and “Werkt Wel?”; “Verzwegen,” FunX; Brummelen, “Black”; Quote Abrue in Varssevelt, “Meeste,” TLVM. 66 Morris, Origins, xii, 279-286. 67 Quote in Visser-Maessen, “Getting”; Esajas, “Lessons” and “Santa.” 68 Website TBA, sections “Lees Meer over de Poster ‘10x Meer Geschiedenis,” “Fotoverslag,” “Diensten,” “18 Hoogtepunten uit 2018,” and “Zwarte Lijst”; Brummelen, “Black”; Flinn and Stevens, “Mistri,” 6; Esajas, “Grootste,” quote TLVM; Parker, “Made-in-America,” 729, 750; Visser-Maessen, Moses, 264, 289-290. 69 Pitts, Afropean, 137, 147-148; Elibol and Tielbeke, “Alledaagse”; Esajas, “Untold,” 12-13; Berk and Visser-Maessen, “Race.” 70 This sometimes occurred coincidentally; Esajas met Hakim Adi at a 2015 Washington conference, but Adi’s questions about Huiswoud did not resonate until he discovered Huiswoud’s papers months later (Esajas during TBA tour attended by author, November 22, 2019). 71 Esajas, “Lessen,” quote TLVM; Brummelen, “Black”; Driessen, “Toen”; Gario, “Agency,” 75-85; Bolwijn, “Zwarte”; Holton, “Decolonizing,” 234. 72 Ibid. Holton, 234-236; Author’s visits to TBA; Varsseveld, “Meeste,” quote TLVM; Bolwijn, “Zwarte.” 73 Ibid. Varsseveld; Website TBA, sections on “Onze Tori,” “100 Jaar VOS,” and “Ivette Foster”; Esajas and Abrue, “Exploring,” 403, 410-411. Quote on 411. 74 Ibid. Esajas and Abrue, 406-412; Esajas, “Strijd.” 75 De Kom (1898-1945) is generally more well-known because he joined the Communist branch of the Dutch resistance movement during Nazi occupation and died in a German concentration camp. 76 Esajas and Abrue, “Exploring,” 406-412; Roorda, “Zwart.” 77 Ibid. Roorda; Parker, “Capital,” 98-117; Sinnette, Schomburg, 112; Allen, Reluctant, 207- 280. 78 For examples, see Klimke, “African,”; Tuck and Boehmer, “African,” 100; Visser-Maessen, “Getting”; Todd Carmody, “Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin,” Cultural Critique 88 (Fall 2014), 1-27; and works mentioned in footnotes 35-36 of this article. 79 Berk and Visser-Maessen, “Race”; Dunstan, “Conflicts,” 133-150. 80 Esajas, “Strijd,” “Zoektocht,” “Lessen,” and “Historische”; Esajas and Abrue, “Exploring,” 408; Bolwijn, “Zwarte.” Before the corona pandemic, TBA planned to open an adjusted version of ‘Zwart & Revolutionair’ using the work of Surinamese artists at the National Archive in Suriname in April 2020. 81 Holton, “Decolonizing,” 218, 229-230, 232; Sinnette, Schomburg, 161-166, 172; James, Holding, 203. 82 TBA website, section “In the Media.” 83 Vukliš and Gilliland, “Archival,” 21. 84 Hettinga, “Slavernijverleden”; Esajas, “Grootste.” 85 Ng, “Community-based”; Flinn and Alexander, “Humanizing,” 333-334; Flinn, “Archives,” 31-34. Black Twitter is a modern version of the African American practice of ‘signifying’ for creating and performing black cultural identities online and spurring activism (Lavan, “Tweets,” 56-65). 86 Beckles, “Black,” 311-324. Quotes on 313, 314; Lavan, “Tweets,” 56. 87 Zwart! was compiled to contribute to “a specific Afro-European identity and awareness” while simultaneously underscoring the longevity of black cultural exchanges between “The Background for Our Future”: Locating The Black Archives… 99

Europe, Africa, and the Americas (Sherif and Rouw, “Inleiding,” 10-12. Quote on 10). 88 Esajas, “Helden.” 89 Flinn, “Archival,” 13-15; Flinn and Stevens, “Mistri,” 8-13, 20-21; Flinn, “Archives,” 30; Flinn, “Community,” 166-169; Esajas et al., “Geen.” 90 Vukliš and Gilliland, “Archival,” 19; Schwartz and Cook, “Archives,” 17; Caswell, “SAADA”; Flinn, “Archival,” 9-10. 91 See for instance Halleh Ghorashi’s contributions in Smash the Pillars, 185-194, and Dutch Racism, 101-116. 92 Examples are the political party DENK and the protest following the June 2015 death of Mitch Henriquez in police custody. Fears over black invisibility due to Islamophobia became visible when the 2017 Martin Luther King Lecture Series at the VU headlined a Dutch-Moroccan actor and Dutch-Turkish anthropologist over Dutch black activists (Visser-Maessen, “Getting”). 93 Pitts, Afropean, 156; Esasjas, “Lessen”; Veldhuyzen, “‘You.’” 94 Reasons for opposition to the anti-Black Pete movement include wariness, acquiescence, nostalgia to St. Nicolas experiences in childhood, rejection of connecting Black Pete to institutionalized racism, and seeing other anti-racism causes as more important (Smith, “Carnivalesque,” 232). 95 Pitts, 134-135, 145-146; Abrue, “Reclaiming,” quote on 70; Linge, “Vier”; Kessel and Leeuwen, “End,” 285-297; Meijeren, “Rijke”; Website TBA, section “18 Hoogtepunten”; Colpani et al., “Archiving,” 163-179. In 2019, Pieter and Isenia created their own exhibition Nos Tei on Dutch Surinamese and Caribbean queer lives, after an exhibition to celebrate forty years of Dutch queer activism at the Dutch LGBTQ archive IHLIA obscured black contributions to that struggle. 96 Flinn, “Archival,” 9-10; Flinn and Stevens, “Mistri,” 22. 97 Weiss, “Between,” 89-109. 98 Tuck and Boehmer, “African,” 101.

“Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions in African American Newspapers of the Middle West Paul D. Reich

ABSTRACT: The critical and commercial success of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration has done much to educate contemporary readers on the internal movements of African Americans in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the earlier migrations of the 19th century have been less discussed, particularly those that resulted in settlements in the Middle West. While those movements were comparatively smaller, our understanding of them provides critical insights for a population wrestling with new- found freedoms and growing concerns about their responsibilities as educated citizens. Part of a larger recovery project from newspaper archives, this essay explores two African American newspapers in Kansas: The Atchison Blade and The Parsons Weekly Blade. Both papers are concerned with African American settlement in Kansas and how that might impact their circulations. They also focus on local and national issues concerning their race, while still devoting significant space to an essential issue: the education of their readers. Af- rican American newspapers in Kansas, like their peers in the North, challenge the way their region is written and secure a place for local voices in national conversations. Many of these conversations happen through verse, through submissions by local citizens of original poetry that engage their community in local and national issues. For the first time since their original publication, this essay places these poems The New Americanist 04/2020 102

back in print and examines how they contribute to our understanding of African American history in the second half of the 19th century.

Keywords: 19th Century History; African American History; Poetry; Newspaper; Kansas

The September 10, 1892, issue of Kansas’sThe Atchison Blade features a poem addressing racial violence:

This was a man; And yet the howling demons, mad with fury— With neither law, or judge, or jury Denied the claim—being first they met, Of tawny skin, must guilty be—and yet This was a man.1

Written by citizen‑poet Tilford Davis, Jr., “To The Mob‑ocracy Of The South” discusses the lawlessness in Southern states and focuses on the injustice of lynching. The repeated refrain, “This was a man,” is effective, for it situates African Americans as men and the “howling,” “mad,” “demons”—the white lynch mob—as little more than animals. The final stanza asks “Justice” to “awake,” “arise,” and “to every man fair trial give.”2 In a country where the lynching of African Americans doubled in the past ten years, Davis’s request is both justified and of particular concern to Atchison’s African American community, who, just three weeks before, read of an attempted lynching less than forty miles away in Tonganoxie. “The Mob‑ocracy,” whether in the South or in the West, reduces rational men to savage beasts, and Davis represents it as one of his people’s most pressing concerns. The Atchison Blade reports on the Tonganoxie incident in their August 20, 1892, issue through a correspondent writing from Leavenworth, Kansas. The article opens by acknowledging the stories coming out of the South, where “it has become a common occurrence to read daily of burning, hanging, or shooting of our men without the aid of either judge or jury.”3 This pattern had been set to repeat in Tonganoxie when an African American farmer is arrested on the charge of raping a young white woman. Although there is no physical evidence of assault, several white men gather to subvert the judicial process and lynch the accused man. In response to this threat, more than a hundred armed African American men escort a lawyer to serve the accused and protect the jail from “Judge “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions… 103

Lynch.” The writer concludes: “If colored men must die from the mur- derous acts of white men, let some of the white men come up missing; that’s the only way to effectually stop mobocracy.”4 For Davis and other writers in The Atchison Blade, this writing serves not only to inform but also educate their readers. Davis’s “Mob‑ocracy” is not a unique contribution to The Atchison Blade but part of a larger series of poems featured in the newspaper. In another Kansas newspaper, The Parsons Weekly Blade, the poetry of Eliza Smith is similarly privileged. Both papers serve communities of color that have recently settled in Kansas; these new citizens now find themselves with voice and opportunity even in predominantly white towns. Both Blades work to educate their readers through editorials, features, and the expressive arts. The poetry of Smith and Davis provides in its verses clear lessons about right and wrong and encouragement for the Kansans who would enact them. When studied together, these poems portray an African American community in Kansas that is defiant, unapologetic, and optimistic about their future. In the period following Reconstruction, as more African Americans fled the South to establish new communities in the North and West, the number of African American newspapers grew at an astonishing rate and quickly became key voices in those communities. From 1895–1915, for example, 1,219 African American newspapers are founded.5 In his introduction to The Black Press, Martin E. Dunn argues that newspapers in the 19th century were repeatedly concerned with two goals: “a response to white racism and an assertion of self‑determination.”6 Both objectives underscore a greater purpose for the African American press: the strengthening of bonds among a divided people. The achievement of this larger aim prominently situates newspapers in African American society, and “by stressing the primacy of racial pride and thus forging ethnic solidarity, the black press [becomes], along with the church, a central institution in the black community.”7 Newspaper editors and correspondents are leaders of their communities, and their work enables readers to connect with one another. For many African Americans, these papers are “the only educational resources available;” subscrib- ers are informed of issues from the particular perspective of African American editors and writers.8 While African American newspapers during this period explore many issues, the “main theme which runs through the entire history of the Black press is the need for self‑definition, for self‑determination, and, most importantly, the need to speak for themselves.”9 The New Americanist 04/2020 104

While most ex‑slaves migrate north, a significant number—including Eliza Smith and her Mississippian parents—head west, many with only one destination in mind: Kansas. For many African Americans, Kansas is the Promised Land, historically significant as the place John Brown bat- tled white southerners to ensure the state’s freedom. In the 1860s, there is an influx of African American settlers—formerly enslaved persons from the South and a smattering of their contemporaries from the North—but the mass migration of tens of thousands of Southern African Americans occurrs from 1879 to 1881: “The Great Exodus, as this extraordinary population movement [comes] to be known, actually [begins] in the late 1870s when at the urging of two ex‑slaves—Benjamin ‘Pap’ Singleton of Tennessee and Henry Adams of Georgia—several hundred downtrod- den Negroes [leave] the South and [establish] colonies in Kansas.”10 In these initial migrations, “boatloads of indigent blacks [begin] arriving in St. Louis from Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi,” and many move on from St. Louis to Kansas City, Leavenworth, Atchison, and other towns in eastern Kansas.11 Another group of Exodusters, mostly from Texas, arrive in southeast Kansas, where they settle in towns like Oswego and Parsons. Randall B. Woods, in his study of the African American migration to Kansas, points out the difficulty of determining the exact number of Exodusters, but argues “between forty thousand and sixty thousand [make] the trek.”12 The propaganda spread by Singleton and Adams portrays Kansas as a place where African Americans could homestead in single race communities free from the discrimination and violence of the South, but most do not become independent landowners, choosing instead to settle in larger towns with a white majority. Many Exodusters become disil- lusioned with Kansas and return home, head north, or push on further west. Those who stay enjoy much better political, social, and economic conditions than in the South. Politically, Woods argues, “black Kansans probably [fare] better at the hands of whites…than in any other field.”13 African Americans only comprise “6 percent of the population” but “cast from 15 to 20 percent of the votes,” an imbalance guaranteeing an enhanced political clout for their community.14 Through most of the 1880s, African American Kansans support Republican candidates, but by the early 1890s they are being increasingly wooed by Democrat and Populist parties.15 As reflected in the poetry of African American Kansas newspapers, political allegiance is a significant issue for their readers. Violent white supremacists held less power in Kansas than in the south, and many African Americans were able to find new social opportunities “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions… 105

there. In many large cities, for example, high schools are integrated, and state colleges accept African American applicants. Cities and towns with large African American populations designate residential areas for them, but these Kansans “applying for jobs in the public sector” find discrimination “the exception rather than the rule.”16 Woods observes that “racial prejudice in Kansas [peaks] during the height of the exodus…[but] once it [becomes] clear that the migration [is] temporary and that Negroes [will] continue to constitute only a small minority of the population, most whites [cease] to feel threatened.”17 There are several mitigating factors for this increased acceptance, but the most useful one for this study lies in white Kansans’ general nature, which Woods describes as “self‑conscious- ly western.”18 Most whites feel “they [have] a reputation to maintain for frontier hospitality, openness, and freedom,” all qualities initially attrac- tive to African Americans.19 In his introduction to The Black Press in the Middle West, Henry Lewis Suggs argues that “the main agent that [projects] Kansas as a land of freedom and opportunity [is] the black press.”2021 African American newspapers in Kansas, like their peers in the North, challenge the way their region is to be written and secure a place for local voices in national conversations. As the opening paragraphs demonstrate, The Atchison Blade connects its community to racial issues both local and national. The Blade, which bills itself as “the newsiest, spiciest and best edited Colored Journal published in the West,” is owned by the Blade Publishing Company in Atchison, Kansas, during 1892–1898.22 Atchison is one of a handful of towns on the Missouri River and from 1854 became a primary landing point for the Exodusters. Many stay to form a small, but vibrant, community large enough to support a newspaper. Despite enjoying a marginally successful six‑year run, fewer than three years of the paper’s run are preserved. Fortunately, several poems appear in those remaining issues, and they serve as a fascinating example of community writing in Kansas and the Middle West. From July 23, 1892 to November 12, 1892, Tilford Davis, Jr. publishes eight poems in The Blade and becomes one of the most consistent and prolific contributors to the paper. Writing mostly from Kansas City, Kansas, Davis is listed as a teacher at the Douglass School in the 1890 Kansas City Directory. Further genealogical research shows Davis as a graduate of Leavenworth High School in 1887. The December 17, 1892, edition of The Blade includes a long paragraph announcing Davis’s immi- nent marriage to Mary Price. After presenting a few tongue‑in‑cheek remarks about marriage—befitting the paper’s “spiciest” status—and a few The New Americanist 04/2020 106

references to Davis’s poetic contributions to the paper, the editors conclude with their best wishes for the couple. The Federal census for 1900 reveals that Davis, his wife Mary, and their daughter Kathryn are living in Kansas City and that Davis is a schoolteacher.23 In the next Federal census, for 1910, the listing identifies Davis’s birth year as 1870 and his birth- place as Kansas (his parents, following the migration patterns discussed, had been born in Kentucky and Missouri).24 This record also shows his profession as mail carrier and lists him as the head of a household that includes his second wife, Norene, 30, and two children. Following his death in 1935, Tilford Davis, Jr. is buried with his second wife in Westlawn Cemetery, Kansas City, Kansas.25 Davis’s father, a stonemason, reads but cannot write; Davis’s mother can do neither. But all five of their children are literate. One son is a stonemason like his father, and one daughter is a schoolteacher. Despite the prevailing limitations imposed upon African Americans in late nineteenth‑century Kansas, the census records show a family in which the children’s lives are much improved over their parents’. Education is available, and the Davis family take advantage of that opportunity. Davis’s experiences in school are positive; three years after his graduation from high school, he chooses education as his first career. Douglass School, initially named Third Ward School, opens in 1887 as the second African American school in Wyandotte County. By the time Davis is hired, the school’s enrollment exceeds 200 students, and Davis’s life as a schoolteacher is a busy one.26 Davis’s first poem inThe Atchison Blade appears in the paper’s second issue on July 23, 1892; it is featured prominently at the top of the first page in the far‑left column. The other six columns on this first page- in clude several editorials, articles, and advertisements, but the prevailing focus of the written content centers on political and social issues in the Atchison community. Readers are encouraged to “labor for the success of the entire Republican ticket”27 and to question whether their “education [is] exceeding [their] morals.”28 Thematically, Davis’s poem follows the values expressed elsewhere in the paper. “The Hour is Late” includes three seven‑line stanzas with an ababccb rhyme scheme. Religious, the verses caution readers to exercise patience:

The hour is late; The Master cometh not— Thou soul, must wait, Forgetfulness thy lot. “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions… 107

Till Deity his mercy deigns— With Justice full in love he reigns. And thou art not forgot.29

Read in the context of place and time, this first stanza is a commentary on the state of race relations in the early 1890s. The first line acknowledges how long African Americans have struggled, while the third preaches that they must lay aside their grievances. Once they do, God will give them justice for the wrongs committed against them. The second stanza reinforces the first and tells readers they must suffer in this life to be welcomed into the next:

Thou, too must bear The burning, thorny crown— Doubt, fear, despair— Ere Peace comes trembling down, As fluttering to earth below, To purifying, shrouding snow, To bless it, else so brown.30

As the second line suggests, their struggles mirror Christ’s. The final stanza promises rewards to readers who sustain their belief in God:

Till death shall come, Pursue the Master’s way; He’ll lead thee home To that celestial day Where mansions rise in order grand For those who sit at His right hand And praise Him there always.31

Davis’s message to his readers would not have been unusual. But for a community that bears witness to the escalating violence against them, it is a lesson that is both reassuring and comforting. Full of strong convic- tions and unwavering belief, these verses promise material and spiritual wealth in the next life. Unfortunately, the possibility of Heaven must have seemed far removed from a world in which readers live with constant threats of disenfranchisement and physical violence. Interspersed throughout the August 6, 1892, issue that features Davis’s second poem, “A Melancholy Day,” are The New Americanist 04/2020 108

concerns over the upcoming election, the preservation of existing rights for African Americans, and the challenges faced by those who remain in the South:

Today all life seems drear and dark, The mingled cares and griefs, and sorrows stark Fall crushing down with their tremendous weight, As dark as Hell as pitiless as Fate.32

Unlike his first poem, the resignation and inevitability Davis expresses in this work are not tempered by a possibility for hope and optimism. Two weeks later, in “Rex’s Risibles,” Davis mentions again the “melancholy days” of the summer of 1892:

Those melancholy days have come— The dog‑days for this year, Of swelt’ring heat in Kansas state; Vainglorious sighs for beer.33

But as this first stanza and the title suggest, this poem is more light- hearted. The next stanza, thirty lines long, does not necessarily support that interpretation, but it does forecast a shift in Davis’s focus from subtle expressions about the general state of his community to overt, dramatic, and direct lessons about specific issues concerning African Americans. This final stanza, for example, discusses the upcoming elections, attack- ing the Democrats and Populists, and anticipates—when the “ballots” are “cast”—“Fair Kansas stands redeemed at last!”34 Considering the political influence African Americans have in the state, this commentary would not be ignored, and while Davis’s support for the Republicans place him in the majority, the need to acknowledge opponents indicates the possibility of defections from the party. Featured in the September 24, 1892, issue and titled “Stand Up For Kansas,” this poem, like “Rex’s Risibles,” is another political piece urging readers to vote for the state’s “Redemption.”35 The political climate in Kansas at this time is especially charged. State government has been con- trolled for the first three decades of statehood by the Republican Party— the party of Lincoln—with which the former slaves identify. The rise of the People’s (Populist) Party threaten the Republicans’ hold on state offices, and the high point for the Populists come in 1892 when they win all statewide elective offices and take control of the Senate. While some “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions… 109

African American Kansans support the insurgent party, most do not, for they perceive the popularity of the People’s Party as another white con- demnation of their race. Davis’s final poem appears in the November 12, 1892, issue of The Blade, and, following the announcement of his wedding in December 1892, Davis’s last published piece in the paper is an essay for February 4, 1893. The sequence of Davis’s poems demonstrates the advantages of newspaper writing. Unlike those pieces published serially or in publishing houses, newspaper poets like Davis produce fluid and dynamic works with immediate relevance to their audiences. They instigate and respond to contemporary events, remind readers of African Americans’ history, and anticipate the possibilities for the future. As an educator, Davis uses his works to establish a pedagogical approach, one that has as much vibrancy and relevance as some better known African American writers of the nineteenth century. Despite his predilection for writing about “melancholy days,” Davis is a hopeful poet, encouraged by the history of his people and optimistic about their ability to participate in decisions affecting their country’s future. While his political poems call for action, most of Davis’s work reassures African Americans and encourages them to have patience and faith. When The Atchison Blade launches in 1892, The Parsons Weekly Blade—another African American newspaper in a predominantly white Kansas town—becomes a prominent voice for African Americans in the southeastern corner of the state. Parsons is an entry point for many Texan Exodusters in 1879; many migrants, though, remain in town rather than remove themselves to all‑African American farming settlements. Those who do so find work in the mines and/or the railroad shops and become “about as prosperous as others in the state.”36 Incorporated in 1871, Parsons’ population steadily increases as agricultural and railroad busi- nesses blossom. By 1890, it is home to over 6,700 residents, a significant portion of them African American. Historian Nelson Case writes in his History of Labette County, Kansas (1901) that the movement of African Americans to the area improves “their condition both intellectually and financially.”37 He continues: “There are now among the colored people many well‑to‑do families, who are intelligent, industrious, and moral. Some of course have remained shiftless, trifling, and worthless.”38 Case’s history also includes a brief section on the “Papers Published By the Colored People.”39 There are differences among Case, James Danky, and Dorothy Smith regarding the date of the first publication of The Blade in 1892. In her chapter on Kansas in The Black Press in the The New Americanist 04/2020 110

Middle West, Smith devotes three paragraphs to the paper, mostly discussing its publication history and political leanings. All three sources agree that S.O. Clayton was the paper’s first editor, but Danky and Smith disagree about when it ceases publication: Danky claims the final issue appeared in 1901, Smith in 1904.4041 Regardless of the conflicting publication dates, the attention given to The Blade suggests it serves as an important example of an African American Kansas newspaper and as the first one published in the southern part of the state.42 The Blade initially identifies itself as a Republican newspaper; but by 1897 the editor, fed up with the party’s unwillingness to support African American candidates for office, switches the paper’s allegiance to the People’s Party, a move that eventually dooms the publication. During its initial run, however, The Blade is an influential and important institution in the African American community, and the poetry in its pages offers opportunities for ordinary citizens to express their views on a myriad of issues. Their verses, while conventional, speak of heartache and loss, offer instruction to readers, and promote their endeavors. The first original poem published inThe Blade occurs in the October 15, 1892, issue. Appearing at the top of page two in a middle column and tacked on to the end of a piece of travel writing, this work signifies the re- duced importance poetry has to this paper as compared to the prominent position afforded Davis inThe Atchison Blade. Writing from Madagascar, Minnie Waller recounts her trip from America to Africa. “Pleased” with her new home, Waller’s “instinct” leads her to reflect on her previous residence:

Thou sunny state of Kansas, With skies serene and fair, Without a doubt no other place Can unto thee compare.43

Complementary in every way to Kansas, this eight‑stanza poem does more than merely sing the state’s praises; it also establishes it as prefera- ble to Africa, one of the other “promised lands” considered by migrating African Americans. This edition of The Blade also includes the first poem by Eliza Smith, the paper’s most prolific poet. Of the sixteen poems printed inThe Blade between the fall of 1892 and the spring 1894, half of them are penned by Smith. The destruction of the 1890 Federal Census makes locating information difficult for Smith, but outside of her poetry, she is mentioned “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions… 111

at least nine times in The Blade, and these references allow us to construct a comprehensive biography of the poet. Two weeks before the publication of Smith’s first poem inThe Blade, the community notes section of the October 1, 1892, issue observes: “Miss Eliza Smith, Hobson’s happy po- etess, is among the happy Hobsonites.”44 This seemingly trivial remark helps to establish her educational background and the initial reason for her relocation to Parsons. Smith is a student at the Hobson Normal Institute for three years. The school is founded—according to the archive description at Howard University—“by the Iowa yearly meeting of the Society of Friends in 1882,” and its mission is to train students for the teaching profession and to “provide higher education of Negro youth in the border states, where segregation limited Negro schools to the eighth grade.”45 Hobson is also mentioned in the monthly journals of both the American and British societies of Friends. The July 14, 1887, issue of The Friends’ Review includes a reprint of John Fry’s report on Hobson—originally authored for the Christian Worker—in which he discusses the closing exercises of the Institute and praises “the labors of the Christian young men and women, who have gone out as teachers and ministers of the gospel.”46 Fry also mentions the value placed on the school by one of the local papers, which ranked it “among the leading educational interests of the State.”47 Henry Stanley Newman’s report for the February 1, 1890, issue of The British Friend, situates Hobson as “one of the benevolent enterprises established to deal with the ‘exodus’ of coloured people who came as refugees to Kansas after the war.”48 Students at Hobson’s, Newman reports, number in the sixties and receive free tuition; their board is covered by “private families,” who employ students as household workers.49 These reports on Hobson provide a glimpse into Smith’s early life in Parsons, where, besides her scholastic activities and “household work,” she finds time to write poetry for the town’s African American newspaper. Her first poem, “My Angel Sister and Brothers,” appears on the third page of the October 15, 1892, issue of The Blade and serves as a worthy literary introduction to Smith. The lines express the tremendous loss experienced by the poet:

I have two angel brothers, A little sister too, They’ve gone into the promised land, Where old things are made new.50 The New Americanist 04/2020 112

As the title and preceding stanza suggest, the work includes religious content demonstrating the continued influence of Hobson on the poet. The poem also paints a picture of a sibling who misses her family but ac- cepts God’s will. In her chronicle of loss, Smith describes each of her de- ceased siblings: Elias, 15, was “brave and bold,” Isaac, 12, was “kind and gentle” and a favorite of his mother, and Lucy Ann died as an infant. The poem ends with two stanzas of Smith’s desires, the first of which outlines how she wants to live her life:

I want to live a noble life To gain a home on high, I want to meet my many friends In heaven when I die.51

Smith’s poetry reveals a woman who accomplishes that goal, for her “noble life” focuses on a deliberate attempt to educate her people on their moral and social responsibilities. While much of her work espouses her religious beliefs, a select few focus on race issues. In the January 7, 1893, edition of The Blade, three columns on the second page are devoted to the Emancipation Celebration held on January 2. Besides an account of the events, this section includes several literary pieces read by participants, including essays by Miss French and Miss Della Turner, an oration by S.O. Clayton (the paper’s editor), and a poem by Smith. “The Negroe’s Defiance” presents the poet’s more radical side. Gone is the sweet, timid, nostalgic tone of her first poem; in its place is a confrontational work that speaks to changes in her people’s attitude towards their former masters:

We move no more at your command, We are a nation free; We stand with you in highest ranks And claim our liberty

Never again shall bloodhounds chase The slaves from door to door, For now we stare you in the face

And tell you its o’er.52 “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions… 113

Reminding readers of their previous position, Smith describes how far they have come. She also directly addresses white readers and confronts them in a way that would have been unthinkable in the South. She continues that tone in another powerful stanza:

We no more tremble at your gaze Of scorn to give us pain, For we are free to give that look Of vengeance back again.53

The lines bear little resemblance to poems by Davis, none of which encouraged the outright, vengeful defiance expressed by Smith. But like her fellow poet, Smith believes that success is attainable through education:

We measure arms with you to‑day In education’s tower, We cultivate our intellect, And equal you in power.

We realize that ‘tis not wealth That helps us build the tower, But ‘tis to educate the heart And intellectual power.54

Smith’s message to her people is carefully constructed. She does not promise or allow them to see “wealth” as the way to equality but promotes education and self‑respect as the two means for achieving that goal. “The Negroe’s Defiance” concludes with three stanzas celebrating the power of God. Her focus on religious influence continues in her next two poems, “The Sublimity Of The Sunday School” and “Shall We Know Each Other?” The former, published in the March 4, 1893, issue of The Blade, follows the same four‑line stanza structure as her other poems, using a simple abcb or abab rhyme pattern. Extolling the virtues of religious instruction, Smith positions a focus on morality and good works as something that will “elevate the troden race, /Of sinners far and wide.”55 Her participation in a “Musical and Literary Concert” the next week to raise money for “Uncle Billie Seals, who had the misfortune to be burned last December” demonstrates the alignment of her words and deeds. Found in its customary place among the community columns on page three of the March 18, 1893, issue, “Shall We Know Each Other?” shifts The New Americanist 04/2020 114

the focus from this world to the next. Readers of “My Angel Sister and Brothers” think of its influence on this poem as Smith ruminates on loss and the many reunions that can occur in Heaven:

I have a loving father Gone to that land of rest, I want to know him as of old, And lean upon his breast.56

For Smith, this return to family foreshadows the visit of her sister, Miss Irene Smith, whose arrival from Fort Smith, Indian Territory, is reported in the March 25, 1893, issue of The Blade. The April 8 issue reports on the party thrown in Miss Irene’s honor with a guest list that includes The Blade’s editor and, more important, Smith’s future husband W.B. Roberts, a local shoemaker and treasurer in The Young Men’s Progressive Club. Sandwiched between this party and the announcement of her marriage to Roberts is Smith’s sixth poem, appropriately titled “Is Marriage A Failure?” As one might imagine for a poet with a penchant for writing about her life and finds herself in a successful courtship, the poem’s answer is a resounding “no”:

Marriage is not a failure, When both have noble hearts To share each others sorrows, And each one do a part.57

Reminiscent of the didactic tone of her previous work, this poem also cautions readers against marrying for money or loneliness and instructs them instead to marry for love, accept traditional roles for husband and wife, and work diligently for “honest fortunes.”58 The announcement of her marriage in the September 16, 1893, issue of The Blade focuses most of its attention on the bridegroom. Because its readers would have been much less familiar with this “genteel young shoe maker,” the paper reports that Roberts made his way to Smith’s family home in Fort Gibson, Indian Territory, where the couple are married.59 The hyperbolic language of the announcement—“Cupid the unerring God of love pierced deeply these two hearts”—is befitting a poet, and the paper’s well wishes—“May the golden rays of peace and prosperity ever shine upon their pathway”—speaks to the special relationship the period- ical has with its contributor.60 “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions… 115

Following her marriage, Smith publishes only two more poems for The Blade. Printed almost a year to the date after the appearance of “The Negroe’s Defiance,” Smith Roberts’s “The Negro’s Soloquy” is a work that revisits the poet’s defiant defense of her community. Beginning with the emancipation, “The Negro’s Soloquy” recounts the limited opportunities available to newly freed African Americans, whose circumstances are re- duced further by their lack of “a single friend” save God.61 Once again, education is shown as the way to increase the chances for success. For Smith Roberts, all progress is hindered by the discrimination and violence she outlines in stanzas 7–10. Lynching, disenfranchisement, and workplace discrimination all thwart the advancement of African Americans. But Smith Roberts has hope for her readers and believes their eventual victory over their oppressors will be both moral and correct:

We will not, like the lawless South, Conquer with ax and rope, We’ll call our chariots, duty, And name our horses, hope.62

As an African American writer, Smith Roberts expresses an optimism that equals Davis’s, but her two poems on race present African Americans with an uncompromising, indefatigable spirit that, coupled with a belief in God, will allow her people to achieve full equality and wrest from white America’s hearts the respect they deserve. In the column to the right of “The Negro’s Soloquy,”The Blade includes a paragraph outlining the paper’s goals and provides subscription information. As Smith’s poems portray, the paper claims itself “a stern, but unselfish advocate for the rights and interest of the Negro.” In a move paralleling other poets, Smith believes so strongly in the newspaper she authors her own propaganda piece for it:

Where do we get the news each week Since tale bearers we no more seek? The fellow who sits in the shade Cries, ‘ha, ha, ha, it is the BLADE.63

Although this is her least impressive poem, Smith joins other community poets in the promotion of the institutions that publish them. African American periodicals like The Blade rely on subscriptions from a read- ership with little disposable income, and the promotion of the paper The New Americanist 04/2020 116

from its most prolific poet—and moral leader—would be advertisement enough. Smith certainly would have felt an obligation to support the institution that supports her. But for Smith, this poem would be her last in The Blade. The June 2, 1894, issue of The Parsons Weekly Blade contains an entire column devoted to the life and death of Eliza Smith Roberts. Married less than nine months and at just 22 years of age, Smith Roberts dies on May 28 from typhoid‑malaria fever. The column speaks to her importance to The Blade. For us—and for the paper’s readers—it also helps to complete the poet’s biography. Unsurprisingly, we learn that Smith Roberts is born in Mississippi and, at eight, migrates with her parents to Indian Territory (in what is now Oklahoma). At 18, she moves to Parsons to complete her education at Hobson, where—as we’ve seen—she devotes herself to “verses… of a moral and religious nature.” In a fitting remembrance of her import, the column ends with a few more stanzas of her poetry, including:

They who endure will conquer, The Savior is your friend, He’s with you in the darkest hour Yes even in the end.64

Although their names are unfamiliar and their work remains buried in the archives of historical societies, university libraries, and database collections, these citizen‑poets are engaged, informed members of their communities whose verses contribute to our understanding of 19th century Kansas life. When studied together, the poetry of Smith and Davis portrays an African American community that is defiant, unapologetic, and optimistic about their future. Both poets are concerned with the increasing racial violence being perpetrated against their people; both are unafraid to blame white America for their actions or inactions. Smith and Davis believe education and self‑respect are essential to their community’s progress, and their work provides the lessons, reassurance, and encouragement necessary for their readers to become full participants in American society. “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions… 117

Bibliography

Case, Nelson. History of Labette County, Kansas and Representative Citizens. Chicago: Biographical Publishing Company, 1901. Danky, James P. African‑American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Davis, Jr., Tilford. “A Melancholy Day.” The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas). August 6, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A1331BB5EEB- 011DA9%40EANAAA‑1331C5895C214370%402412317‑1331C 1DED31550A0%400. –-.“The Hour is Late.”The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas). July 23, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A1331BB5EEB011DA9%40EANAAA‑1331C587B- 6CF99D8%402412303‑1331C1DEC59609D8%400. –-. “Rex’s Risibles.” The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas), August 20, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑news‑ bank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&do‑ cref=image/v2%3A1331BB5EEB011DA9%40EANAAA‑1331C58A‑ D30A9E58%402412331‑1331C1DED7F462A0%400. –-. “Stand Up For Kansas.” The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas). September 24, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https:// infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EA- NAAA&docref=image/v2%3A1331BB5EEB011DA9%40EANAAA‑ 1331C58DE86EE038%402412366‑1331C1DEE3E88140%400. –-. “To The Mob‑ocracy Of The South.”The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas). September 10, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A1331BB5EEB- 011DA9%40EANAAA‑1331C58CC3C299C8%402412352‑133 1C1DEDF4C7B50%400. Dunn, Martin E. The Black Press, 1827–1890: The Quest for National Identity. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971. “Editorial Correspondence.” The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas). July 23, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/ The New Americanist 04/2020 118

readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A1331BB5EEB‑ 011DA9%40EANAAA‑1331C587B6CF99D8%402412303‑1331C1D‑ EC59609D8%400. Find A Grave. Find A Grave. Accessed in Ancestry.com. U.S., Find A Grave Index, 1600s‑Current. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012. http://www.ancestry.com. Fry, John. “Hobson Normal Institute.” In The Friends Review 40, no. 50 (1887), edited by Henry Hartshone. Philadelphia: American Printing House, 1887. “History, Douglas Elementary School.” Accessed October 24, 2019. https://douglass.schools.kckps.org/school‑history/. “Is Our Education Exceeding Our Morals?” The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas). July 23, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/ apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A1331BB5EEB- 011DA9%40EANAAA‑1331C587B6CF99D8%402412303‑1331C1D- EC59609D8%400. J.H.G. “Lawyer Townsend With His People.” The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas). August 20, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/ apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A1331BB5EEB‑ 011DA9%40EANAAA‑1331C58AD30A9E58%402412331‑1331C1DED‑ 7F462A0%400. Newman, Henry Stanley. “Hobson’s Normal Institute for Coloured Students at Parsons, Kansas.” In The British Friend 48, no. 2 (1890). Glasgow: James G. Smeal, 1890. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd. ah6idk. The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas). June 2, 1894. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com. ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docre- f=image/v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA‑12BE- 0C97646A9220%402412982‑12BBC94162C07818%400. The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas). October 1, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com. ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA‑12BE0A3AE4AD9660 %402412373‑12BBC93FC1091B30%400. Simmons, Charles A. The African American Press: A History of News Coverage During National Crises, with Special Reference to Four Black Newspapers, 1827–1965. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998. “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions… 119

Smith, Dorothy V. “The Black Press and the Search for Hope and Equality in Kansas, 1865–1985.” In The Black Press in the Middle West, edited by Henry Lewis Suggs. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. Smith, Eliza. “My Angel Sister and Brothers.” The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas). October 15, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/ apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516B- D0CFE8%40EANAAA‑12BE0A45AC510C08%402412387‑12BB- C93FCC52F3F8%400. –-. “The Negroe’s Defiance.”The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas). January 7, 1893. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516BD- 0CFE8%40EANAAA‑12BE0A69503AA5D8%402412471‑1 2BBC9400113C1C0%400. Smith, Eliza J. “Is Marriage A Failure?” The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas). July 1, 1893. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516BD- 0CFE8%40EANAAA‑12BE0ACD2FC5D7D8%402412646‑12BB- C9406EF85A60%400. –-. “Shall We Know Each Other?” The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas). March 18, 1893. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516B- D0CFE8%40EANAAA‑12BE0A8F36649750%402412541‑1 2BBC94033C29470%400. –-. “The Sublimity of Sunday School.”The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas). March 4, 1893. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/ apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516B- D0CFE8%40EANAAA‑12BE0A88C2EB0E18%402412527‑12BB- C94029AB5BC0%400. Smith Roberts, Eliza. “The Blade.”The Parsons Weekly Blade(Parsons, Kansas). March 17, 1894. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516BD- 0CFE8%40EANAAA‑12BE0C6050D33C58%402412905‑12BB- C9410F3E7B28%402. The New Americanist 04/2020 120

–-. “The Negro’s Soloquy.”The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas). January 6, 1894. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516BD- 0CFE8%40EANAAA‑12BE0C4B02F8B630%402412835‑12BBC- 940CF8C3980%400. Staff. MSRC. “Hobson Normal Institute” (2015). Paper 95. Manuscript Division. http://dh.howard.edu/naid_manu/95. Suggs, Henry Lewis. The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865–1985. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. “Roberts‑Smith Wedding.” The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas). September 16, 1893. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516BD- 0CFE8%40EANAAA‑12BE0C0F2EA00130%402412723‑12BB- C9408A676BF0%400. United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1910. In Ancestry.com. 1910 United States Federal Census. Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004. http://www.ancestry.com. United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1900. In Ancestry.com. 1900 United States Federal Census. Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004. http://www.ancestry.com. Waller, Minnie. “A Voyage from Toledo, Iowa to Tamatave, Madagascar.” The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas). October 15, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https:// infoweb‑newsbank‑com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EA- NAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EA- NAAA‑12BE0A45AC510C08%402412387‑12BBC93FC- C52F3F8%400. Woods, Randall B. “Integration, Exclusion, or Segregation? The ‘Color Line’ in Kansas, 1878–1900.” In African Americans on the Western Frontier, edited by Monroe Lee Billington and Roger D. Hardaway. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1998. “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions… 121

Notes

1 Tilford Davis, Jr., “To The Mob-ocracy Of The South,”The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas), September 10, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb- newsbank-com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A1331BB5EEB011DA9%40EANAAA-1331C58CC3C299C8%402412352- 1331C1DEDF4C7B50%400. 2 Ibid. 3 J.H.G., “Lawyer Townsend With His People,” The Atchison Blade(Atchison, Kansas), August 20, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb- newsbank-com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A1331BB5EEB011DA9%40EANAAA-1331C58AD30A9E58%402412331- 1331C1DED7F462A0%400. 4 Ibid. 5 Charles A. Simmons, The African American Press: A History of News Coverage During National Crises, with Special Reference to Four Black Newspapers, 1827-1965 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 20-21. 6 Martin E. Dunn, ed., The Black Press, 1827-1890: The Quest for National Identity (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 12. 7 Dunn, 13. 8 Ibid. 9 Dunn, 33. 10 Randall B. Woods, “Integration, Exclusion, or Segregation? The ‘Color Line’ in Kansas, 1878-1900,” in African Americans on the Western Frontier, eds. Monroe Lee Billington and Roger D. Hardaway (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1998), 128-146, 131. 11 Woods, 131. 12 Woods, 132. 13 Ibid. 14 Woods, 133. 15 Ibid. 16 Woods, 137. 17 Woods, 140. 18 Woods, 141. 19 Ibid. 20 Henry Lewis Suggs, ed., The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865-1985 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 3. 21 In her chapter on Kansas, in the same text, Dorothy V. Smith concurs with Suggs and claims that from 1876 through 1900 “migration continued to be a key issue of concern for Black newspapers and their editors,” “The Black Press and the Search for Hope and Equality in Kansas, 1865-1985,” in The Black Press in the Middle West, 107-134, 110. 22 James P. Danky, ed., African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 52. 23 United States of America, Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1900), T623, 1854 in Ancestry.com. 1900 United States Federal Census (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004), http://www.ancestry.com. 24 United States of America, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1910), T624 in Ancestry.com. 1910 United States Federal Census (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004), http://www.ancestry.com. 25 Find A Grave, Find A Grave, accessed in Ancestry.com, U.S., Find A Grave Index, 1600s-Current (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012), http://www.ancestry. com. 26 “History, Douglas Elementary School,” accessed October 24, 2019, https://douglass. schools.kckps.org/school-history/. 27 “Editorial Correspondence,” The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas), July 23, 1892. Readex: The New Americanist 04/2020 122

African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank-com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/ readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A1331BB5EEB011DA9%40EANAAA- 1331C587B6CF99D8%402412303-1331C1DEC59609D8%400. 28 “Is Our Education Exceeding Our Morals?” The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas), July 23, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank- com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A1331BB5EEB011DA9%40EANAAA-1331C587B6CF99D8%402412303- 1331C1DEC59609D8%400. 29 Tilford Davis, Jr., “The Hour is Late,”The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas), July 23, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank- com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A1331BB5EEB011DA9%40EANAAA-1331C587B6CF99D8%402412303- 1331C1DEC59609D8%400. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Tilford Davis, Jr., “A Melancholy Day,” The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas), August 6, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank- com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A1331BB5EEB011DA9%40EANAAA-1331C5895C214370%402412317- 1331C1DED31550A0%400. 33 Tilford Davis, Jr., “Rex’s Risibles,” The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas), August 20, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank- com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A1331BB5EEB011DA9%40EANAAA-1331C58AD30A9E58%402412331- 1331C1DED7F462A0%400. 34 Ibid. 35 Tilford Davis, Jr., “Stand Up For Kansas,” The Atchison Blade (Atchison, Kansas), September 24, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb- newsbank-com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A1331BB5EEB011DA9%40EANAAA-1331C58DE86EE038%402412366- 1331C1DEE3E88140%400. 36 Smith, 115. 37 Nelson Case, History of Labette County, Kansas and Representative Citizens (Chicago: Biographical Publishing Company, 1901), 7. 38 Case, 7. 39 Case, 8. 40 Danky, 454; Smith, 115. 41 TheAfrican American Newspaper Series, published by Readex, has 387 digitized issues of the paper, ranging from September 24, 1892 to December 28, 1900. 42 Smith, 115. 43 Minnie Waller, “A Voyage from Toledo, Iowa to Tamatave, Madagascar,” The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), October 15, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank-com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/ doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA- 12BE0A45AC510C08%402412387-12BBC93FCC52F3F8%400. 44 The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), October 1, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank-com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/ doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA- 12BE0A3AE4AD9660%402412373-12BBC93FC1091B30%400. 45 Staff, MSRC, “Hobson Normal Institute” (2015), Manuscript Division, Paper 95, http:// dh.howard.edu/naid_manu/95. 46 John Fry, “Hobson Normal Institute,” in The Friends Review 40, no. 50, edited by Henry Hartshone, Philadelphia: American Printing House, 1887: 798. 47 Fry, 798. 48 Henry Stanley Newman, “Hobson’s Normal Institute for Coloured Students at Parsons, Kansas,” in The British Friend 48, no. 2, Glasgow: James G. Smeal, 1890: https://hdl. handle.net/2027/hvd.ah6idk: 33-34, 33. 49 Newman, 33. “Ho for Kansas!”: Poetic Expressions… 123

50 Eliza Smith, “My Angel Sister and Brothers,” The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), October 15, 1892. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb- newsbank-com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA-12BE0A45AC510C08%402412387- 12BBC93FCC52F3F8%400. 51 Ibid. 52 Eliza Smith, “The Negroe’s Defiance,”The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), January 7, 1893. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank- com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA-12BE0A69503AA5D8%402412471- 12BBC9400113C1C0%400. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Eliza J. Smith, “The Sublimity of Sunday School,”The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), March 4, 1893. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb- newsbank-com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA-12BE0A88C2EB0E18%402412527- 12BBC94029AB5BC0%400.

56 Eliza J. Smith, “Shall We Know Each Other?” The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), March 18, 1893. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb- newsbank-com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA-12BE0A8F36649750%402412541- 12BBC94033C29470%400. 57 Eliza J. Smith, “Is Marriage A Failure?” The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), July 1, 1893. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank- com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA-12BE0ACD2FC5D7D8%402412646- 12BBC9406EF85A60%400. 58 Ibid. 59 “Roberts-Smith Wedding,” The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), September 16, 1893. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank- com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA-12BE0C0F2EA00130%402412723- 12BBC9408A676BF0%400. 60 Ibid. 61 Eliza Smith Roberts, “The Negro’s Soloquy,”The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), January 6, 1894. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb- newsbank-com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA-12BE0C4B02F8B630%402412835- 12BBC940CF8C3980%400. 62 Ibid. 63 Eliza Smith Roberts, “The Blade,”The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), March 17, 1894. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank- com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/ v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA-12BE0C6050D33C58%402412905- 12BBC9410F3E7B28%402. 64 The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, Kansas), June 2, 1894. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb-newsbank-com.ezproxy.rollins.edu/apps/readex/ doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B765516BD0CFE8%40EANAAA- 12BE0C97646A9220%402412982-12BBC94162C07818%400.

Alain Locke’s Affective Air S. Luke Doughty

ABSTRACT: This reparative reading draws on unexplored archives to analyze how and why Alain Locke—the “Dean” of the New Negro Movement and the first Black Rhodes Scholar—used air as a trope of his homosexual affectations. Unpublished love letters to Langston Hughes show that his articulations of air became an experiment in honing aesthetics, which would later define the first Black arts movement in the United States. Success in this enterprise took its shape because of Locke’s background in pragmatism and epideictic rhetoric. When describing Western monuments, air permeated the public sphere and functioned as a lens to see those cultural landmarks’ more queer and ephemeral versions, which thereby gave him a reason to celebrate his sexuality for its literary effectiveness. These articulations of air directly correspond with Aristotle’s conception of epideictic rhetoric in Ancient Greece, when it was known to divulge secrets, offer new perspectives, and subsequently celebrate or denigrate someone or something. The material aspects of air became its pragmatism—its “cash value,” and Locke’s materiality, invention, genius, and bent for creating the new from the old. Drawing on the visual, tactile, audible, and temporal dimensions of air in these letters, Locke metaphorically turned his archive into a “closet,” where he could hide key aspects of “The Harlem Renaissance.” The New Americanist 04/2020 126

Key words: Epideictic Rhetoric, Homosexuality, Langston Hughes, Pragmatism, The New Negro

Throughout numerous letters that philosopher Alain Locke sent to Langston Hughes, one of his lovers, Locke repeatedly invoked air as a metaphorical force of his sexuality. His quotidian, ubiquitous, viscous, and ambiguous air made it more effective as a metaphor, not less; those qualities embodied his “open secret”—lying in plain sight, so mundane that it became overlooked. Instead of acting as his main object of study, Locke’s air dissipated throughout the public sphere and functioned as a lens through which to see the world. These novel renderings of public spaces gave him a reason to celebrate his homosexuality for its literary inventiveness. Such uses for air directly correspond with epideictic rhetoric’s function in Ancient Greece. Aristotle used this classical rhetorical mode to divulge secrets, offer new perspectives, and therefore celebrate or denigrate someone or something.1 Robert Danisch’s “Alain Locke on Race and Reciprocity: The Necessity of Epideictic Rhetoric for Cultural Pluralism” (2010) has explored how Locke used that classical rhetorical mode in a racial context.2 This paper elaborates to analyze how Locke relied on epideictic rhetoric for his sexual liberation movement. Locke’s air successfully projected his metaphorical sexuality because of its materiality, which cor- responds with literary pragmatism’s attention to invention, genius, creating the new from the old, and the materiality of an object. By using his belles‑lettres to explore the visual, audible, tactile, and temporal dimensions of air, Locke could presumably unravel the metaphysics of homosexuality. Since this aesthetic saturated both his letters and the art that he chose for his famous magazine edition, The New Negro, the insights here can help scholars more fully appreciate how Locke’s homosexuality made the Harlem Renaissance an intellectual and literary possibility. William James—the pragmatist and Locke’s professor at Harvard— wrote that a material object acquires its identity based on the sensations it creates for humans: “the difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such sensations; by not being, is that we lack them. These sensations then are its sole meaning.”3 In other words, humans define material by its qualities—how it feels, tastes, sounds, smells, and looks when made to do different things. An object’s literary pragmatism, then, could be its qualities within literature—making certain objects metaphorically useful to a writer. Air, in Locke’s works, developed its pragmatism as a metaphor because it enabled him to play with concepts of secrecy and Alain Locke’s Affective Air 127

disclosure, while simultaneously playing with other dynamics: shame and pride, the corporeal and incorporeal, the seen and unseen, the “closeted” and “out.” Displaying these sexual politics of his air enabled others to gain insight into his lived experiences as a queer man. Air in Locke’s letters appeared as atomic, colorful, grainy, or semi‑translucent; audibly at times as raucous and nearly soughing; tangibly as exfoliating (both grimy but also, ironically, cleansing); and temporally dynamic. Yet more so, Locke did not invoke air in new ways so much as use typical descriptions of air to create transient moments of emotional breakthrough. Before Locke developed it as a trope of queer affect, air already pos- sessed a “literary pragmatism.” As a metaphor of a semi‑formed object, air has functioned historically at least since antiquity when Anaximenes studied it, or when Pliny wrote about it. Since then, air as a trope became a platitude of western literature: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and other luminaries have relied on the trope for its basic metaphorical purchase. Air for these writers worked as the medium by which traces of partially material substances travelled between people; material substances such as water evaporated into the form of mist (moving the worldly towards the heavenly); and immaterial sensations such as color, music, breath, time, smell, emotions, and disease condensed—moving the heavenly towards the worldly. For example, Shakespeare treated secrets in Twelfth Night as though they could travel in the air. When Malvolio exits the stage, potentially to reveal to Olivia the prank played on him, Maria says: “Pursue him now, least the deuice take ayre.”4 In this example, knowledge transforms from one’s subjectivity into a shared public air, travels to another person, and then condenses into an individual’s knowledge once more. Air could also signify a person’s breath, and therefore humanity, as in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, when Leontes realizes that Hermione is becoming a human again: “Still me thinkes There is an ayre comes from her. What fine Chizzell Could euer yet cut breath…I will kisse her.”5 Here, breath is a unique combination of water and air that physically emits Hermione’s burgeoning subjectivity. In further examples from literary history, air bears substances along that literally have only partially materialized, and metaphorically have not yet been completely understood or disclosed. The English language’s traditional handling of air—the literary and poetical qualities associated with air—provided Locke with a vocabulary to discuss his sexuality implicitly. He simply elaborated upon the literary faculty of air—as breath, as a medium of secrets, as a medium of Harlem music—to connote closeted homosexuality. More specifically, his air The New Americanist 04/2020 128

often mixed with fragments of solid matter, creating a physical/spiritual duality. Mixing air with more physically apparent matter made it less translucent, transforming it into a filter that enabled Locke to re‑see, and re‑write, Western monuments. For example, in one letter to Hughes, Locke wrote that their time together turned the air into atomised gold,” which showed him a version of Paris that he had “never seen”: “I love sublimated things and today nature, the only great cleanser of life, would have distilled anything… through prosaic hours and days we can keep the gleam of the transcen- dental thing I believe our friendship was meant to be.”6 In this excerpt, nature distilled their metaphysical love into tangible form. The mist became a floating chemical reaction—one partially translucent that did not prevent Locke from seeing beyond the mist, but rather, enabled him to see a manipulated image of the world around him through the mist. In his other letters, he viewed ancient images, monuments from the Renaissance, or other Western landmarks through the air. He intentionally drew from scenes traditionally serving as bastions of same‑sex love, or artists and luminaries who practiced same‑sex love. Similar to Locke’s desire to use White history ironically—to reveal the Black roots supporting it—he wanted to rely on the straight façade of the past to reveal its homosexual underbelly: a feat of deconstruction that Eve Sedgwick would articulate explicitly decades later. Locke’s air could cull and warp the straight world into unprecedented renderings that reflected how he felt on the inside when spending time with his male lovers. In one postcard to Hughes, which exemplifies this semi‑condensed air, Locke wrote: “the news that you are homeward bound removes the de- lightful mental will o the wisp that I might run into you in foreign parts. So—if at all—I am to see you in America—I only want you to know how much I appreciate your late work, and that…may or may not materialize in friendship. I at least salute your genius.”7 This excerpt exemplifies how Locke’s epideictic air worked. The “will o the wisp” traditionally denotes a spirit, often representing forbidden desire, which one might see in the middle of the night.8 Scientifically, “the will o the wisp” is an ethereal combination of light and gases, a mixture of atomized materials such as liquid, thrown into the air, which could then reflect light in a way clear air could not. That is, when seen over bodies of water, “will o the wisp” combined matter, such as liquid, and less concrete matter, such as air, creating a middle ground that could refract light into an ethereal object. Langston’s return to the United States removed Locke’s “will o the wisp,” suggesting what Locke’s other letters affirm—that the USA had become Alain Locke’s Affective Air 129

his metaphysical closet and Europe a physical place for him to “materialize” his “open secret.” His transatlantic romances—caught between his American closet and the open European streets—may have been the “perfect storm” for these figments of longing, hovering over bodies of water, to haunt his imagination. His mention of Hughes’s work as “genius,” perhaps enough to “materialize” into friendship, invoked epideictic and pragmatic beliefs about the poet as someone who took metaphysical truth and exercised discretion to distill it into phenomenological, earthy matter for lay people. The other side of Locke’s postcard enhances his attention to these ideas. It shows two men in Cairo, where Locke hoped to witness the unveiling of King Tut’s tomb during the 1920s9. He researched this excavation project for his race work, which he hoped would prove fruitful for his efforts in the US to build a body of African art in public museums and exhibits.10 The men on this postcard stand in front of a massive doorway, leading into the side of a large stone mosque. One of them peers into the black abyss. The other man, walking out of the darkness and into the light, stares straight into the camera. This postcard is one among many others that demonstrates Locke using Western history and culture to hone an aesthetic of mystery. Danisch, in his article about Locke’s epideictic race work, even mentions that one use of epideictic rhetoric is to uncover the past to create new meaning, either through archaeological or genealogical work.11 This epideictic aesthetic of revelation and ultimate celebration of that divulge- ment is how Locke used the past to take a step forward, as he had hoped to do for Black people by creating the New Negro. While he hoped unveiling King Tut would contribute to the work of building a Black genealogy and history to prove that Black people had contributed to Western culture, Locke had a similar, but less obvious, intent for queerness. Unlike his treatment of race, Locke left a certain medium and message—both his sexuality and his poetical writings—to un‑published, archived materials, conceiving them as one in the same. “I write verse for private circulation and consumption only.”12 One reading of that divide could argue that his archive metaphorically doubles as his closet, and that his writing to Hughes about queer air is his metaphorical “coming out.” Air in the next unpublished excerpt from Locke’s archives demonstrates that dynamic, divulging his subconscious homosexual desires, and making the passage epideictic. It should first be noted that John and Takis Poulakos, whom Danisch cited in his own works about Locke, define epideictic rhetoric as engaging “in acts of display that ‘uncover what [lies] hidden.’”13 Furthermore, as Danisch also notes, Lawrence Rosenfield The New Americanist 04/2020 130

elaborated on epideictic rhetoric as a notion of “display” and “shining forth.”14 Both definitions are pertinent to the following story of Locke’s, in which two male lovers named H and R disclose their sexuality to one another via air: “H is now in bed—he sleeps very fitfully—he slides his legs in sleep over the younger boy [who] is wide awake. He begins to snore. R caresses his thighs—then very stealthily he opened the pajama pants.”15 Each detail of this scene is covert: the names remain secret; R “very stealthily” makes his move only after he hears snoring—initiating the sleeper’s sub‑conscious, where Freud believed that repressed desire existed.16 As a loud noise piercing through the quiet air, snoring divulged the “open secret.” Like Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, air’s entrance into H was a penetration of his mind, and each exhalation its disclosure. Hearing H snore, R decided to initiate sex, which suggests that he had already acknowledged his own homosexuality on a conscious level. That initiation was R’s way of precipitating H’s private and immaterial homosexuality into a physical reality. William James—the pragmatist, whose classes Locke took during college and whose works Locke read in depth—wrote similarly in The Principles of Psychology how breath could signify one’s thoughts to outsiders, turning the incorporeal into the corporeal:

My glottis is like a sensitive valve, intercepting my breath instantaneously at every mental hesitation or felt aversion to the objects of my thought, and as quickly opening, to let the air pass through my throat and nose, the moment the repugnance is overcome. The feeling of the movement of this air is, in me, one strong ingredient of the feeling of assent…The movements of the muscles of the brow and eyelids also respond very sensitively to every fluctuation in the agreeableness…of what comes before my mind…the “self of selves,” when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat.17

In this excerpt, James articulated breath as the connection between the public world and what he called on another occasion a Wordsworthian “mysterious sensorial life.”18 The physicality of a sleeping person here is not controlling the person’s mind but symptomatic of it, of the ‘self of selves’ responding to ideas in the head. Therefore, when breath leaves the body, it carries some essential matter from the inside with it. An on- looker can then “depth read” the internal action of a person based on “peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat”: an open mouth, or in Locke’s excerpt—snoring, closed eyes, even a serendipitous Alain Locke’s Affective Air 131

leg. Adam Frank wrote similarly about affect, first quoting Tomkins— “affect is primarily facial behaviour”—and then continuing in his own words: “[it takes] place on the skin and muscles of the face as well as in the tones of voice.”19 The process of condensing the subconscious into tangible sexual acts or visible, affective behavior became a metaphor in Locke’s writings for turning secrets into public knowledge. A poet projecting their psyche onto the material world—onto mountains and clouds—is a technique Locke would have learned from past art movements that ben- efited from the minds and contributions of queer men and women—e.g., the Impressionists and the Romantics. Once that breath escaped, it dispersed throughout the air to become shared, like Maria’s secret in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Locke used air in this ubiquitous form throughout his writing—termed as “atmosphere”, “mist”, or “will o the wisp.” Once breath leaves via an aperture, such as a mouth or nose, it contributes to the inescapable and shared air of the public world. This inescapability suggests the closeted person’s subjectivity as existing in a state of perpetual failure and temporal ubiquity. For Locke, signifying his sexuality by dressing as a “dandy” became a way of telling people his sexuality without explicitly and constantly discussing it.20 Similar to that situation, Judith Butler wrote that “coming out” is a never‑ending performance; the process restarts each time queer people find themselves in situations with strangers.21 I argue that this perpetual state of mind relates to what Sianne Ngai termed “ugly feelings”—the types of emotions that leave one in an affective state without a “release” or end.22 Unlike affects that are short‑lived and object driven—such as rage at something—objectless and petty affect remains for long durations of time and therefore more likely defines one’s subjectivity. This “non‑ca- thartic” affective state—that is, one without climax—resembles air in its dissipated form, sometimes as mist, fog, or “atomized gold,” which Locke turned into something poetically useful. He threw it into the air to mediate his perception and the perceptions of others. Locke explained a similar affect in a note from his archive:

Such states as objectless sadness, moods of poetic melancholy…are diffused emotional states covering, as it were, the whole field of consciousness, and leaves us room…to take an attitude and discriminate a relationship. And we do so through the medium of feeling. The feeling deepens somehow and we get a sense of the context as a subjective ‘mood’, a phase of consciousness and its very diffusion becomes a sense of immediacy, of close identification.23 (emphasis added) The New Americanist 04/2020 132

This excerpt explains how a somewhat permanent mood, a particularly negative one, can inform one’s subjectivity, and lead to a shared “poetic melancholy.” By diffusing that emotion, Locke could acquire affective “closeness” to his value objects, his lovers—even when writing letters to them from far away places. Indeed, Locke’s own life increasingly mirrored this “objectless” affect, since he chased Hughes around the world and sought after a lover for his entire adult life. Though Hughes may have been Locke’s “object” of affection, his inability to have Hughes, or to have him in the United States’ public sphere, turned his air into that diffuse sexual energy. Sarah Ahmed relatedly wrote in her seminal Happy Objects: “to be affected by something is to evaluate that thing.”24 Indeed Locke’s poetical muse often, if not always, developed from a nearby love interest; he wrote these letters to lovers, about lovers, or after his time spent with lovers. Ironically, though, he also wrote letters to far away lovers, where they could not consummate their affections. This play with distance may explain why Locke’s fascination with other men did not lead to his direct literary evaluation of them in his writing. Since he was closeted, he transferred his homosexual energy into a sublimated, vaporous affect that could change his evaluation of western monuments in Europe, built on the façade of heteronormativity and White imperialism, to reveal the queer, and Black, subaltern alterity. From an epideictic perspective, giving that closeted subjectivity a purpose in Harlem art would be enough to redeem it. Similarly, Danisch’s article cited Aristotle’s notion of epideictic rhetoric, which can serve inflect- ed purposes: celebrating or denigrating someone or something.25 Harlem art frequently captured that duality, which turned the sorrows of racism and the legacy of slavery into beautiful art for personal and communal enjoyment. In “The Gift of Laughter,” which Locke included in the anthology that launched The New Negro, Jessie Fauset wrote that laughter was the Negro’s unique contribution to American drama as a way of turning sorrow into joy.26 Fauset wrote that laughter divulged the internal subjectivity of the African American, becoming both public and positive simultaneously:

The new ‘funny man’ among black comedians is essentially funny himself. He is joy and mischief and rich, homely native humor personified. He radiates good feeling and happiness; it is with him now a state of being purely subjective. The spectator is infected with his high spirits and his excessive good will; a stream of well‑being is projected across the footlights into the consciousness of the beholder.27 Alain Locke’s Affective Air 133

Fauset continued to explain that laughter “has been used by colored men who have gained a precarious footing on the stage to conceal the very real dolor raging in their breasts.”28 In that description of laughter, similar to H’s breath or the excavation work in Cairo, the divide between an inside space and outside space not only indicates the transfer from secrecy to divulgence, but also from negativity and shame to positivity and celebration. That transfer contrasts certain cultural instances in which divulged information might continue to bear shame even after becoming public—e.g., moments of exposure, accusation, or confession. Locke’s rhetoric, the epideictic mode, contrasts Aristotle’s other modes, such as forensic rhetoric. Arguably similar rhetorical traditions, such as paranoid readings and the hermeneutics of suspicion, for example, with their respective ties to the genre of tragedy, subversion, and enmity, focused on discovering what lies hidden, sometimes used to uncover a shameful deed, act, or lie. Epideictic rhetoric—which is unique for its ability simultaneously to divulge and celebrate something formerly hidden and denigrated—cata- lyzed the Harlem Renaissance into existence. Locke’s choice rhetoric became the very key to his aesthetic movement; that it unlocked the doors of genius both for the Black community and the closeted community is no coincidence, but a product of the Victorian Era that drew sharp lines between the public and private, the proud and the ashamed, and that used sexuality as a means of enhancing racial categories. Yet Harlem did not merely transform the negative to the positive by making it public, such as exhibiting aspects of King Tut’s tomb to be celebrated as African art. Harlem art also specifically preferred to travel through the air to its listeners. Laughter, similar to snoring, is literally air, but in Harlem it doubled as a literary trope; it signified an affect of complicated joy unique to the New Negro’s lived experiences. The dramatist in Fauset’s excerpt transitions smoothly between the senses—from the audible to the visible: it “radiates,” using the dramatist’s “spirits” to “infect” the audience, through a “stream” that “projected” across “lights” into another’s “consciousness”—a description similar to Rosenfield’s description of epideictic rhetoric as a display that shines forth. Similar to dissipated air, or breath that leaves the narrow throat and projects outward for others to inhale, laughter projects audibly onto others. If affect, as Frank wrote, is on the face to be seen and in the tone of voice to be heard, then laughter on the stage sent epideictic air to its listeners in a public forum—full of secret pain that actors transformed and divulged as joyful sensory experiences. The New Americanist 04/2020 134

Another dimension of air’s materiality was its color. Similar to Fauset’s stream of light, Locke’s air turned the metaphysical into the visual by using refractions of light—i.e., color functioned as a dye to cast upon air and render it more visible within his works.. These depictions of air enhanced its literary pragmatism and offered nuance to Locke’s subjectivity as a closeted homosexual. In the following excerpt from his writing, used in a previous example, he describes Paris after a few romantic days with Hughes. He wrote to Hughes that “America with her [sexual] inhibitions” partially caused his “suicidal depths of despair and discouragement.” He then thanked Hughes for lifting him into an altogether opposite state of mind during their time together:

I have just come back to the room from a trance‑like walk off the Champs... Today the atmosphere is like atomized gold,—and last night you know how it was—two days the Equal of which atmospherically I have never seen in a great city—days when every breath had the soothe of a kiss and every step the thrill of an embrace…our hours together [were]…golden.29

No longer in the “depths of despair,” his world included Hughes’ breath, which “had the soothe of a kiss” as well as the sun’s ether, which refracted through atmosphere as “atomized gold” on its way to Locke’s eyes. The condensation of breath and light into palpable forms: a “kiss” or “atomized gold,” served both epideictic purposes, i.e., they turned Locke’s homosexual feelings from the invisible to the disclosed, as well as from the shameful to the celebrated. More to the point, coloring air helped to bring attention to its visible, and therefore material, dimension. According to James’ logic, color gives identity to an object: “Matter is known as our sensations of color, figure, hardness and the like. They are the cash‑value of the term.”30 He believed that a pragmatist defined objects not merely by their scientific meaning, but also by the human ability to give use to that object. Locke experimented with that theory by using air and its colors to describe Haifa in Israel:

I shall never forget my first view of it [Mount Carmel] from the terraces of the shrine. Mount Carmel, already casting shadows…so glowing with col- or—gold, sapphire, amethyst, as the sunset colors changed—and in between the mottled emerald of the sea, and the gray‑toned house roofs of Haifa. Al- most immediately opposite and picking up the sun’s reflection like polished metal…transformed for a few moments from its shabby decay into a citadel Alain Locke’s Affective Air 135

of light and beauty…It is a fine symbol for a Faith that wishes to reconcile the supernatural with the natural.31 (emphasis added)

Locke drew attention to the novelty of Mount Carmel because of the way air mediated color and light. In his rendering of Mount Carmel, color leaked into the air around the mountain, slowly waning off with distance, to create the “glowing” of gold, sapphire, and amethyst, all changing as time passed and light disappeared into night. This light transformed the quaint houses of Haifa into a “citadel,” which stood for the relationship between the “supernatural” and “the natural.” Throughout Locke’s letters, he constructed these ‘new perspectives’ both with color and with time. As air became tangible in vaporous or atomic form—the material of the dispelled closeted homosexual’s affect—Locke’s vision became sensitive to the time of day, e.g., the sun’s color refracted through these particles differently based on its placement in the sky. In various letters, his chosen time of day relates to a longer tradition of the sun’s ether revealing secret knowledge at certain hours. After visiting France and Italy with a lover, he wrote about the importance of time for creating certain perspectives when viewing public landmarks: “[I] began to know the fine points of view and the proper time of day to go to see [famous monuments]…the sky and the mist and the sun make Venice.”32 It was some combination of the visual and tactile that made Locke’s experiences remarkable. In “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” James uses the example of Benvenuto Cellini, who “found himself cast into a dungeon” after a lifetime in the sun, where he got “a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in the twenty‑four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his cavern.”33 Locke similarly expressed in writing how time and light often informed one another to create “new” perspectives or to reveal new knowledge to someone in Western literature. Locke would write about the way light refracted through something, such as “the sky” and “mist” in the excerpt about Venice, or “atomized gold” in the first letter to Hughes. Yet unlike his letter to Hughes, this letter about Venice was for his mother. Though still personal, Locke wrote letters about his escapades with other men for an audience—other gay men who wrote for the Harlem Renaissance, for his mother, or for bene- factors. Stewart describes Locke as partially closeted to many of them, including his mother.34 Setting the stage of these letters with “the sky,” “the mist,” and “the sun” was his way of leaving his sexuality hanging in the air between himself and his audience, mixing it with light to create colors The New Americanist 04/2020 136

with double meaning, and condensing the final reaction into “mist” that projected like Fauset’s literary laughter, and which created unique, transient views of mountains and cities. As Nicholas Gaskill writes in Chromographia, Goethe believed that while color belonged to the eye, it interacted with the world through light. Since light changed based on the time of day, this dynamic conceived knowledge of the world as a personal and mercurial phenomenon between person and object.35 Similar to unique experiences of color in the eye, people experienced time differently, according to Goethe: “the dura- tion of…visionary impressions varies with the powers or structure of the eye in different individuals.”36 As the two forces met in the natural world to create visuals, those visuals became a unique, private show for each of them. Locke—who studied Goethe at Harvard and wrote essays about his philosophy—would have read these ideas about the location of knowledge formation. Beyond how time affected color, Goethe wrote how color could differ for each individual: “the time necessary for the recovery of the tone of the retina varies in passing from brightness to darkness.”37 In other words, the temporal relationship of objects—i.e., the time between what one has looked at, and what one was looking at—differed for everyone. In this concept of sight, a nearby person—a lover, perhaps—could leave impressions on one’s mind and change the way one viewed the world. By expressing his personal version of the world, Locke may have hoped to change the way other people viewed it as well. Indebted to A. Mussell’s ideas about color and sound, Locke viewed “the qualitative scale of color and sound apperception” as a metaphor of values.38 He wrote: “color and sound sensations are felt differently…such aspects of sensory experience are called ‘values’”39 As Locke visited and described these public places with his lovers, his versions of color and sound represented his values and affectations. His theoretical knowledge of Goethe and James became the tools to create his matrix; these monuments were not the grand ones the rest of the world had appreciated; he turned them into ephemeral, person- alized renderings that reflected his individualistic values reality. At stake was not only how he felt about his identity as a gay, Black man, but also how other people felt about him. Stated more boldly, the innovative ways color, sound, and air recip- rocally affected each other represented how queerness became a part of American values, or so Locke seemed to hope. Echoing these ideas about color and values, Stewart argues that Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, viewed values as unfixed metaphysically. Rather than an Alain Locke’s Affective Air 137

a priori set of ethics, Nietzsche presumably thought, humans could create their own beliefs.40 Locke’s goal to create a new American system of values ultimately led him to his PhD dissertation topic at Oxford and at Harvard. Perhaps that preoccupation is why he called Harlem a place where “elements mix and react, the laboratory of a great race‑welding… [where] a transformed and transforming psychology permeates the masses.”41 In another pair of quasi‑public letters, Locke uses air to describe moments of visual and intellectual clarity. In the first letter, Locke wrote that when seeing the Alps on a “bright Sunday morning…we could see peaks twenty and thirty miles away in the clear air.” 42 In this first correspondence, the air’s translucence, connecting the hour of the day with its color, offered piercing distances, insights, and nuance. In the second letter, this one from France, Locke described how he and his lover, Downes “walked over to Saint Serran [to the southwest], where there is a Roman basilica style of church [—] much better—we struck it about sunset with the sun streaming like molten gold through some very fine stained glass windows—and some quaint old Breton women (fisherman’s wives I daresay) were praying at the fisherman’s altar. It was a very pretty night.”43 Air in this description is an optic, and through its private and public locations, colors (“molten gold”), and times (“about sunset”), Locke could share his feelings and perspectives with others. In his articulation of the basilica in Saint Serran in particular, Locke refracted the world, bending light through the historical (and therefore temporal) meaning that a stained glass window gave to sunlight. That filter allowed Locke to invoke antiquity and—by extension—a tradition that combines ho- moeroticism with intellect and art. More particularly, having studied classics at Harvard, he had a bent for the Platonic teaching method. He viewed the expression and appreciation of art, the process of learning, as a Platonic falling‑in‑love with the pursuit of knowledge, which doubled as a falling‑in‑love with other men. Hughes, conveniently, needed the classical education that the senior Locke had to offer, occasionally mentioning the topic of classical education in their letters.44 Locke would subsequently take a didactic tone with Hughes. In one example, Locke wrote:

the Germans have a perfect genius for friendship, – which cult I confess is my only religion, and has been ever since my early infatuation with Greek ideals of life…You see a poet needs primarily spiritual deepening, and not The New Americanist 04/2020 138

always the intellectual kind of development. Remember, however, that if such things are the sails of the spirit, one requires for safety a proportionate ballast of intellect and ideas.45

In this excerpt, Locke alludes directly to homosexuality as a muse for his writings. He even calls it the “sails of the spirit”—moved along by wind—and explains that intellect also needs a Platonic sort of “spiritual deepening.” Air facilitated his blend of literary elements here—enabling setting and scenery to mix and further his muse to create new perspectives of the world. The logic of this passage coheres by noting a few other dynamics: its didactic tone (“Remember” he writes), as well as Locke’s careful invocations of telling words: “genius” (and its connection to Emerson’s concept of the poet as a genius who translates metaphysical truth for the world); “friendship” (as a euphemism for homosexuality); his deference of intellect to the “spirit” (similar to the ghost in Hamlet, a concept which relies on the mixture of air and liquid to create what appears to be a gas, and which stands for a figure existing between the corporeal world and the metaphysical one); and nautical adventure, where such will o the wisps exist figuratively in the wide Atlantic that separated Locke and Hughes. The way Locke’s air manipulated physical and/or affective distance seemed to help him explore how individuals created art together, or how the individual and the communal created values through varying degrees of cultural distance/difference. That experiment moved from his private correspondence into his published works. In “Fog,” a short story that Locke included in The New Negro, John F. Matheus depicts Harlem’s atmosphere to dramatize how air collapses distance visually, creating an opportunity for individuals to unite and create community with shared values despite their differences. In one scene, as fog crashes into the open cityscape, tobacco smoke overwhelms the passengers of an individual car: “The fog was thicker, more impenetrable. It smothered the headlight. Inside the car in the smoker…the lights were struggling bravely against a fog of tobacco smoke, almost as opaque as the dull grey blan- ket of mist outside.”46 In that excerpt, the public fog of the city and the private smoke in a car, which one person inhales and exhales, collapse together. One could imagine the combination of private and public air as a union of Locke’s secret homosexual world with the heterosexual world at large—a total, visual collapse of the metaphorical distance between those two disparate value systems, as well as a clash of individualism and collectivism. Alain Locke’s Affective Air 139

That collapse occurs through breath (that is, through touch) and through sight, sound, and time—all of which I have discussed as dimensions of Locke’s affective air. While the car’s personal headlight enabled the driver to see, “one by one the [public] street lights came on, giving an uncertain glare in spots, enabling peeved citizens to tread their way homeward without recognizing their neighbour ten feet ahead, whether he might be Jew or Gentile, Negro or Pole.”47 The public lights and the personal lights collapse together, refracted through the fog—the trope of Locke’s closeted affect—and enabling people with limited vision to me- ander through a shared space, but not enough to know with whom each person shares that space. Here one might remember Eve Sedgwick’s scholarship from the 1990s, which would read Queen Esther’s secret Judaism as a metaphor for the sexual closet—because sex and religion were more concealable than race.48 The fog threw everyone into the closet. Like fog and light, time in this short story existed for both the individual and the community. A group of travelers shared a watch, while the public clock ticked on the Court House. That timekeeping creates the rhythm by which the individual sounds of each citizen combine together, forming a sort of orchestra:

The raucous shots of smutty‑speaking street boys, the noises of a steam laundry, the clank and clatter of a pottery, the godless voices of women from Water Street houses of ill fame, all these blended in a sort of modern babel, common to all the towers of destruction erected by modern civilization. These sounds were stirring when the clock sounded six on top of the Court House, that citadel of Law and Order, with the statue of Justice looming.49

The state clock acts as the conductor of Harlem’s orchestra—initiating the fog that “no longer distorted; it blotted out, annihilated” and thus connected everyone. It ticked as a symbol of hetero‑normative time keeping, waiting for disobedience. Locke’s air as an aesthetic of modernism— that is, as a force that unifies by erasing difference—doubled as a trope of homosexuality. This public time starkly clashes again with the individual’s time in the short story when one character asks his traveling companion, “What time’s that pocket clock of yourn’s got?” Another member of the “group of rough, red men” responded that they had to get to their meeting by the time the “air notice” commanded: “half after seven.”50 As George Hutchinson would point out in The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, these “red men” were off to a KKK meeting.51 Matheus’s The New Americanist 04/2020 140

somewhat idealistic resolution then, when the red men experience a train crash in the fog with people from a number of other cultures, is that the red men abandon the Klan meeting.52 Because the fog mediates the way people from different backgrounds experience the world and each other, the cutting tension of racial hatred gives way to empathy and solidarity. The fog—initiated by the courthouse clock striking six—transformed the air: the sounds of a “modern babel” became the screams, curses, and prayers in various dialects and faiths when they experienced a train crash together; visuals became non‑existent as the fog covered everything; prejudices were forgotten; distance collapsed as different people grew close literally and metaphorically. It seems un‑coincidental that Locke’s select works for his anthology, as well as his private letters, both played with the way air creates, shapes, and even destroys public places and values. In these shared locations—often central to Western culture—air mediated how people experienced their fellow citizens, and the literal or figurative distance between one another. James—the pragmatist who so influenced Locke—once wrote: “The theist shows how a God made [substance]; the materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success, how it resulted from blind forces. Then let the pragmatist be asked to choose between their theories.”53 Locke wrote a similar proposition while studying Keats’ romantic poetry. In his essay “The Romantic Movement as Expressed by John Keats,” he quoted Keats’ poem “Lamia,” which explores the difference between a scientific perspective and a literary one:

Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in Heaven; We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy can clip an angel’s wings Conquer all the mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender‑person’d Lamia melt into a shade.54

Here Locke notes that Keats lamented the fall of Romantic idealism to science. A rainbow can be understood either scientifically—as the re- fraction of sunlight through partially materialized water in the air; alternatively, it can be understood imaginatively—having a sort of magical Alain Locke’s Affective Air 141

power, signifying heaven or having the ability to destroy Lamia (an ancient monster). Locke’s exploration of air similarly respected the duality of its crude, literal practicality and its mysterious and literary power as an aesthetic. Some may decry air as too ambiguous for serious critical analysis. However, understanding Locke, an aesthete and philosopher who studied the abstract and ambiguous, cannot occur on separate terms. His innovations came at a time when air was accomplishing daring mis- sions for the brave new modernist world: powering steam ships, enabling planes to fly through the air, sending telegrams, broadcasting radio sig- nals—and changing art and jazz music. During Locke’s life, that world had to reconsider how the metaphysical and the phenomenological co- alesced. How much was one’s understanding of “air,” or “homosexuality,” or “values,” a discovery, and how much were those understandings a creation of meaning? Perhaps it was and is a bit of both. It is perhaps only a coincidence that the rainbow became a symbol of the LGBTQ+ community in coming decades, but it is nevertheless an example of humans defining a material substance beyond its “catalogue of common things,” yet another creation of ideas. The poet—as Emerson wrote, and as Romanticists believed—became a genius, endowed by God, when s/he gave the world new purpose and meaning. Locke’s air throughout his letters demonstrated its own attempt at poetical genius: creating the materiality of the homosexual by giving it new power. This refash- ioning of air, subtle yet indelibly tincturing many of Locke’s archived correspondence, has yet been unappreciated as an epideictic ray of homosexuality: bringing the hidden into the public as a semi‑formed “open secret,” using that “open secret” to create the New Negro’s unique perspective on the world, encouraging people to change their prejudices against homosexuality, and thereby finding new reasons to redeem queerness. Uncovering this truth of Locke’s at least functions as a methodological experiment, using close reading of archives to delineate the subjectivity of a man hopelessly in love with another man.

Many thanks to Worcester College at the University of Oxford for the grant that made this research possible. Thank you to the Beinecke Library at Yale University for access to the archive of Langston Hughes, as well as to the Moorland-Springarn Research Center at Howard University for access to the archive of Alain Locke. The New Americanist 04/2020 142

Bibliography

Ahmed, Sarah. “Happy Objects.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 29-51. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Aristotle. The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, trans. W.Rhys Roberts & I. Bywater. New York: The Modern Library, 1984. Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David Halperin, 307-320. New York: Routledge, 1993. Danisch, Robert. “Alain Locke on Race and Reciprocity: The Necessity of Epideictic Rhetoric for Cultural Pluralism.” Howard Journal of Communications 19, no. 4 (2008): 297-314. https://www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/106461708023 91706. ----. “Power and the Celebration of the Self: Michel Foucault’s Epideictic Rhetoric.” Southern Communication Journal 71, no. 3 (2006): 291-307. Fauset, Jessie. “The Gift of Laughter.” InThe New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, 161-167.. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Frank, Adam. Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Freud, Sigmund. Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Ware: Wordsworth, 2012. Gaskill, Nicholas. Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. ----. “The Articulate Eye: Color-Music, the Color Sense, and the Language of Abstraction.” Configurations 25, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 475- 505. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/675014/pdf. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethe’s Theory of Colours. London: J. Murray, 1840. Hughes, Langston. Langston Hughes Papers (LHP). James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. James, William. “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” In On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, 1-27. Originally printed in Talks to Teachers on Psychology, 1899. Reprinted in London: Penguin Books, 2009. Alain Locke’s Affective Air 143

----. “Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered.” In On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, 91-115. Originally printed in Talks to Teachers on Psychology. London: Penguin Books, 1899. ----. The Principles of Psychology. Manipal Digital Library. Accessed on July 24, 2020. http://library.manipaldubai.com/DL/the_principles_ of_psychology_vol_I.pdf. Keats, John. The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1958. Locke, Alain. Alain Locke Papers (ALP). Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Howard University. Washington, D.C. ----. “The Romantic Movement as Expressed by John Keats,”The Works of Alain Locke. Edited by Charles Molesworth, Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Matheus, John F. “Fog” In The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, 85-95. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Poulakos, John, and Takis Poulakos. Classical Rhetorical Theory. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. Rosenfield, Lawrence. “The Practical Celebration of Epideictic.” In Rhetoric in Transition, edited by Eugene White, 131-56. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980. Sedgwick, Eve. “Epistemology of the Closet.” In Epistemology of the Closet, 67-90.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night, edited by Keir Elam. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/ twelfth-night-arden-shakespeare-third-series-iid-133547. ----. The Winter’s Tale. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/ the-winters-tale-arden-shakespeare-third-series-iid-130725. Staff, MSRC. “Locke, Alain.” Manuscript Division Finding Aids. Prepared by Helen Rutt, assisted by Joellen ElBashir. Washington DC: Moorland-Springarn Research Center, 2015. https://dh.howard. edu/finaid_manu/123. Stewart, Jeffrey.The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Tomkins, Silvan. Affect Imagery Consciousness. New York: Springer, 2008. The New Americanist 04/2020 144

Notes

1 Robert Danisch, “Alain Locke on Race and Reciprocity: The Necessity of Epideictic Rhetoric for Cultural Pluralism.” Howard Journal of Communications 19, no. 4 (2008): 300, https:// www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10646170802391706. 2 Danisch, “Locke,” 297-314. 3 William James, “Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered,” in On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings. Originally printed in Talks to Teachers on Psychology, 1899 (Reprinted in London: Penguin Books, 2009), 94. 4 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), Act Three, Scene Four, Line 129, https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/twelfth-night-arden- shakespeare-third-series-iid-133547. 5 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/the-winters-tale-arden-shakespeare-third-series- iid-130725. 6 Langston Hughes Papers (LHP), Locke to Hughes, November 3, 1924, JWJ MSS 26, Box 104, Folder 1975, Series 1, Film Number 2666, Page 39. James Weldon Johnson Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale; Stewart 440. . 7 LHP (unpublished), Locke to Hughes, no date, JWJ MSS 26 Box 104, Folder 1976, Series I, Film 2666, Pages 43-44. (unpublished) “(Unpublished)” in further footnotes indicates that the quote or artefact has not been published before. 8 OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), s.v. “Will-O’-the-Wisp, n. 1,”https:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/229084?isAdvanced=false&result=1&rskey=KPrAct&; Julia Cresswell, The Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), s.v. “Jack.” 9 LHP (unpublished), Locke to Hughes, no date, JWJ MSS 26 Box 104, Folder 1976, Series 1, Film 2666, Page 44. 10 Jeffrey Stewart,The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 438. 11 Danisch, “Locke,” 299. 12 Stewart Jeffrey 341; Alain Locke Papers (ALP); Staff, MSRC, “Locke, Alain” (2015), 128-129. Manuscript Division Finding Aids. 123. https://dh.howard.edu/finaid_manu/123. Jeffrey Stewart notes that Locke did submit some creative writing for publication, but not successfully (341). 13 Danisch, “Locke,” 299; John Poulakos and Takis Poulakos, Classical Rhetorical Theory (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), 63. 14 Danisch, “Locke,” 300; Lawrence Rosenfield, “The Practical Celebration of Epideictic” in Rhetoric in Transition, ed. Eugene E. White (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980), 135. 15 Stewart Jeffrey 643; Alain Locke Papers (ALP); MSRC Staff 128-129. 16 Sigmund Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Ware: Wordsworth, 2012). 17 William James, The Principles of Psychology, 670-1 (Manipal Digital Library), http://library. manipaldubai.com/DL/the_principles_of_psychology_vol_I.pdf. Accessed on July 24, 2020. 18 William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings. Originally printed in Talks to Teachers on Psychology, 1899 (Reprinted in London: Penguin Books, 2009), 26. 19 Adam Frank, Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 7. 20 Stewart 8. 21 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 309. 22 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 9. 23 Stewart 201. 24 Sarah Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 31. Alain Locke’s Affective Air 145

25 Aristotle, The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, trans. W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater (New York: The Modern Library, 1984), 32. 26 Jessie Fauset, “The Gift of Laughter,”The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 166. 27 Fauset, “Gift,” 165. 28 Ibid. 29 Stewart 440; LHP, Locke to Hughes, November 3, 1924, JWJ MSS 26, Box 104, Folder 1975, Series 1, Film Number 2666, Page 39. 30 James, “Metaphysical Problems,” 94. 31 Stewart 381. 32 Stewart 178. 33 James, “Certain Blindness,” 20. 34 Stewart 40. 35 Nicholas Gaskill, Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 11. 36 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours (London: J. Murray, 1840), 8. 37 Ibid. 38 Stewart 284. 39 Stewart 285. 40 Stewart 284. 41 Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” Introduced by Arnold Rampersad, The( New Negro. New York: Atheneum, 1992), 7. 41 Stewart 177. 42 Stewart 137. 43 ALP, Hughes to Locke, April 6, 1924, Box 38, Folder 5 ; Staff, MSRC, “LOCKE, ALAIN” (2015). Manuscript Division Finding Aids. 123. https://dh.howard.edu/finaid_manu/123. 44 LHP, Locke to Hughes, February 10, 1922, JWJ MSS 26, Box 104, Folder 1975, Series 1, Film Number 2666, Page 4 (unpublished). 45 John F. Matheus, “Fog,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 86. 46 Matheus, “Fog,” 86. 47 Eve Sedgwick, “Epistemology of the Closet,” in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 75. 48 Matheus, “Fog,” 85. 49 Matheus, “Fog,” 86. 50 George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 405. 51 Ibid. 52 James, “Metaphysical Problems,” 98. 53 John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1958), 7; Alain Locke, “The Romantic Movement as Expressed by John Keats,” in The Works of Alain Locke, 10-29. Edited by Charles Molesworth, Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12.

Book Reviews

Seth Perry, Bible Culture & Authority in the Early United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780691179131. 195 pgs. $35.00

Despite the Enlightenment spirit that informs the establishment of the US‑American republic, the importance of the Bible during the founding decades is an uncontested fact. Yet the underlying question of what enabled its impact has rarely been asked. Bible Culture & Authority in the Early United States refuses to take for granted the notions of both a fixed text that is ‘the Bible’ and the assumption of its unquestioned authority. Instead, Seth Perry provides a detailed description of what he terms “scripturalization,” a historically shapeshifting set of processes by which the Bible is attributed authority and by which, in turn, the Bible autho- rizes whoever invokes its text. In questioning the presumptions about the Bible and its status in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Perry provides a much‑needed prequel to scholarship that is implicitly based on these premises. In order to unearth past processes of attributing authority, Perry draws on a rich archive of bibles printed between the late‑colonial era and the Civil War. The dramatic increase in US printing in the late‑eighteenth century forms an important backdrop in that it enabled a large variety of bibles to coexist. The page layout and editing of these bibles in addition to prefaces, marginal references and elaborate commentary make visible a variety of ways in which biblical authority was secured and transposed onto agents who wrote commentary or referenced these texts. The New Americanist 04/2020 148

In this sense, Perry’s conceptual toolkit, seems implicitly akin to Latour’s actor‑network theory, combined with approaches from the study of material texts. The initial chapter addresses a friction between agency and discourse and the printed text: It juxtaposes the post‑revolutionary insistence on the authority of the unvarnished Bible (22, 55) and bibles printed at the time, which in their extensive commentary targeted implied readers who could not be trusted with the text (18–22). Additionally, the chapter shows how commentary, including prefaces and notes, served to authenticate one bible edition among many (36). In historicizing the Bible through the study of bibles, Bible Culture & Authority insists on the contingency of the text itself and fruitfully jeopardizes the idealized abstraction of ‘the Bible.’ Chapter two provides deeper insights into the processes of scripturalization when it zooms in on citation: citing the Bible turns the text into scripture, and the assumption that bibles will be cited from determines practices of reading (41). In this chapter, Perry returns to the recurring topic of contingency: “biblical paratexts” such as commentary offered possibly alternative interpretations to readers, whereas they also often reinforced established ones, as is shown with reference to the justification of slavery based on Gen 9:25 (56). Moreover, the fact that the Bible and its commentary share a single page tends to disrupt “a porous border separating text and paratext” (55), Perry argues, and the attribution of authority then takes places literally across the page (57). Page design thus complicates the distinction between the bible as an individual printed object and the more abstract idea of the Bible. Moments like this make Bible Culture & Authority not only a valuable source for students of religious history, but they offer insight into the print culture and reading habits of the time. Additionally, the chapter is fruitful reading for anyone interested in material texts, because these annotated bible pages showcase and complicate the distinction of book (or book‑copy) the idealized notion of ‘the Book’ that is common in the history of the book. The second part of Bible Culture & Authority moves away from bibles as such to chart “modes of performative biblicism,” which nevertheless serve to endow a respective performer with authority. Placing particular focus on the travelling preacher Lorenzo Dow and his wife Peggy, chapter three shows how early nationals fashioned themselves after biblical role models, reinforcing both the authority of the respective biblical character and their own (73). While Perry also addresses gender‑specific differences in the attribution of biblical authority earlier, this chapter forcefully illustrates the differentiating gender dynamics at work in performative Book reviews 149

biblicism. Whereas the Bible offers numerous roles for male performers, in Peggy Dow’s case the already limited range of biblical roles for women was further chastised by her husband’s choice to be an apostle. In a patriarchal religious system, the cross‑fertilizing attribution of authority between Bible and believer becomes more complex for women, as male authority is added to the mix. The final two chapters combine questions of scripturalization, -au thority, and biblical roles when they zoom in on early national visionaries. Chapter four makes evident that visionary accounts relied on the authority of the speaker as ascertained with reference to the Bible – yet it was at times enough to simply adopt the language conventions of the Authorized Version (88f). In passages that stress the authority of print as such, Perry details the extent to which visionary accounts were preoc- cupied with their own printedness – a result of the paradoxical practice to disseminate God’s unmediated messages in print (91). Especially his remarks on female visionaries’ concerns about writing offer insight into a religious discourse of authorship that resembles concerns of literary authors at the time, thus enriching the study not only of religious culture but of print publication more generally. Whereas the fourth chapter covers a range of visionaries, the final chapter places the creation of the Book of Mormon in the context of con- temporaneous published biblical scholarship. This chapter completes the circle of Perry’s book, as the reciprocal forces that distribute authority among the Bible and bibles, commenters and visionaries, written text and performative applications culminate in a cultural context that allows for the creation of newly scripturalized text. Nevertheless, the specific- ity of this example also shows that Perry’s book describes – other than his terminology of “early national Bible culture” (112) or “Anglophone print‑bible culture” (87) might suggest – diverse cultures that shift over short periods of time. It is thus not surprising that contingency and change form a recurrent point of focus in a study that offers a historiciza- tion of Bible culture beyond the somewhat narrower confines suggested by its title. In effect, Perry tackles Bible culture between the late‑colonial era and the Civil war, with a conclusion that gestures towards the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Ilka Brasch Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany The New Americanist 04/2020 150

Emily Skidmore, True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9781479895687. 272 pgs. PB. $19.95

A farmhand dies in his seventies, a local man breaks his leg, a slighted lover seeks her revenge, an immigrant is forced to take a medical examination at the border: Emily Skidmore’s True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Century uncovers how all of these circumstances can lead to a press revelation of a trans person’s ‘true sex.’ This timely monograph examines the remarkable and remarkably mundane lives of trans men from the 1880s to the 1930s. More precisely, Skidmore’s book is an historiography of a particular genre of newspaper story that revelled in the scandal of the revelation of the supposed ‘true sex’ of these individuals to the general public. The rapid expansion of the digital archives of national and small‑town newspapers has enabled this much‑needed work to take place on such a scale. The book acts as a comprehensive exploration of the sex‑reveal trope that was employed repeatedly in the press at the turn of the twentieth century; Skidmore has identified at least 65 individuals whose gender histories were reported on in the press in this way. Skidmore’s key contribution to LGBT history is in locating the figure of the “unexceptional” (4) trans man, existing outside urban queer communities, and quietly living, working and marrying in rural settings until they were outed in the press. As such, the book stands in opposition to queer studies’ tendency towards what Jack Halberstam has referred to as ‘metronormative’ histories that prefigure the urban as the refuge for all historical LGBT subjects. It also brings into question queer scholarship’s notions around “community” in this period, proposing that trans men would be more likely to form community with their neighbors than with those who shared their experiences of gender. Skidmore argues that her subjects’ frequent choice to live in rural communities “suggests the need to reevaluate how portable the insights about gays and lesbians can be in understanding the historical lives of trans men and other gender transgressors” (50). Her work highlights the necessity of studying the con- stituent groups of the LGBT umbrella individually, instead of as a mono- lith. “All too often,” she writes, “the assumption is made that LGBT individuals have sought community with others like them, and that LGBT history is, therefore, by definition, a community history” (66). Skidmore convincingly supplements this narrative of urban queer community with that of the rural trans man and other forms of social membership. Book reviews 151

In Chapter 1, Skidmore examines the usage of the discourse of sexology in reporting related to trans men, charting the perhaps unexpectedly limited influence of sexological viewpoints on mainstream media. Although newspaper editors appeared to be aware of sexologists’ writings on gender non‑conforming subjects as early as the 1880s, such work was only “deployed skeptically” (35) as the solution to the problem that trans men’s “strange” and “mysterious” behavior posed to editors (56). Particularly insightful is Skidmore’s observation that sexologists may, conversely, have been influenced by such reporting; she identifies the echoes of newspaper stories in the work of sexologists P.M. Wise and Havelock Ellis. Skidmore moves from these broader national trends to the reporting found in small‑town newspapers, covering trans men who were members of the local community. In Chapter 2, she explores the relation of rural communities to their transmasculine inhabitants, finding that local reporting was regularly more sympathetic to its subjects than that of big cities, which were increasingly deploying the tactics of sensational ‘yellow journalism’ to increase sales. This acceptance of the local trans man was also reflected in other spheres; rural trans men often continued to live their lives in much the same way as they had prior to press scrutiny. Moreover, trans men’s choices were often respected after post‑mortem revelations; Skidmore identifies individuals who were buried in men’s clothes, or in Catholic churchyards. By comparing newspaper narratives in this way, Skidmore proposes that rural communities had “more elastic understandings of masculinity and the relationship between sex and gender than have previously been understood” (58). Such acceptance, however, was often contingent on other factors. Chapter 3 explores the significance of whiteness in rendering the queer subjectivity of trans men acceptable, and in Chapter 4, Skidmore turns her attentions to notions of ‘foreignness’ in the treatment and pathologization of non‑white and immigrant trans men. She describes the ways in which stories of white trans men were put to use in advancing the “ideologies of patriarchal capitalism and white supremacy” (70), whilst their queerness was rendered unthreatening by their framing as remarkable, singular and exceptional. The celebration of the ‘successes’ of white, economically independent trans men is contrasted with the criminalization of their non‑white counterparts in the changing geo‑political climate of the early 20th century. Skidmore describes cases in which transmasculine alignment with the imperial project and a masculinity based on militarism and patriotic duty protected certain trans subjects, whilst being used against others. She notes the ways in which The New Americanist 04/2020 152

journalists “utilized foreignness more readily than sexological theories to depict gender/sexual deviance” (127). Skidmore then examines the benefits and dangers of marriage to trans men, arguing that marriage formed an integral role in the performance of masculinity. Chapter 5 plots the proliferation of regulations surrounding the institution of marriage at the turn of the century, in conjunction with the increase in anti‑cross‑dressing legislation. She proposes that marriage, despite the risk of state inspection and criminalization, offered these individuals a means of passing, and access to a legal certificate that ratified their status as men. The lives and stories that Skidmore sheds light on are fascinating and often poignant, however the book does not always fully acknowledge the harm and disruption that its source material may have caused to the subjects it depicts. Perhaps most saliently there is, at times, a danger that modern readers might approach some of the narratives in this book in much the same way as audiences received the original articles – as titillat- ing scandal. Where Skidmore is at her best is in her more direct engagement with the lived experiences and decisions of trans men. In particular, her work on marriage and the circular relationship between sexologists and the newspaper industry open up fruitful avenues for further study. True Sex marks a welcome and significant contribution to the emergent field of transgender history.

Moss Pepe University of Edinburgh Book reviews 153

Johannes Voelz, The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xii+246 pp.

Johannes Voelz (Literature, Goethe‑Universität Frankfurt) has written a book that reads key authors and texts in American literature through the lens of security. Beyond the rather modest goal of showing the role that various conceptions of security play in American literature, Voelz seeks to show how security itself is constitutive of modernity. Hence each chapter’s close readings of a particular text open out upon this wider vista of modernity in order to demonstrate the centrality of security for understanding what it means to be modern. Indeed, Voelz urges us to see how we cannot really begin to understand recent American history without understanding the role that security plays within it. The triumphalism that marked the end of the Cold War at the close of the twentieth century was quickly supplanted by the uncertainty and insecurity that marks our present epoch as one marked by an endless war against terror. “If we had to predict,” Voelz writes, “the label that will serve as shorthand description for the early twentieth‑first century, ‘The Age of Security’ would seem like a safe choice” (1). Voelz shows how the roots of this security obsession extend back to the beginnings of American history. His analysis begins with a reading of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Merwyn in order show how security concerns figure into the early republic. From Brown, Voelz next turns to Harriet Jacobs, but he devotes much of his attention to more recent authors; the final three chapters analyze the role of security in Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, and Don Delillo. He readily acknowledges that his selection of authors is only representative, and that he could have just as easily chosen other authors to make sense of security in American literature (he cites James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Henry James, Jack London, and Thomas Pynchon as possible alternatives). These various American authors—along with, one presumes, others he does not name—have all written books concerned with various external threats that “beleaguer life in modern America” while at the same time they are skeptical that a society devoted simply to neutralizing these threats would be one worth living in (2). This ambivalence structures much of American literature, and these various authors appeal alternatively to efforts aimed at securing modern life against various uncertainties and an acknowledge- ment that uncertainty, unpredictability, and insecurity can never be fully overcome. In the end, death overtakes all of us, despite our best‑laid plans. The New Americanist 04/2020 154

Security names various efforts by individuals and polities to exert control over future contingencies, which are by definition indeterminate and uncontrollable. These efforts are ultimately doomed to fail, but we mod- erns nevertheless expend vast resources trying to do just that. Because he believes that these efforts to secure the future are a defining trait of modernity, he rejects literary approaches that focus on literature as a site of resistance against the politics of security as well as those that affirm these politics (183). Instead, we need to take a longer view that sees how security concerns have inspired literary art since the country’s beginnings. Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Merwyn represents the obsession with securing the early American republic from both external and internal threats. Federalists such as James Madison were concerned about how populism would breed the sort of factionalism that would doom the young republic, and he and other Federalists thought that only representative democracy could inoculate the nascent polity against this threat (35–37). Arthur Merwyn dramatizes these threats in the form of the pro- tagonist’s attempt to secure his reputation in the face of rumors of a crim- inal past (in this respect it is one of the first American novels to feature the figure of the confidence man) and the threat to his health in the form of yellow fever (42–43). Voelz reads Arthur Merwyn as a novel about agency and responsibility. Harriet Jacobs is part of a political and economic regime that sought to deny both of these to individuals deemed slaves. “Faced with a power regime legally endorsed to control all aspects of the slave’s life, the slave is forced into risky calculations aimed at the self’s removal from the master. While the fugitive—who has already succeeded in the risky venture of flight—finds herself in a state that is thoroughly pervaded by insecurity, the slave, positioned under the master’s purview, engages in a risky wa- ger that puts life and death in the balance” (68). Among other things, the freedom the fugitive seeks entails an open future in which her decisions count for her. Harriet Jacobs appeals to a possible community of insecurity that would replace both the enslaved state and the life of fear endured by the fugitive slave (91–93). Merwyn must reassure his associates that he is neither a physical nor a moral risk (128).. The fourth chapter engages in a close reading of Willa Cather’sThe Professor’s House (1925) in order to show how Tom Outland seeks to escape the malaise of modernity to the sort of absolute security that only faith and the past can provide. Outland is a scholar in the American Southwest who takes refuge in meaning he discovers in the various artifacts of the indigenous past. Instead of positing security in the future, Outland seeks Book reviews 155

it in the past. Like every past, this past can never be fully recovered, however, and hence the novel enacts an ironic displacement of security. Like all of us, Tom Outland has to learn to live in a state of insecurity and risk. Voelz situates Flannery O’Connor’s work within the Cold War context through a reading that focuses on her story “The Displaced Person.” Her work opposes the secular national security state and its culture by exploring a religious worldview that seems adamantly antimodern. However, her fictional work mounts a critique of secular, progressive modernity that parallels the critique of progressivism found in the work of midcen- tury Cold War liberals. The world of her fiction is a world of sacramental, redemptive violence (132–134). Divine security coincides with physical insecurity as sacred violence destroys the body but redeems the soul. Voelz concludes with a reading of Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis that un- derstands the novel (and Delillo’s work more generally) as quasi‑existen- tialist; he is a serious student of Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Delillo’s work has always been associated with postmodernism, but his recent work takes aim at the world of high finance and poses the question of whether authentic experience can be recovered in a world thoroughly mediated by financial and other forms of data. The pessimistic answer Voelz finds in Cosmpolis is that it is only in the moment of our death that any deliver- ance from pervasive economies of risk can be found. Like any review, this one can only hint at the richness of Voelz’ literary analyses. Readers who are interested in the pervasive role that security plays in American literature and American culture more generally should read this book.

Corey McCall Penn State University

Contributors

Luke Doughty graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor’s in English and Classics from Wabash College in 2018, and with a Master’s in English and American Studies from the University of Oxford in 2019. Recently, he has worked as a teaching assistant at Stanford University and as an adjunct instructor at Texas A&M University, Texarkana. He has published in Oxford Research in English and Oxford University Press’s Literary Imagination on the topics of race, sexuality, and l egal history.is a freelance writer. Luke Doughty graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor’s in English and Classics from Wabash College in 2018, and with a Master’s in English and American Studies from the University of Oxford in 2019. Recently, he has worked as a teaching assistant at Stanford University and as an adjunct instructor at Texas A&M University, Texarkana. He has published in Oxford Research in English and Oxford University Press’s Literary Imagination on the topics of race, sexuality, and legal history.is a freelance writer.

Heather Fox is an Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where she teaches courses in literature, composition, pedagogy, and women & gender studies. Her research, published in South, The Faulkner Journal, The Explicator, and other journals, examines interdisciplinary approaches to American literature, particularly women’s literature and the literature of the American South. A Frances S. Summersell Fellow and Phi Kappa Phi award recipient, her monograph under contract draws upon archival research to situate narrative selection and arrangement as social commentary. The New Americanist 04/2020 158

Derek Kane O’Leary completed his Ph.D. in the History Department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. He is a new member of the faculty at Bard High School Early College in Washington, D.C. This article draws on his dissertation, “Building the American Archive in the Atlantic World, 1791-1869.”

Paul D. Reich is an associate professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Dr. Reich teaches classes in American Studies, literature, and media studies, including courses on Toni Morrison, visual narratives, and Christopher Nolan. His pedagogical essay on HBO’s The Wire was published in The Wirein the College Classroom and his co-authored essay on literary field studies, “Taking the Text on a Road Trip,” has appeared in Pedagogy. He has also recently co-authored an essay entitled “#DrySeptember: Reading William Faulkner through the Lens of Black Twitter” in Studies in American Culture; it earned the 2018 Jerome Stern Prize for Best Article in Studies in American Culture.

Amanda Stuckey is an Assistant Professor of English at Central Penn College, where she teaches courses in composition and American literary studies. Her research examines the intersections of book history, disability studies, and sentimentality in the long nineteenth century, and has received support from the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Printing History Association. Her work has appeared in Printing History and Studies in American Fiction.

Laura Visser-Maessen is Assistant Professor of North American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She specializes in African American history, civil rights, and race and protest in a trans-Atlantic context, but her teaching covers a variety of topics related to American history and culture. Her book Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) became a finalist for the Hooks Institute National Book Award 2016. She recently co-edited a special issue for the European Journal of American Studies (April 2019) on the ways in which (the memory of) the year 1968 affects the black freedom struggle today. She also co-authored its editorial introduction and contributed an article offering a comparative perspective on the ways in which 21st century American, British, and Dutch black activists have used the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. to advance their own anti-racism protests. Her current research interests include the organizing strategies of black activists in the US and western-Europe during the 20th and 21st centuries, the US as a reference culture for black Europeans, and black autobiography.