Reviewed by:

• Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture by Michaël Roy
• Bryan Sinche (bio)

Following in the wake of scholarly leaders like I. Garland Penn, Dorothy Porter, and Marian Starling came a new generation of Black print culture specialists who have expanded and shaped the field. Articles and books by William L. Andrews, John Ernest, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Frances Smith Foster, Eric Gardner, Leon Jackson, and Joycelyn Moody—along with the emergence of searchable digital databases—have helped inspire a flurry of scholarship that shows no signs of abating. To wit: Benjamin Fagan's The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (U of Georgia P, 2016), Gardner's Black Print Unbound (Oxford UP, 2015), and Derrick Spires's The Practice of Citizenship (U of Pennsylvania P, 2019) have fueled an interest in Black newspapers and periodicals, and collections like Early African American Print Culture (ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein [U of Pennsylvania P, 2012]), The Colored Conventions Movement (ed. Jim Casey, P. Gabrielle Foreman, and Sarah Patterson [U of North Carolina P, 2021]), and Against a Sharp White Background (Brigette Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne [U of Wisconsin P, 2019]) have further expanded our understanding of the genres and forms in which African American writing appeared. The effect of much of this work has been to reconsider the role of the slave narrative in pre-1900 African American literature. Michaël Roy's Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture helps to further this critical project by attending to the materiality and diversity of antebellum narratives.

Roy's monograph is a revised version of Textes Fugitifs, first published in France in 2017. The American edition, translated by Susan Pickford, [End Page 210] updates the scholarly apparatus, but it is largely unchanged from the 2017 publication that won the research prize of the Association Française D'Études Américaines. As Roy notes, his book fills a major gap in African American literary scholarship, as it is the first monograph focused on the printing, distribution, circulation, sale, and reception of the texts we have come to call "slave narratives." Moreover, Roy complicates that term throughout Fugitive Texts, arguing that to understand the genre in all its complexity, we must attend to the narratives' publication histories. Roy argues that a "book history approach to the antebellum slave narratives … illuminates the heterogenous nature of what is often perceived as a homogenous whole" (9). Roy shapes his argument by focusing on two key factors: the decade during which a narrative was published and the mode of publication. As Roy explains, these factors are tightly correlated for narratives published during the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and Roy's three chapters marry historical context to publishing case studies for each of those decades.

Roy's first chapter attends to slave narratives published in the 1830s under the aegis (or with the support of) major abolitionist organizations, especially the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). As Roy notes, there were several slave narratives published in the United States before 1830, but all those narratives were self-published and, as such, circulated locally rather than nationally. The one exception to this pattern of circulation—David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829)—is not a slave narrative, and Walker's pamphlet relied on a unique distribution method (it was smuggled south by sailors) that was not viable for most authors or publishers. Even so, the hysteria generated by Walker's provocative pamphlet confirmed the power of print for newly formed abolitionist organizations, and in the mid- to late 1830s, the AASS sought to blanket the country with antislavery publications. As part of this campaign, the AASS decided to publish and distribute the Narrative of James Williams in 1838. Most criticism on Williams's Narrative has focused on the controversy generated by pro-slavery southerners who cast doubt on aspects of Williams's story and thereby undermined the political efficacy of his story, but Roy adds a crucial piece to the history of the Narrative by focusing on...

审阅者：

• 《逃亡文本：战前印刷文化中的奴隶叙事》作者：迈克尔·罗伊
• 布莱恩·辛奇（简介）

继 I. Garland Penn、Dorothy Porter 和 Marian Starling 等学术领袖之后，新一代黑人印刷文化专家扩大并塑造了这一领域。 William L. Andrews、John Ernest、P. Gabrielle Foreman、Frances Smith Foster、Eric Gardner、Leon Jackson 和 Joycelyn Moody 的文章和书籍，以及可搜索数字数据库的出现，帮助激发了一系列学术研究，这些研究表明，减弱的迹象。也就是说：本杰明·费根 (Benjamin Fagan) 的《黑人报纸与被选中的国家》 (The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation)（佐治亚大学出版社，2016 年）、加德纳的《Black Print Unbound》（牛津大学出版社，2015 年）和德里克·斯皮尔斯 (Derrick Spires) 的《公民身份实践》（宾夕法尼亚大学出版社，2019 年）推动了对黑人报纸和期刊以及早期非裔美国人印刷文化（编者：Lara Langer Cohen 和 Jordan Alexander Stein [宾夕法尼亚大学 P，2012]）、《有色人种公约运动》（编者：Jim Casey、P. Gabrielle Foreman、和莎拉·帕特森 [北卡罗来纳大学 P，2021]），以及《反对尖锐的白色背景》（Brigette Fielder 和 Jonathan Senchyne [威斯康星大学 P，2019]）进一步扩展了我们对非裔美国人写作的流派和形式的理解出现了。这部作品的大部分内容是重新考虑奴隶叙事在 1900 年之前的非裔美国文学中的作用。迈克尔·罗伊的《逃亡文本：战前印刷文化中的奴隶叙事》通过关注战前叙事的物质性和多样性，有助于进一步推进这一重要项目。

罗伊的专着是《Textes Fugitifs》的修订版，于 2017 年在法国首次出版。美国版由 Susan Pickford 翻译，[完第 210 页]更新了学术机构，但与 2017 年获得研究奖的出版物基本没有变化法国美洲研究协会的会员。正如罗伊指出的那样，他的书填补了非裔美国文学学术界的一个重大空白，因为它是第一本专注于我们称之为“奴隶叙事”的文本的印刷、发行、流通、销售和接受的专着。此外，罗伊在《逃亡文本》中使这个术语变得复杂化，他认为要理解这种类型的复杂性，我们必须关注叙事的出版历史。罗伊认为，“对战前奴隶叙事的书籍历史方法……阐明了通常被视为同质整体的异质本质”（9）。罗伊通过关注两个关键因素来形成他的论点：叙事发表的十年和出版模式。正如罗伊所解释的，这些因素与 1830 年代、1840 年代和 1850 年代出版的叙述紧密相关，罗伊的三章将历史背景与这几十年中每个年代出版的案例研究结合起来。

罗伊的第一章讨论了 1830 年代在主要废奴主义组织，特别是美国反奴隶制协会 (AASS) 的支持下出版的奴隶叙事。正如罗伊指出的那样，1830 年之前美国出版了几本奴隶叙事，但所有这些叙事都是自行出版的，因此在当地而不是全国范围内流传。这种流通模式的一个例外是大卫·沃克（David Walker）对世界有色公民的呼吁（1829），它不是奴隶叙事，沃克的小册子依赖于一种独特的分发方法（它是由水手偷运到南方），这是不可行的对于大多数作者或出版商来说。即便如此，沃克的挑衅性小册子所引发的歇斯底里证实了新成立的废奴主义组织的印刷力量，在 1830 年代中后期，美国社会服务协会 (AASS) 试图用反奴隶制出版物覆盖全国。作为这场运动的一部分，AASS 决定于1838 年出版和发行《詹姆斯·威廉姆斯的叙述》。对威廉姆斯叙述的大多数批评都集中在支持奴隶制的南方人所引发的争议上，他们对威廉姆斯故事的各个方面表示怀疑，从而破坏了政治上的支持。他的故事的功效，但罗伊通过关注……为叙事的历史添加了至关重要的一部分。