Scholars contributing to Part II advance our knowledge of the movements associated with Black people and Black texts. In the decades from 1800 to 1830, legal statutes and slave revolts impacted the mobility of African American people and the flows of Black literary texts. These decades are peculiar even as they are bookended by landmark decisions – namely the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Both statutes emboldened slave owners and catchers to pursue fugitive free Blacks in northern states and border territories, thus endangering free-born people of African descent as well. President George Washington never stopped pursuing Ona Judge, who absconded from his home in 1796, on her own, and moved into Philadelphia’s community of free-born and fugitive free Blacks.1 Likewise, the second fugitive slave law only added to the danger Harriet Jacobs faced in freedom, remaining on the run in the North even as she began to contemplate publication in the 1850s.

Essays in part three, “Print Culture in Circulation,” consider the means by which African Americans distributed ideas to mass audiences, including the structures that supported these efforts and the rhetorical tropes that enabled a broad readership. In the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, countless networks organized around African American writing, thinking and speaking fostered literary engagement. Elizabeth McHenry explains that such societies reveal the value of education to free and enslaved African Americans who relied on these associations “for collective reading, writing, and discussion to combat charges of racial inferiority, validate their call for social justice, and alert their audience to the disparity between American ideals and racial inequality.

The three chapters in Part I, “Black Organizational Life before 1830,” explore institutional transformations that supported Black literature of the period, focusing on church, print, and labor as key sites that supported the production of African American literature. Whereas opportunities to lead churches, print outlets, and labor organizations were male dominated, the chapters in this section also prioritize the efforts of men in the production of early African American literature. For more detail on the significance and presence of Black women in literature of this period, scholars should turn toward schooling as the expansion of educational institutions represents an important transition in African American literary culture in the early 1800s.

This chapter focuses on a community of Black women writers in Philadelphia who contributed essays and poetry to the Liberator newspaper. The Liberator provided a venue for such writings, but Philadelphia’s free Black women also decisively shaped the tone and politics of the nation’s leading abolitionist newspaper.

Chapters in the fourth and final section, “Illustration and the Narrative Form,” explore transitions in visual culture of the early nineteenth century. By 1830, there was a growing diversity of Black portrayals in visual culture, ranging from the well-meaning but often misguided antislavery imagery to the purposefully hostile proliferation of anti-Black caricature. In materials that circulated privately, such as the friendship albums passed among free Black women, illustrations appeared alongside writing as hand-painted flowers denoted sentimental notes and poems.1 Similarly, southern newspapers printing runaway advertisements for fugitive free Blacks hailed readers with the iconic stereotype of a runaway man or woman, on the move with stolen property. In addition to images, social activity also wielded an impact on visual culture. For instance, the 1808 ban on new importations of slaves from Africa was clear and present in the minds of African Americans. Not only did they mark these occasions with sermons and pamphlets produced to discuss these events, but also their freedom celebrations – public ceremonies and parades in Boston’s free Black community, for example – were meant to take up space in public with visual demonstrations about abolition’s significations.2

The material conditions of the years between 1800 and 1830 rendered Black authors and much of African American literature “out of bounds.” Contributors engage literature by people of African descent outside of slavery’s fetters, or Black cultural producers creating work deemed untoward, or literatures developed outside the covers of bound books. In this period, the idea of Black literature was plagued not only by prohibitions on literacy and circumscription on Black people’s mobility, but also by ambivalence about what in fact would have been acceptable public discourse for people of African descent. This volume explores African American literature that elided the suppression of African American thought by directly confronting the urgencies of the moment, especially themes related to the pursuit and the experience of freedom. Transitions in the social, political, and cultural conditions of the decades in question show themselves in literary production at the turn of the nineteenth century. This volume focuses on transitions in organizational life (section 1), in mobility (section 2), in print circulation (section 3), and in visual culture (section 4).