Books Published

Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century takes as its subject women who in fewer than fifty years moved from near literary invisibility and isolation to prolific productivity and connectedness. Grounded in primary research and paying close attention to the historical archive, this book offers against-the-grain readings that emerge when Black women’s novel and narrative writing are assumed to be married to—rather than painfully divorced from—their journalistic prose, organizational involvement and reception communities. Part literary criticism and part cultural history, Activist Sentiments examines nineteenth-century social, political, and rhetorical practices in the literary and activist work of Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Frances E. W. Harper, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Amelia E. Johnson. Activist Sentiments reveals how Black women's complex and confrontational commentary emerges in their sentimental, and simultaneously political, literary production. University of Illinois Press, 2009. 
 

 
Our Nig, or, Sketches from the life of a free black, in a two-story white house, North showing that slavery's shadows fall even there. Harriet Wilson. Penguin Classics, 2005. New York, 2005. Co-editor with Reginald Pitts. Introduction by P. Gabrielle Foreman. Updated 150th anniversary edition, 2009. This groundbreaking edition presents new information about Wilson’s early and later life. In unraveling the mystery of what happened to its author after Our Nig’s publication, this edition “managed to pick up one of the coldest trails in nineteenth-century African American studies,” as one reviewer put it. Instead of dying in poverty shortly after Our Nig was published as many had assumed, Wilson’s hair products were extremely popular before the Civil War. Then, starting again as “Boston’s eloquent and earnest colored medium,” Wilson became well known throughout New England as a Spiritualist lecturer. Boston and New Hampshire talks about the new edition were covered by the Boston Globe, Harvard Gazette, and New Hampshire Union Leader. Featured interviews appeared on New Hampshire NPR and on Center Broadcasting Corp. of New Hampshire. Talk at Philadelphia Free Library listed as “Editor's Pick” in the Philadelphia Weekly and the "Arts Picks" in Philadelphia's City Paper. Radio interviews reached over 3.5 million listeners. Review. Boston Globe article. Review.  
 
To purchase Our Nig:

 
The Collected Works of Maggie Shaw-Fullilove and Mary Etta Spencer. MacMillan series on African American Women Writers, 1910-1940. Critical Introduction. G. K. Hall, 1995. Archival and genealogical research yielded previously unknown short stories originally published in the Half Century Magazine as well as photographs that were included in the volume. Found and interviewed the author’s surviving daughter and other family members.