Wright takes up P. Gabrielle Foreman's charge to read African American women's works. âarightâ (8). When read aright
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Nazera Sadiq Wright, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 186 pp. Reviewed by Elizabeth Cali, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville In her Epilogue to Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century, Nazera Sadiq Wright reminds us—through the voices of Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison, and through examples of everyday instances of mistreatment—of the paradoxical denial of and contribution to black girls’ specific vulnerability in the US. In response to this paradox, Wright offers a lexicon for exploring further the tropes representing and connoting black girlhood during the long nineteenth century. This lexicon is a constructive response to erasures, mischaracterizations, and blatant mistreatments, one that exposes problematic tropes even as it steadily reveals power-infused and progress-driven nineteenth-century African American women’s depictions of black girlhood. Wright takes up P. Gabrielle Foreman’s charge to read African American women’s works “aright” (8). When read aright, she argues, tropes of black girlhood provide an “underexamined course for racial progress” (2), often creating or imagining black civic futures within and beyond separate sphere ideologies. Thus, Wright explores nineteenth-century African American women’s portrayals of black girlhood that reject white supremacist pathologizing, that counter one-dimensional representations, and that underscore the breadth of nineteenth-century depictions of blackness. The analytical juxtapositions offered are alternately stark and subtle. The first few chapters contrast white and black male patriarchal depictions of coming-of-age assimilation against African American women writers’ nuanced constructions of black girls’ inner lives. For Wright, the former construe girlhood as fulfilling white and male projections of nationalism and black patriarchal identity, while the latter figure such youthfulness as a crucial component of the promise of black futures. In the culminating chapters of the book, analyses of conduct books in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal the binding impacts of respectability politics and supportive structures of black community networks that recognize the centrality of black girlhood to racial uplift. Wright’s methodology responds directly to Leon Jackson’s call for interdisciplinary collaboration between book history and African American literary studies, and it follows in the tradition of Frances Smith Foster, Carla Peterson, and Eric Gardner, among others who study black print culture as vital to recovering black literary and cultural expression. In particular, Wright responds to Gardner’s call for the consideration of “unexpected places” in uncovering myriad forms of black expression. That investment results in a meaningful study of black girlhood itself as an unexpected place through which to © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
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expand African American literary studies and black print culture studies. By grounding significant portions of this interdisciplinary study in circulating print, Wright’s work offers yet another testament to Foster’s field-shifting claim that early black periodicals, concerned as they clearly were with antislavery activism, are also resources for studying the innumerable interests of black communities. Wright’s attention to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, and Frances E. W. Harper’s Trial and Triumph suggests a return to well-travelled academic terrain. Her approach, however, asks us to reconsider how we think about the use of space and rigidity even in our best-known representations of black girlhood. Wright unpacks literary scenes of physical confinement to highlight intellectual innovation against environments of captivity and confinement. Echoing Marcus Rediker’s discussion of the violence of abstraction, Wright’s study reveals a method for rejecting such abstraction. Here African American women writers’ imaginative explorations of black girls’ inner lives present a counter-narrative to the violence and dehumanization encoded in ledgers, garrets, and slave-ship engineering. In each of these instances, spaces of confinement and restriction double as locations of interior strategizing and articulations of selfhood. Scholars influenced by Katherine McKittrick’s theorizing of black geographic and spatial thought will additionally find Wright’s discussion of interiority and space a fruitful location for bridging black diaspora studies and African American literatures. For scholars of African American literary history, and presumably any scholar of nineteenth-century US literature, Gardner’s recovery of a text by prominent writer and orator, Maria W. Stewart was thrilling. Black Girlhood’s exciting inclusion of Stewart’s recently recovered short story, “The First Stage of Life,” brings an uncommon perspective on Stewart, given the prolific attention to her activism as an essayist and orator. The combined study of works such as Incidents and Our Nig with newly recovered works by canonized authors like Stewart, and representative works by lesser-known authors compels consideration of Wright’s use of the term “network” insofar as it impacts literary black girlhood. If the depths of this concept are not yet fully pursued, Wright has laid the groundwork for revealing a series of intersecting networks proliferating tropes of black girlhood: a network of readers, community networks as patrons of childhood advancement, and a fiction-writing network expanding to include established nineteenth-century US black women essayists and orators. Wright is at her strongest when she applies practices for reading and theorizing nineteenth-century figures of black girlhood. Foreman’s concepts of reading aright and
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“simultextuality” shape some of the most revealing of the literary analyses throughout the book, including a fascinating explication of N. F. (Gertrude Bostill) Mossell’s incisive critique of white women’s infringement on black working girls’ navigation of public spaces. Elsewhere, the invocation of age-markers as cues to help us read aright shifts scholarly attention to stages of growth, allowing for Wright’s revelation of tropes of the “youthful” and “prematurely knowing” black girl (61) in African American women’s writings. Wright reads allusions to age and stages of growth as markers of transition, humanity, change, and ultimately a path to independence. In reading aright, this book facilitates interpretation of literary black girls as challenging fixed positions of confinement and immobility. The tracing of tropes that offered African Americans methods of racial progress vis-à-vis childhood choices, opportunities, and dilemmas enables Wright to examine both the burden and promise with which nineteenth-century writers construe black girlhood. Such consideration of the frequent tension between African American women’s empowering depictions and both white and black male writers’ patriarchal projections underscores an environment of concurrent precariousness, volatility, and possibility in which writers wrote for and about black girls. Wright’s position that black girlhood is the trope through which many African American authors—men and women—imagine the future highlights both concern and hope for the alternately manipulative and liberatory power of such literary representations. A study itself in archival research, Wright’s book moves chronologically through an expanse of roughly a century of African American literary expression. This scope at times sacrifices the extent to which her explications of literary black girls engage with the specific print and sociohistorical politics of an era. Moving from the antebellum decades up to the New Negro Renaissance poses some unreconciled challenges to Wright’s goals of accounting for and applying the shifting impacts of social and economic class, for example, in analyzing the wide-ranging literary portrayals of black girls. Yet if the scope is at times restrictive, these issues are not ignored; rather, Black Girlhood reveals necessary pathways for future scholarship. Plus, the determination to cover such breadth of literary production in terms of both era and genre reflects the urgent drive to fill gaps too long unexplored in nineteenth-century black and American print. Wright’s study also positions itself amongst a burgeoning focus on black girlhood in African Americanist scholarship across disciplines. As Farah Jasmine Griffin attests, three contemporary studies, LaKisha Michelle Simmons’s Crescent City Girls, Marcia Chatelain’s South Side Girls, and Aimee Meredith Cox’s Shapeshifters, examine the
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histories, experiences, and perspectives of black girls with specific attention to historical era and regional culture and politics. These studies traverse the Jim Crow South, the Great Migration, and the Great Recession, and both explicitly and implicitly call for further historical recovery on their subjects. Wright’s research is a necessary addition to the critical trajectory of expressions and representations of black girlhood that these scholars have built. To this end, Black Girlhood lights a vital path toward the future scholarship in this area of study.
