In honor of Black History Month, we are sharing excerpts from several of the books on our African American Studies list. For further reading, find related free journal articles and open-access books here: https://bit.ly/4kgkEK5.
Listeners most often associate the blues with emotional distress expressed by a lone individual who is or has been the victim of mistreatment. As a genre, the blues has not been understood historically as raising questions of social justice. Rather, the tradition is heard as giving voice to heartache and pain as a result of wrongs committed, usually in the context of romantic and sexual relations. Cheating and mistreating lovers cause narrator-victims to cry out against perceived injustice. Having ignored repeated warnings from friends, the narrator of Big Bill Broonzy and His Chicago Five’s “Tell Me Baby” (1942) describes his discovery of having been victimized multiple times: “My friends all told me; I thought it was a joke; whoa, there is fire where you see a lot of smoke / Tell me baby, ooh, tell me, darlin’, how many times.” In this instance, not only is the narrator betrayed, but the lover cheats multiple times, with different men. The refrain “how many times?” underscores her incorrigibility and his repeated victimization. The romantic betrayal is sometimes represented as a kind of theft, as in Anna Bell’s “Every Woman Blues” (1928): “If you see me stealing, please don’t tell on me [2×] / I’m just stealing from my regular back to my used-to-be.” The woman is “stealing away,” resonating with an expression used under slavery, giving to the former lover what the current one is due. In many blues, romantic betrayal is accompanied by financial exploitation, as unfaithful lovers take from the one they are cheating on to give to the one they are cheating with. “Fattening frogs for snakes,” the colorful African American expression that appears in numerous blues songs, means feeding, clothing, housing, and/or giving money to someone only to have it benefit another. Occasionally, blues tell the tale of infidelity from the perspective of the cheater rather than one betrayed. A repentant narrator in B. B. King’s “It’s My Own Fault” (1965) confesses, “Used to make your own pay checks, baby, and bring them on home to me / I’d go out on the hillside, you know, and make every woman, good girl seen.” Here, it’s the hardworking woman who turns over her money to her faithless man, who in turn cheats with other women.
These songs recount a betrayal: the faithful lover is deceived—cheated out of love, affection, and, sometimes, material goods, including money—by the unfaithful partner. In a sense, the narrators assert that a contract has been broken. One lover believed that both parties shared feelings and care that they would keep exclusively within the relationship. Victimization occurs when one partner deceives and takes advantage of the trust of the other. Breaking the implied contract constitutes a wrong committed—an injustice—which also suggests a kind of debt. The faithful lover has been denied the fidelity, decency, honesty, and respectful treatment they were owed. Financial mistreatment, when it occurs, compounds the injustice.
As is already apparent, the mistreating or cheating lover represents broader socioeconomic forces. Broonzy’s “Tell Me Baby,” which underscores the repetition of infidelity despite warnings from friends, hints that the narrator has been the victim of other types of exploitative relations. The repetition of how many times in the lyrics prompts associations with other forms of serial victimization, inviting a metaphorical interpretation. For listeners, asking repeatedly how many times have I been and will I be mistreated calls forth racialized social, political, and economic forms of betrayal. Muddy Waters’s powerful vocal performance in his cover of “Tell Me Baby” (1960) makes the anger and frustration born of repeated exploitation even more palpable than in Broonzy’s original, with a suppressed rage that gestures beyond the romantic.
The doubling effect achieved by using romantic relations to express frustration about other forms of victimization in the blues does not entail a direct, one-for-one substitution of themes and characters: the mean mistreater is not necessarily simply the mean boss man. Instead, the representational strategy employs human relations as metaphors for one another in ways that create parallels, overlaps, but also inconsistencies and contradictions. While one line or phrase in the lyrics may signal one meaning, another fragment may gesture by association in another direction. In the blues, verses about romantic betrayal are adjacent to lyrics about working conditions, creating a collage effect that stops short of making explicit connections. Interpreting songs requires listening to the lyrics and aspects of the musical performance in a way that is attentive to the historical circumstances in which they were created, picking up subtle (and not so subtle) clues about possible submerged meanings, and enabling even contradictory interpretations to emerge. My interpretive strategy in the following study, attuned to the historical context of production of the blues, aims to foreground the target audience’s likely understanding of layers of meaning in songs. In other words, I listen for the ways the music suggestively evokes parallel experiences of exploitation whose similarities resonate for listeners. In particular, I focus on forms of victimization that invoke debt, be it personal, emotional, psychological, financial, economic, social, or political. For an African American audience well acquainted with the blues, the polysemic themes and indirect forms of articulation deliver a powerful message related to a racialized history of mistreatment, and especially economic exploitation.
While many blues represent social and economic forms of injustice indirectly through romantic relations, some songs discuss them openly. Tom Dickson’s “Labor Blues” (1928) describes in a straightforward manner the situation of gang laborers who are not paid for their work:
Said, good morning, captain; said good morning, shine [2×]
’Tain’t nothing the matter, captain, but I just ain’t goin’
I don’t mind workin,’ captain, from sun to sun [2×]
But I want my money, captain, when payday come
In this unusually pointed articulation, the narrator speaks to a captain, a form of address that identifies the situation as one of gang labor with an overseer, such as on a road or railroad or in a turpentine or levee camp. The greeting in response, including the racial slur shine, establishes a context of racialized hierarchy via a kind of shorthand. In the next line, the narrator declares his unwillingness to continue working. While accepting what can be presumed to be harsh conditions, including “workin’ . . . from sun to sun,” he now draws the line at not receiving money on payday and refuses to continue. The following verse establishes the ongoing nature of the exploitation: “Work me all this summer and started on this fall [2×] / Now, I’ve got to take Christmas in my overalls.” Toiling without pay for months under extreme conditions has become unacceptable. The mention of summer, fall, and Christmas reminds us that manual labor often entails being away from home and family for long periods of time, even during holidays. The representation invites a comparison to slavery: unpaid labor in harsh conditions produces a denial of basic rights and a loss of freedom. The narrator’s direct form of rebellion fulfills a wish fantasy for thousands of listeners who identify with the oppression but cannot speak out directly.
The remaining four verses of “Labor Blues” turn to sexual infidelity, hinting at connections between the two situations. Men away from home will turn to other women, some of whom will take their money: “Now, there t’ain’t no tellin’ what a Mississippi gal’ll do / Well, there t’ain’t no tellin,’ a Mississippi gal’ll do / She will get your money then pull game at you.” Like the captain who does not pay, the outside women might also take financial advantage. Likewise, women left alone without their men for months on end might also find satisfaction elsewhere. The last verse of Dickson’s song, which incorporates traditional lyrics, suggests this result: “Hey, tell me, woman, where did you stay last night? / Hey, it’s, tell me, woman, where did you stay last night? / Well, your shoe’s unfastened and your skirt don’t fit you right.” Itinerant labor creates conditions for sexual infidelity on the part of both partners, tightening the association between sexual and financial betrayal.
Calling out cheating, betrayal, and exploitation highlights injustice of various kinds. Whether in the context of labor or sexual relations, implied in the calling out of acts of injustice is the demand that something be done to rectify the situation. Our notion of justice calls forth the image of the scales, a metaphor borrowed from the world of weights and measures to symbolize equity and fairness through a process of balancing. The metaphor, used for economic exchanges, crimes and punishments, and even personal, spiritual, and moral accounting, asserts a measurability of harms done and implies that a remedy may be applied to restore balance. In other words, injustices assert a kind of deficit or debt, as we have seen in the examples of “Tell Me Baby” and “Labor Blues.” The person wronged is owed something, be it emotional, financial, or social. Redemption, the word I choose to designate rectification or remediation of debts owed for wrongs committed, is particularly apt because of its association with two very different realms: the economic and the spiritual. Repaying money (redeeming a loan) coincides semantically with redressing faults or sins (redeeming your soul). Balance or equity entails regaining something, whether a material good or a clean slate. The meanings of the word redemption remind us that debts may be material and immaterial, tangible and intangible.
Debt and Redemption in the Blues: The Call for Justice argues that the blues as a genre calls out forms of racialized economic injustice involving debt, most often signified as romantic relations. In Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, Clyde Woods recognizes in the blues not only an “aesthetic tradition” but also “a theory of social and economic development and change.” His reading of the history of exploitation in the Mississippi Delta “return[s] the blues back to its roots as a critique of plantation social relations and their extensions.”4 Viewing Woods’s argument from another angle, the following study focuses on the critique of socioeconomic exploitation as it is articulated in the blues, rooted in a foundational experience of agricultural labor as bondage.
Debt and Redemption in the Blues: A Call for Justice by Julia Simon is available from Penn State University Press. Learn more and find the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09495-3.html. Receive a discount with code BHM26.
If you liked this excerpt, you may enjoy the article "Sinners: White Violence, the Spirit(s), and the Purifying Fire of the Blues: A Conversation Between Ahmad Green-Hayes and Ambre Dromgoole" from Ecumenica 18:2. You can find the article here: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/ecumenica/article/18/2/178/405544/Sinners-White-Violence-the-Spirit-s-and-the.
In honor of Black History Month, we are sharing excerpts from several of the books on our African American Studies list. For further reading, find related free journal articles and open-access books here: https://bit.ly/4kgkEK5.
The bulldozers arrived early the morning of May 31, 1956, at 1206 Epiphany Street in the Lower Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Nearby residents watched the demolition of the building with the understanding that their homes, businesses, and churches would soon be next to face the wrecking ball. However, some took comfort in the fact that they had been promised new, clean public housing in other parts of the city. Others believed that this public housing would be built on the very acres that were being razed by the bulldozers and wrecking balls.
A few months later, on September 20, the housing chairman of the branch chapter of the Milwaukee NAACP, Bernard Toliver, wrote to national headquarters asking for “any advice and free literature” on how to open the housing market for “Negroes” in response to the fast-moving developments of the local urban renewal program. These developments would later include targeting and demolishing the Bronzeville neighborhood, the heart of Milwaukee’s African American business community, in order to build the I-94/I-43 freeway.
In St. Paul, Minnesota, six days after Toliver’s letter requesting help, the local police arrived on an unseasonably warm day at 449 Rondo Avenue wielding axes and sledgehammers. Inside the house lived Reverend George Davis and his wife, Bertha Miller Davis, who was blind and rarely left their home. The Davises’ home was one of many slated to be demolished for the construction of I-94. But the eighty-year-old Davis, who years prior had fled from the Jim Crow South to live in Minnesota, stood in the doorway with a shotgun, refusing to leave his home. The Davis family was one of the last of the 650 families in the Rondo Avenue neighborhood displaced by the construction of I-94, which “split the heart” of the city’s Black community. These neighborhoods, three proud Black communities, were never the same again.
These events suggest much about the widespread but local threat of urban renewal policies to African American communities in Northern cities, communities that were already restricted as to where they could live. The Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, as well as the Highway Act of 1956, disproportionately affected African Americans through urban renewal, which many dubbed “Negro Removal.” In the mid-twentieth century, mostly white city governments were not interested in improving Black neighborhoods but rather in tearing them down to build sports arenas, highways, and high-end apartment buildings. Many of these urban renewal projects were designed to either keep white families from moving to the suburbs or to encourage white families to return to the city for sporting events and entertainment.
During the height of urban renewal programs, spaces became even more racialized through federal policy, social customs, local laws, and violence. Because urban renewal policies increased the formation of racialized spaces and intensified segregation, the democratic ideals of citizenship, such as freedom, inclusivity, equality, and liberty, were hindered. Uncovering communities’ rhetorical responses to urban renewal helps us better understand these ideals of citizenship as well as urban history. Spaces designated as “blighted” or “slum” by city governments were most often inhabited by Black residents. This labeling of “Black spaces” as blighted made it easier for city governments to reclaim this space to create “white spaces,” such as highways to connect the suburbs with white spaces downtown.
Restrictions on housing based on race predetermined where African Americans could live after being displaced from their homes. This overt form of racism is one way in which spaces in the city become racialized as either Black-only or white-only places. As Mary Triece notes, racialized spaces create “unjust geographies.” One way that spaces became racialized, unjust geographies is through the language and narratives circulated to describe them. When we better account for how language functioned to create and perpetuate racialized spaces in Northern cities, we better understand the interconnectedness of rhetorical strategies (language-in-action), space and place, and forms of citizenship. A rhetorical history of urban renewal thus reveals how racialized spaces (1) limited the organizing and rhetorical agency that took place in African American communities, (2) drew from African American cultural history to inform the materiality of these spaces, and (3) influenced the types of rhetorical actions and forms of citizenship that could take place in response to urban renewal. The policies of urban renewal were an attempt by cities to take historically and segregated Black spaces and make them white. Resistance to these attempts was conducted in creative and innovative ways by the Black community.
Because of segregation, African Americans had limited or no representative power in Northern city governments in the mid-twentieth century and lacked traditional civic means to prevent being uprooted from their homes, businesses, and churches. Compounding the trauma of forced removal, African Americans were not free to move anywhere else in their cities due to redlining by financial institutions (preventing African Americans from getting mortgages in certain areas), racist housing covenants that restricted African Americans from certain rental properties, and outright physical and verbal hostility from white residents when African American families tried to move into exclusively white neighborhoods. In other words, white residents enforced a strict segregation of space in many urban neighborhoods. This violence, along with racist housing laws, restricted African Americans to living in “blighted” neighborhoods. These tensions are often what get highlighted in urban renewal histories—a focus on the racist policies/practices that victimized African American communities. But what they hide, as I discuss later in this introduction, is how the communities responded. We need to look at these responses as creative and strategic acts of citizenship.
Despite the wrecking balls destroying numerous African American homes, churches, and businesses nationwide, many residents tried to stop or modify the urban projects; in some instances, they were successful. Because of segregated spaces and limited access to legislative power, how did African Americans enact the modes of citizenship that were available to them—that is, how did they resist, modify, and in some cases stop the destruction of their neighborhoods? Who were these organizers, leaders, and residents at the local level of a social movement that valiantly resisted urban renewal?
This book is their story. It is the story of a people who worked and organized to be treated like all citizens. It is the story of three Black communities in crisis over the fear of losing their homes and businesses, and their rhetorical actions in response to the power of city and federal governments. The Hill District in Pittsburgh, the Bronzeville neighborhood in Milwaukee, and the Rondo Avenue neighborhood in St. Paul all saw the formation of grassroots organizations that worked alongside national organizations, such as the NAACP and the National Urban League, to resist urban renewal. These communities are representative of African Americans living in the urban North where urban renewal destroyed the economic resources of the African American neighborhoods. Bridging recent work in rhetorical, historical, and African American studies, this book aims to strengthen our understanding of the Black Freedom Movement (which includes the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement) and better account for the places, narratives, and agency that different forms of citizenship produce, especially in resistance to dominant and persuasive narratives of urban renewal.
Struggle for the City: Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement by Derek G. Handley is available from Penn State University Press. Learn more and find the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09775-6.html. Receive a discount with code BHM26.
If you liked this excerpt, you may enjoy the article "'this is my space / I am not movin': Responses to the Threat of Recolonization in the Poetic Activism of Langston Hughes and Ntozake Shange" from The Langston Hughes Review 28:1. You can find the article here: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/langston-hughes/article/28/1/49/297057/this-is-my-space-I-am-not-movin-Responses-to-the.
Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: An excerpt
In honor of Black History Month, we are sharing excerpts from several of the books on our African American Studies list. For further reading, find related free journal articles and open-access books here: https://bit.ly/4kgkEK5.
When considering the writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, one usually thinks of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Dorothy West, and Claude McKay. While those names deserve their canonical position within that pivotal literary and arts movement, there remain a number of figures whose contribution is only recently being fully realized. One previously understudied figure from this period is Gwendolyn Bennett (1902–1981), a significant writer and artist during the early days of the Harlem Renaissance, and one who remained a powerful advocate for African Americans living in and around Harlem well into the 1930s and 1940s. Bennett’s name is increasingly referenced in books that cover the Harlem Renaissance largely due to her brief, yet prolific, literary and artistic output from approximately 1923 to 1928. During that time Bennett published over forty poems, reviews, articles, and short stories in notable African American magazines and anthologies, including Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), William Stanley Braithwaite’s Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927, and Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927); her artwork adorned several magazines, including Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life; her literary column, “The Ebony Flute,” was published monthly in Opportunity; and she worked as an editor or assistant editor of several important periodicals, including Opportunity, Black Opals, and Fire!! Bennett’s diverse talent in the fields of poetry, short story writing, journalism, art, and editorial work had previously made it difficult for scholars to pigeonhole this dynamic woman into one genre, arguably contributing to her marginalization. Bennett herself said, “I’d feel that if I’d been either an artist, a graphic and plastic artist, or a writer, I might have had a single mind” (qtd. in Govan, Gwendolyn Bennett 204). However, as Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz state in Bad Modernisms (2006), new modernism studies have “extended the designation ‘modernist’ beyond” canonical authors, expanded the modernist time period beyond the 1920s, and “embraced less widely known women writers, authors of mass cultural fiction, makers of the Harlem Renaissance, artists from outside Great Britain and the United States, and other cultural producers hitherto seen as neglecting or resisting modernist innovation.” These developments have been achieved through “two significant enterprises”: reconsidering the “definitions, locations, and producers of ‘modernism’” and applying “new approaches and methodologies to ‘modernist’ works.” The Harlem Renaissance is now regarded as an artistic movement that was heterodox in its multiple interests, including its many definitions of art. Bennett’s ability to maneuver successfully between a “constellation of ideas, movements, publishing venues, and artistic communities” at the beginning of the Renaissance makes her one of the youngest leaders of this movement (Sanders 129).
Much of the scholarship about Bennett has focused on her literary output from 1923 to 1928. This is not surprising given that most published pieces by Bennett cease after she moved to Florida with her first husband, Alfred J. Jackson, in the late 1920s. As more archival research has been conducted, however, we are starting to see Bennett’s significance move well beyond 1928. The recovery of over fifty unpublished poems, many of which were written in the 1930s; numerous diary entries throughout different parts of her career; several autobiographical essays; correspondence between Bennett and canonical figures from the Harlem Renaissance from the 1920s to the 1940s; reviews and newspaper articles Bennett wrote in the 1930s; the first recovered painting by Bennett created in the early 1930s; and a book project initiated in the 1930s, illustrate that Bennett continued to be highly productive well after the 1920s. Recently, Cary Nelson (2015) chose to highlight three of Bennett’s previously unpublished poems that Belinda Wheeler recovered in the recently published second edition of Anthology of Modern American Poetry: “Dirge for a Free Spirit,” “I Build America,” and “[Rapacious women who sit on steps at night].” Nelson claimed that taken together “this group of three poems alone mandates a revised understanding of Bennett’s career” (629). Sandra Govan, Michel Fabre, and Maureen Honey have also used some archival material to push Bennett’s artistic timeline beyond 1928. The comprehensive material provided in this collection, including some never-before published and analyzed material, further highlight Bennett’s significant contribution to the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.
This volume seeks to claim Bennett’s spot beside the names of Hurston, Hughes, McKay, Cullen, Larsen, and West, among others. Bennett’s diverse literary output; the social circles in which she played a central role; her critiques of Harlem and elsewhere in her correspondence, reviews, articles, and “The Ebony Flute” during the 1920s; and her staunch radical political voice (particularly in her 1930s work), make her an important figure who deserves more attention.
Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Gwendolyn Bennett's Selected Writings edited by Belinda Wheeler and Louis J. Parascandola is available from Penn State University Press. Learn more and find the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08096-3.html. Receive a discount with code BHM26.
If you liked this excerpt, you may enjoy the article "Joining Black and White Hands in the Cause of Justice in America: Two (Unpublished) Letters between Arthur Miller, Langston Hughes, and Eugene O'Neill" from The Arthur Miller Journal 20:1. You can find the article here: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/arthur-miller/article/20/1/1/399749/Joining-Black-and-White-Hands-in-the-Cause-of.
The author of The Declaration in Script and Print discusses Independence Day, the Declaration of Independence as an iconic document, and more.
Why do we celebrate independence on July 4th even though Congress voted for independence on July 2nd?
The date we have chosen for Independence Day depends on a document. By all rights we should be celebrating the day when the United States became an independent nation—July 2, 1776—when the Continental Congress adopted Richard Henry Lee’s resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” John Adams predicted that July 2nd would be the national anniversary, a day marked with parades, bonfires, bell ringing, gun salutes, and “illuminations” of houses with candles in the windows. Adams was wrong, however, because he did not foresee the emotional impact of the official announcement, a broadside printed two days later with the title In Congress, July 4, 1776. A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled. The date in the title is one reason why July 4th prevailed over July 2nd. But above all Americans cherished the text, an eloquent expression of fundamental rights based on principles of liberty, justice, and equality. Historians have traced its origins, its changing reputation, and its influence at home and abroad. I too have noted how it has been variously interpreted, but mainly I wish to show how it has been visualized, how it appeared in engravings, lithographs, and letterpress broadsides during the nineteenth century. I identify about two hundred prints and broadsides in The Declaration in Script and Print, expensive engravings suitable for framing as well as cheap stereotype keepsakes aimed at the bottom of the market. Starting with an innovative advertising campaign in 1816, I describe the merchandising tactics of artists, printers, and publishers who played on a surge of patriotic sentiment to promote their wares. In the same spirit, Penn State University Press has selected July 4th to be the release date for my book.
What was it that made the manuscript Declaration more inspiring to Americans than the printed version issued on July 4th?
Some delegates were not able to vote for independence on July 4th. A week later they received the necessary authorization, which made it possible for everyone to sign a manuscript version of the Declaration, “fairly engrossed on parchment.” They signed it on August 2, 1776, and reaffirmed the unity of the United States by changing the title to: “In Congress, July 4, 1776. The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.” The text is more or less the same as the broadside edition, but written out by hand it seems more tangible, personal, and distinctive. Beneath it are fifty-six autographs of Founding Fathers, each an act of patriotism representing courage, conviction, and a shared commitment to a righteous cause. Awestruck Americans could pick out the names of Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and other heroes of the Revolution. While giving the first edition its due, they have looked at the August 2nd manuscript as a more meaningful and evocative expression of their history and ideals. Printmakers catered to public demand by publishing reproductions of the manuscript although often only the signatures were reproduced in facsimile. Some believed that the manuscript had been signed on July 4th, wishful thinking all the better to convey the drama of the moment.
How and when did the Declaration become an iconic document?
In 1816 the Philadelphia newspaper publisher John Binns issued subscription proposals for an engraving of the Declaration. He was the first to tell Americans about the iconic value of that document, for which he designed a pictorial scheme that would define a new genre of patriotic prints—the signatures in facsimile, the text adorned with portraits, allegorical vignettes, and a massive cordon of state seals. Other printmakers adapted his designs, some imitated them in pirated editions, and two opportunists reprinted the original edition on the occasion of the Centennial. While Binns’s print was in press, an itinerant writing master, Benjamin Owen Tyler, produced a calligraphic version with the signatures in facsimile but without illustrations. That too inspired a series of imitations and adaptations. Binns accused Tyler of plagiarizing his prospectus, and Tyler fought back by impugning his opponent’s patriotism in a newspaper war that publicized both of these trend-setting prints. More than seventy per cent of the Declaration prints and broadsides published during the nineteenth century were derived in whole or part, directly or indirectly, from these archetypal images.
Why would Americans prefer facsimiles of the Declaration to the original manuscript?
Perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of preference as practicality. Americans have been able to view the original in Washington where it has been displayed at various times in the Patent Office, the State Department, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives. Huge crowds came to see it in Independence Hall during the Centennial. Many were disappointed to discover that it was in poor condition, the text illegible in places and the signatures almost entirely effaced. Printmakers helped to popularize the Declaration, but their invasive replicating techniques are partly to blame for ruining it. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams realized that the manuscript was in danger and commissioned a scrupulously accurate reproduction of the text and signatures, printed in a limited edition dated “July 4th. 1823.” Adams and his successors strictly controlled the distribution of the official facsimile until the end of the century. Meanwhile the condition of the manuscript went from bad to worse. In 1894 complaints about its continuing deterioration prompted government officials to take it down and lock it in a safe, where they kept it out of sight for thirty years. During that time the State Department facsimile was the only option for those who wanted to visualize the founding document. To this day we rely on it to show what the manuscript must have looked like when it was signed by the Founding Fathers: that is what we see in souvenirs, textbook illustrations, and the New York Times every year on July 4th, an iconic image of an essential text.
The Declaration in Script and Print: A Visual History of America’s Founding Document is now available from Penn State University Press. Learn more and order the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09730-5.html. Take 30% off with discount code NR24.
By the year 1800, tattooing had become a global phenomenon. Stigma authors Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky discuss how and why tattoos circulated in the early modern world.
We think of tattooing as a contemporary phenomenon, now ubiquitous in the twenty-first century. We see elaborately tattooed skin daily—at the beach, in the street, and in the college classroom. Nearly half of all Americans under forty today have chosen to adorn their skin with tattoos, often multiple times, and tattoos mark the skin of people of all ages, backgrounds, and genders. But tattooing has been with us since prehistory as a locally defined but widespread and permanent form of cutaneous marking. This form of skin marking carries an extraordinary range of meanings and has traveled across diverse cultures, especially during the early modern period. The years 1450–1800 were a new age of dermal encounters, as forms of marking skin native to the Americas, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Europe came into contact as never before. Cast simultaneously as a mark of belonging and of distinction, the tattoo held particular prominence as a sign of identity in this period of unprecedented global movement. Global tattooing practices, largely recorded in written archives by European travelers and colonists, but also preserved in archeological findings and oral histories, were an object of fascination, but also familiarity.
Native nations across the Americas practiced tattooing to communicate identity, commemorate valiant deeds, and signal honorable status long before the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century. Using sharpened bird or fish bones and plant- or mineral-based dyes such as genipap, red lead, sap, or charcoal, Native Americans would prick a design into the skin and then rub dye or powder into the incisions, creating a permanent mark. Some European colonists in the Americas chose to be tattooed by Native people, often adopting the practice to fashion new hybrid identities for themselves. While some Europeans discouraged getting marked, seeing tattoos as a sign of “savagery,” French fur traders and military men making their lives in North America were especially open to receiving Native tattoos. Plant, animal, and celestial designs from Native American tradition were placed on their skin alongside crosses and coats of arms borrowed from European Christian tradition.
Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese colonizers, on the other hand, were more hostile to Indigenous tattoo traditions. European and Chinese observers alike noted the “barbarity” of Indigenous Formosan tattooing when they reported on Taiwan in parallel seventeenth-century accounts, though Chinese officials also looked for signs of filial piety consistent with their own Confucian values. Spanish officials and Catholic missionaries worked hard to repress the rich tattoo traditions of the Philippines among the Indigenous Bizayas, reading marks on skin as essential and indelible signs of their inferior identity.
Whatever European colonists might have thought about the marking practices of Indigenous peoples around the globe, tattoos were well known to Europeans prior to these encounters. Indeed, tattoos were familiar in early modern Europe—and had been for centuries—as signs of identity, belonging, love, and piety. Though the Polynesian word tatau came into European languages only in the late eighteenth-century following the South Seas voyages of Bougainville and Cook, the practice of permanently marking the body through pricking and ink had long existed on the European continent. European travelers writing about Native American tattooing in the seventeenth century often referred their readers back to stories of elaborately painted Ancient Picts, indigenous to Britain and France. From their own time, they referenced devoted courtiers who wore their beloveds’ monograms permanently pricked on their arms, alchemists who inscribed their skin with astral characters to harness their power, and Holy Land pilgrims. In Jerusalem and Bethlehem, local Christians “marked” the bodies of Coptic, Armenian, and European pilgrims with scenes of Christ’s passion and representations of sacred sites. Pilgrims would choose from a range of woodblock designs that the tattoo artist would rub in charcoal and imprint on their arm. The tattooist would then use a series of fine needles bound together, dipped in an ink made of fine soot and ox gall, and prick along the lines of the stamped figure, finally washing it with wine, sometimes repeating the process. For European Holy Land pilgrims, tattoos commemorated their arduous travels, signaling their devotion and bravery. Given the pain they experienced—swelling and fever often lasting for days—they may also have imagined their tattoos as stigmata or a form of imitatio Christi.. Even today, Christians visiting Jerusalem can get marked at the Razzouk Tattoo shop, where Wassim Razzouk and his sons still use centuries-old wooden stamps passed down in his family for generations.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Europeans increasingly associated Indigenous forms of tattooing with cultural inferiority and tied tattoos in European traditions exclusively to criminals and sailors. This denial of the age-old use of the tattoo as a desirable and honorable global and European sign lasted until the “tattoo Renaissance” of the late twentieth century.
Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World is now available from Penn State University Press. Learn more and order the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09442-7.html. Save 30% w/ discount code NR23.
Unlocked Book of the Month: History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States
Each month we’re highlighting a book available through PSU Press Unlocked, an open access initiative featuring scholarly digital books and journals in the humanities and social sciences.
About our February pick:
First published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1818, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations provides an account of the Lenni Lenape and other tribes in the mid-Atlantic region, looking at their history and relations with other tribes and settlers, as well as their spiritual beliefs, government and politics, education, language, social institutions, dress, food, and other customs. The text, written by the Reverend John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary based in Ohio and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, includes the author’s observations, anecdotes, and advice, preserving not only his knowledge about the Indian nations in the eighteenth century but also his perspective, as a missionary and settler, on Native Americans and the often-fraught relationships between the tribes and European settlers. This version of the text, published in 1876, contains an introduction and notes by the Reverend William C. Reichel as well as a glossary of Lenape words and phrases and letters between the author and the then-president of the American Philosophical Society concerning the study of the Indian nations and their languages.
Read more & access the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-06701-8.html
See the full list of Unlocked titles here: https://www.psupress.org/unlocked/unlocked_gallery.html
Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland, editors of Aromas of Asia, discuss anosmia as it relates to the COVID-19 pandemic, the tricky nature of olfaction, and where the phenomenon of smell as transnational exchange began.
Of the many serious, and still emerging, impacts of infection with COVID-19, anosmia, or a loss of the sense of smell, is less often discussed. Yet the condition is said to affect almost half of all diagnosed patients, and although most people regain olfaction within a month, for some, anosmia lingers, transforming how they eat, drink, and interact with the world. People may also experience a condition of paranosmia, or phantom, and often unpleasant, smells.
In the introduction to our new interdisciplinary edited collection, Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats, we discuss how this phenomenon speaks to the tricky nature of olfaction: its profound impact in shaping one’s everyday experience of the world and the popular dismissal of its significance. For, perhaps it is only in losing a sense that we are troubled and thus realise its significance. Anosmia is a condition that demonstrates how smell (or its lack) moves between bodies and traverses scales, as an intimate, personal experience of the world created by the transnational movement of pathogens within a global pandemic.
Smell is thus a particularly generative phenomenon to draw upon when theorizing the dynamics of transnational exchange. And this particular transnational exchange of the pandemic, of course, began in Asia.
Western cultural hierarchies and intellectual traditions have tended to elevate the importance of vision, or hearing, while marginalizing senses including smell, taste, or touch. With a few notable exceptions, contemporary scholarship still remains strongly wedded to English-language or Western scholarly concerns and contexts.
Our new collection of essays relocates the discussion of olfaction to the Asian region, considering how the mobility of olfaction makes social worlds, identifies prejudices or threats, and implements power games of scent and odor. Wherever smell is interpreted as threat, and has potential to be used to violently enforce differences in ethnicity, gender, caste, and class, questions of smell can have serious implications.
We were concerned in this work to critique sensory colonialist tropes that align Asia and its peoples with more “debased” senses, thus resisting a dichotomy of “West-vision-logic” and “Asia-smell-emotion.” Where associated with smell, Asian peoples and cultures have been historically cast in two extremes: on the one hand heavily perfumed or “stinky,” and on the other overly sanitized, odorless or antiseptic. While examining and critiquing these sensory stereotypes, our collection engages with Asia as a heterogeneous and changing complex of scentscapes that have blended together and come apart throughout history. The boundaries of this region are not presumed to exist before olfaction but rather emerge through histories of sensory exchange.
Our contributors consider periods from antiquity to the present and examine various transnational contexts across East, Southeast, and South Asian regions. We do not claim the spread as representative or exhaustive, but the chapters provide a robust cross section of the “scentscapes” that traverse the region. Thus, incisive essays and careful research was essential to achieve the methodological richness and conversation between disciplines evidenced in this book. Besides the editors, the authors, in order of their contributions, are Lorenzo Marunucci, Peter Romaskiewicz, Qian Jia, Gaik Cheng Khoo, Jean Duruz, Gwyn McClelland, Shivani Kapoor, Aubrey Tang, Saki Tanada, Adam Liebman, and Ruth E. Toulson. The disciplines brought together in this volume include anthropology, history, film studies, fine arts, food studies, literature, philosophy, political studies, and religious studies.
Strong-smelling miasmas, or drifting clouds of noxious air, have been central to human understandings of disease transmission. Well after the emergence of germ theory, fear of smells in the form of miasma continues to this day. Some commentators used olfactory evidence in positioning Chinese “wet markets” as the site of origin for COVID-19 virus. For example, in one paper in The COVID-19 Reader (2021), the writer suggests that “a lack of hygiene [at wet markets] was obvious from the smells and scattered wastes.” From this olfactory experience, the authors describe their lack of surprise that a pandemic might emerge from this place. We compare this in our introduction to another study of 2020 that shows how freshness is constructed and valued in sensory experiences of markets within China. Perceiving smells or odors as threats can reinforce, especially during the pandemic, the alterity of Asia as the other to the West. COVID-19 illustrated how olfaction is an intimately embodied, individual experience, but also a social phenomenon traveling between bodies and communities—and around the globe. In our collection, Aromas of Asia, we focus on the interconnections of sensory worlds, but we do so by offering a transnational and located approach to scentscapes in Asia, even as they are founded on mobility and exchange.
Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats is now available from Penn State University Press. Learn more and order the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09541-7.html. Save 30% w/ discount code NR23.
The author of The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe discusses St. Michael the Archangel and how the internet and art from 1600 aren't so different.
Why use the internet to explain artworks made around 1600?
The whole idea for the book started with an offhand comment made at a conference–the idea of a meme going viral was at first a kind of off-the-cuff analogy to this print (St. Michael the Archangel, the book's central case study) that seemed to be copied just about everywhere around 1600. For those of us who spend too much time on the internet, it made sense: a meme gets copied, adapted, reshared, and circulated, creating new variations, combining with other memes, and becoming divorced from its original context. But when I started to think about it, this flippant remark hit on a few things I was particularly interested in–namely, how do new image technologies (in this case, print, or today’s memes) adapt and change as they move between communities of viewers? Reading media studies scholars’ work on internet culture gave me a vocabulary and a framework to analyze the movement of early modern prints–it made me think about gatekeepers and infrastructures of print media and made me question art-historical notions of artistic agency. Now of course, there are lots of ways the sharing of memes on the internet differs from the sixteenth-century circulation of printed images–things happen so quickly now, there is a dematerialization of artistic labor, and the infrastructure of the web is complex in ways that differ from the transoceanic trade of the early modern period. But this analogy helped me see this vast, in some ways undocumented process–the concerted export of printed imagery across the globe by colonial, missionary, and commercial agents, prints that were then copied and recirculated by a whole range of local actors–in a new and hopefully productive way.
Why did you choose these case studies?
My central case study, St. Michael the Archangel, is just a straight-up weird image. This archangel almost always has a sword, but here he doesn’t; he carries a martyr’s palm and has this strange, open, upraised hand. Frankly, this made variants of this image easy to spot. The 1581 painting hangs only a few miles from where one of the later Filipino ivory variants is now held, in Central Mexico, and I think that juxtaposition really compelled me. I started collecting them; for a while, every time I gave a paper it felt like someone in the audience knew another version (in Quito, in Cusco, in Valencia). So I started with that one iconographic image and within a year or two had a sizeable corpus. I am sure there are more out there–in fact, while the book was in press I was able to finally get to Portugal and see a couple more!
So I had this one iconographic image, but I wanted it to speak to a wider phenomenon. So I decided to also include the Evangelicae historiae imagines because it is the most copied thing in the early modern world, and, it turns out, many of the same folks were involved in both projects. Many talented and diligent scholars have done the work of locating and describing a lot of the Imagines copies, so I was able to focus on how the St. Michael images anticipated this kind of movement, arguing that the Jesuits knew and exploited the viral potential of print.
How did this print (the St. Michael, published in Antwerp) end up in Manila?
Well, the print had to be smuggled out of Antwerp first, probably overland with a Flemish book publisher who had ties in Spain. Then it was likely sold in Seville before being taken by missionaries or merchants to New Spain. Once landing in Veracruz, the print would have been taken overland, via Mexico City, to Acapulco before making the 100-day sea voyage to Manila in the cargo of a priest or trader. There are a lot of unknowns in this itinerary, but we do have letters from Jesuit priests thanking their brethren in Seville for sending prints to them. But the better answer is to read my book (particularly the chapter on Manila)!
The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe is now available from Penn State University Press. Find more information and order the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09283-6.html. Save 30% with discount code NR23.
