Lecture

Toward a History of Black Print 

Elizabeth McHenry, New York University

In this series of three lectures, Elizabeth McHenry turns her attention to several overlapping areas of Black print culture studies that have yet to be sufficiently explored: the business of printing, the history of Black printers, and the extension of African American literary and print culture.

This event has already occurred

calendar_month

March 11 - 14, 2024

location_on

Hybrid event: Class of 78 Orrery Pavilion, Kislak Center, 6th Floor Van Pelt-Dietrich Library; and virtual (via Zoom)

group

Open to the Public

Hosted by: Kislak Center

Registration information: all three lectures will be held in person and also streamed virtually, via Zoom webinar. Please register separately for each lecture (see below).

McHenry is particularly attentive to the capacity of small printing offices to experiment with different print formats and the impact of the rapid rise in printing as a course of study at Historically Black Colleges and Universities across the South around the turn from the 19th to the 20th century. Scholars of African American literature have largely overlooked the products of student-run printing offices and small job printing businesses during this time, which included single-sheet publications, leaflets and pamphlets.

These textual objects confound bibliographic interpretation, and the story of their production, distribution and use will be difficult to tell. But it is critical to our efforts to expand our knowledge of African American literary history and in particular, our understanding of literary and print cultures of the Black South.

Monday, March 11, 5:30 pm: Black Bibliography, Here and Now

In the first lecture, McHenry uses the arc of her own past scholarship to think critically about what it takes to reconstruct African American literary history. She considers how her research and writing has intersected with and been shaped by both early Black bibliographies and the principles of Black bibliographic practice. This provides a context for her to assess those areas of Black print culture that remain understudied, including the business of printing, the history of Black printers, and formats of Black literature that are easily and relatively inexpensively produced.

Tuesday, March 12, 5:30pm: Black Literature and the Business of Printing

Years before he became the editor of The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP, W. E. B. Du Bois used all of his savings to purchase a small printing business in Memphis, Tennessee. The second lecture of this series looks closely at this business, the Ed. L. Simon & Co., Printers. What drove Du Bois to establish the business and his experiments with the possibilities of print make visible the importance of studying the work of local Black printers and the products of Black printing businesses, to better understanding the audiences for Black print and the forms and formats of Black literary production.

Thursday, March 14, 5:30pm: Black Print and the Pathways of Black Study

In the final lecture of this series, McHenry explores the rise of printing as a course of study in Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the impact of these programs on education in the Black South. Her interest lies not only in the programs themselves, but also in the institutions that housed them, many of which became—specifically because of their “Printing Departments”— major centers for the production of Black literature and the distribution of Black print. If we were able to find and follow these publications, what might we learn about the uses of Black print and the rise of literary cultures in the rural South?

Event Series

Man standing in front of wall of bookshelves holding open book

The A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography

The Rosenbach Lectures are the longest continuing series of bibliographical lectureships in the United States. Rosenbach Fellows typically present three lectures over a period of one-two weeks.

Elizabeth McHenry

Elizabeth McHenry is Professor in the English Department at New York University, where she also serves as the department chair. She holds a B.A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her 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.

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 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.

Both of these books were awarded the DeLong Book History Book Prize, and To Make Negro Literature was also named the co-winner of the 2023 St. Louis Mercantile Library prize. McHenry serves as a co-editor (along with David Kazanjian and Priscilla Wald) of the New York University Press series “America in the Long 19th Century.”

Featured image: Printing with printing presses at Claflin University, Orangeburg, S.C., ca. 1899. Library of Congress.