New Directions: Black Print Culture and Archives, Roundtable 2. Speakers: Jean-Christophe Cloutier (University of Pennsylvania), Tara Bynum (University of Iowa), Jarvis Givens (Harvard University), Elizabeth McHenry (New York University)
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Dr. Tara Bynum is an Assistant Professor of English & African American Studies and a scholar of early African American literary histories before 1800. She received her PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Political Science from Barnard College. Her current monograph, Reading Pleasures (University of Illinois Press’ New Black Studies, fall 2022), examines the ways in which eighteenth-century enslaved and/or free men and women feel good or experience pleasure in spite of the privations of slavery, “unfreedom,” or white supremacy. It is a pleasure that isn’t beholden to social expectations or systemic oppression, but instead is experienced because of an individual’s commitment to religious faith, friendship, or community building. This work is part of a larger, ongoing project that thinks more deeply about how black communities in the early republic made and shaped the very meaning of nation-building in the greater New England area and beyond. Related essays have appeared or are forthcoming in: Early American Literature, Common-Place, Legacy, J19, Criticism, American Periodicals, and African American Literature in Transition, Vol. 1, 1750-1800.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Romance (and Provenance) in Marseille: Claude McKay and the Wayward Lives of Two Typescripts.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, an M.A. from SUNY Buffalo, and a B.A. in Liberal Arts and English from Concordia University, Montréal, in his native Québec (Canada). At Columbia, he also worked as an archivist in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library where, among other collections, he processed the papers of Samuel Roth, Erica Jong, and former publisher of Grove Press, Barney Rosset. He is the author of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia University Press, 2019), which won the fifth annual Matei Calinescu Prize from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the MSA 2019 First Book Prize from the Modernist Studies Association, and the 2020 Waldo Gifford Leland Award from the Society of American Archivists; it was also shortlisted for the 2020 ASAP Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. The book focuses on the archival investments of midcentury African American novelists and brings to life a slew of newly-discovered primary texts as it sketches the troubled history of black special collections in the U.S.Cloutier is also co-editor to a scholarly edition of Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem (Penguin Classics, 2017; paperback 2018), a previously unknown novel by Claude McKay composed in 1941. Edited in collaboration with Brent Hayes Edwards, the edition provides extensive historical contextualization of the novel's composition and a discussion of its implications for our understanding of McKay's late career. In 2021, the edition appeared in French translation: Les Brebis Noires de Dieu (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Place).
Jarvis Givens, The Black Teacher Archive: Preserving the Journals of ‘Colored Teachers Associations,’ 1920-1970.
Jarvis Givens is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a faculty affiliate in the department of African & African American Studies at Harvard University. He studies the history of American education, African American history, and the relationship between race and power in schools. His first book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, was published by Harvard University Press in 2021. This work traces African Americans’ traditions of challenging racial domination in schools and society by highlighting the various intellectual and political strategies they employed from the slavery era through Jim Crow. Givens takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying history, employing conceptual and methodological interventions from the field of Black Studies. Such methodological interests led him, in partnership with Imani Perry of Princeton University, to an exciting new digital humanities project called The Black Teacher Archive. This is an online portal that houses the digitized records of national and state “Colored Teachers Associations” organized by black educators from the antebellum era through Jim Crow. The BTA is supported by a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Elizabeth McHenry, Black Literature and the Business of Printing.
Elizabeth McHenry's research and teaching focus on African American literature and the various histories of Black print culture. She is especially interested in mining the archives of black print to uncover the lost, forgotten, or overlook traces of African American literary history and using these to piece together the context in which literary texts were produced, distributed, and read. For instance, her first book, Forgotten Readers (2002), examines the long history of African Americans as readers in the context of their organized literary practices. The book relies on a number of theoretical and disciplinary lenses to understand the epistemological and social conditions of print culture and literary community for African Americans between 1830 and 1940. It expands our definition of literacy and urges of us think about literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Her second book, titled To Make Negro Literature (2021), returns again to the archives to examine a variety of projects and conditions of authorship that have gone dismissed or largely unnoticed in traditional accounts of African American literary history. By turning our critical attention away from the usual markers of literary achievement—known authors and traditionally published works of poetry and fiction—she illuminates a series of texts, projects and literary practitioners that make visible the unsettledness of the category of black literature at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
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