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Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature . Daniel Hack. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. ix+284.

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/694807

1545-6951

Melissa Shields Jenkins,

American History and Culture

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewReaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature. Daniel Hack. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. ix+284.Melissa JenkinsMelissa JenkinsWake Forest University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn his exciting new book, Daniel Hack shows full awareness of the potential minefield into which he enters. “Influence” narratives abound in English letters, including some that connect African American literary traditions to writing in the White British and/or American traditions. Lately, however, these studies have focused on the influence of black writing on the dominant canon of white writing, rather than the other way around. One of the best in this latter vein is Julia Sun-Joo Lee’s The Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel (2010), in which she examines canonical Victorian authors who respond to and appropriate slave narrative tropes, characters, and conventions. Hack ends his first chapter with the same episode that begins Lee’s book, Charles Dickens’s decision to remove a “hideous and abominable” (43) portrait of Frederick Douglass from his Narrative before passing it along to a new reader. For Lee, the episode underscored the mixture of fascination and revulsion experienced by a number of white Victorians when absorbing black texts. For Hack, the episode is a way of understanding revision itself, the violence inherent to wresting a text into a new context.Another forerunner to Hack’s book is Audrey Fisch’s American Slaves in Victorian England (2000), which is, as with Lee’s later book, about the reception of African American tropes and rhetorics within white Victorian contexts. Hack also acknowledges the debt he owes to Laura Doyle, Eliza Tarmarkin, Elizabeth Young, and others who have become part of a strong network of transatlantic scholars (7). Hack’s book innovates in that its focus is on African American appropriations of the tropes of the dominant white culture, rather than the other way around. It is a bold move that could go awry and may even be discouraged in some circles. The fear is that such work reduces the rich traditions of the minority culture into a copy of the work of the dominant culture. It is anti-Emersonian to acknowledge the ways that the American scholar is indebted to the colonizer. These anxieties are handled masterfully here, and the potential “risk” (7) involved is acknowledged early on. The benefit is a broadening of our sense of African American literary communities.In his careful introduction, “The African Americanization of Victorian Literature,” Hack sets the language for the kind of use narrative he wants to pursue. He speaks of “transpositions and repurposings,” “deployments and responses to” (1), “leverag[ings]” (7), and “intertextual engagements” (9). His key term worried me at first, as the “African Americanization” of anything implies a kind of consistent product as different cultural objects are covered with brown paint. (Similarly, one could question the occasional use of “the” in front of terms such as “the African American tradition of citation” [180], which seemed, at first, to assume one shared strategy of citation.) But Hack quickly explains his goals in adopting and employing his key term. In arguing for “African Americanization,” he hopes to imply a transfer of ownership. The Victorian text is not “used” by an African American writer, but instead becomes an African American text. It is also fruitful and helpful that Hack registers the differences between nineteenth- and twentieth-century acts of “African Americanization” as he turns to the works of W. E. B. Dubois in chapter 6. As he puts it, “when later African American writers engage with Victorian literature, they will not be engaging with it as contemporary, and when they engage with contemporary literature, they will not be engaging with Victorian literature” (177).The first half of the book focuses on texts (Bleak House, “Charge of the Light Brigade,” and The Spanish Gypsy), and the last half on authors (Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, W. E. B. Dubois), to “capture the complexities of individual encounters and to narrate the development of these practices over time” (16). Within these chapters, there are additional moments of hesitation that show Hack’s attempt to be as careful in his inferences as possible. For example, in outlining how “tactics” (30) employed by Douglass’ Paper seem to downplay the criticisms of philanthropy within Bleak House, a novel it began to publish serially before previewing its full content, Hack writes, “we must take care not to assume that what seems clear now would have seemed clear in the past. Readers must be tuned to the right frequency to hear these notes” (28). The same chapter then turns to the thorny issue of Hannah Craft’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative as having “borrowed extensively” (34) from Bleak House and other works, and proceeds to do a line-by-line overview of a few of the borrowings. (He does similar work in chapter 5 with Pauline Hopkins’s “unacknowledged borrowing” [137] from lesser-known British Victorian texts.) However, he finds balance in noting Tennyson’s unacknowledged borrowings from his own contemporaries.His chapter on reprintings of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” shows a deep engagement with American print culture, as he easily compares editorial decisions made by different outlets of the black press over time. Even more startling is his reporting on James McCune Smith’s reading of “Light Brigade” alongside a poem by Tennyson, “Anacaona,” that did not appear until after Tennyson’s death. Hack’s methological approach, which he calls “close reading at a distance” (3), is a combination of formalism and cultural studies. He wants to point to specific formal parallels between the original and the appropriation, but also think about how the specifics of time and location require new readings of established works. He announces this as his own method but also that of his subjects, the African American writers who often found themselves repurposing works by Tennyson and Dickens that had nothing to do with their struggles or were even hostile to them. George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy, the focus of chapter 3, is a notable exception, he suggests, in that the original text “treats a racial minority with respect while foregrounding the role of race in determining individual and group identity” (79). He notes that in twice telling a story of “passing” (in The Spanish Gypsy and again in Daniel Deronda), Eliot sets herself apart from other canonical British writers, which may be why her work reaps numerous echoes in similar narratives of passing in the American tradition (80).As mentioned, the second half of the book focuses on specific authors as their relationships with British Victorian texts evolve over the course of a career. These chapters are particularly satisfying, and again display a rather mind-boggling mastery of a wide variety of materials—letters, biographies, works of fiction and poetry, catalogs of personal book holdings. Hack tackles explicit allusions, more implicit parallels in plot structures and characterizations, engagement with the long history of forms such as the bildungsroman, speeches, prefaces, and editorial apparatus such as strategies for citation and quotation.Reaping Something New is a special book. One leaves it with full awareness that not many critics could have written it, as it requires a deep knowledge of British Victorian texts and a full immersion into nineteenth-century American print culture and with Americanist theory and criticism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Hack is able to walk readers through acts of citation, but also of “meta-citation,” as African American writers “dialogue with prior African American citations of” Victorian texts (101). His afterword strides confidently into the twenty-first century, with brief readings of two contemporary novels. This book stands as one of our best arguments for thinking about literary traditions as intertwined and dialogic rather than separate and distinctive. If we want more books like this one, we will have to train scholars to look for conscious borrowings and reconfigurations by authors and editors, and not just for unconscious echoes. And, we will have to shatter more of the silos that separate fields of study within English departments. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 115, Number 3February 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/694807HistoryPublished online September 25, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.