Unexpected Places

Unexpected Places aims to recover the forgotten authors, texts, and places of nineteenth-century African American literature. Arguing that literary historians have too often reduced a “large, rich, and wonderfully complex and conflicted body of literature” to “a single genre” (the slave narrative), Eric Gardner aims to broaden the “tiny handful of texts” that have come to represent the totality of African American cultural production and consumption (pp. 8, 6). As the book's title suggests, Gardner approaches African American culture as a “space” whose boundaries (both geographic and generic) have been too narrowly drawn (p. 15). On a conceptual level, Gardner laments how the field has been “radically circumscribe[d]” by an incomplete sense of what counts as literature, having become too invested in the published, bound book (p. 10). In response to this limit, Gardner shifts critical attention to the emerging black periodical press, “the central publication outlet for many black writers,” and to its neglected forms: the essay, the newspaper column, and the letter to the editor (ibid.). At the same time, Gardner seeks to bring more of the nation (particularly the western United States) forward to move beyond the well-traveled “sites on our current map”—the “southern stories” of slavery “written by blacks in the urban Northeast” and then published in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia—the expected “urban Northeast centers of activism” (pp. 172, 12

African american · African-American literature · American literature · Art · Ethnology · Field (mathematics · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Newspaper · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · History · Race, History, and American Society

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