Early American Literature

Marcy Dinius's The Textual Effects of David Walker's Appeal is a deeply researched study of the many ways that Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829; 1830) influenced Black and Indigenous writers from the 1830s to the 1850s. While scholars have long studied the [End Page 768] rippling political effects of Walker's incendiary publication, including the passage of antiliteracy laws and the censoring of abolitionist periodicals in southern states, this is the first study to focus on the works of print by writers of color who were directly influenced by Walker's manifesto, from inspiring specific choices in typography and format to copying sections of the Appeal verbatim. This book-length monograph builds on and deepens the formative contributions Dinius made in her widely cited and taught essay "'Look!! Look!!! Look at This!!!!': The Radical Typography of David Walker's Appeal" (PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 55–72).

Dinius distinguishes her work from earlier historical studies like Peter Hinks's To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (Pennsylvania State UP, 1996) by tracing the Appeal's role in what she calls "print-based activism" in the antebellum period. She is particularly interested in how Walker's pamphlet was activated by writer-activists again and again in the decades following its initial publication in 1829. The Textual Effects of David Walker's Appeal, in this way, takes shape as a (literary) history of the many "discursive possibilities produced by Walker" (197) over time and space. Dinius also expands on the influential work of Elizabeth McHenry, who, in Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (New York UP, 2002), showed Walker's impact not solely on Black nationalist history but within the larger fight for racial justice and its relationship to a growing print and publication sphere. Dinius chronicles the local, regional, and international influence David Walker had on Black and Indigenous activists and how he inspired the political pamphlets and tracts of Maria Stewart, William Apes, William Paul Quinn, Henry Highland Garnet, Paola Brown, and W. E. B Du Bois. In revising, incorporating, and adapting Walker's pamphlet, each of these authors extended the reach of the Appeal's initial audiences.

Dinius provides a new perspective into Walker's stylistic choices as a writer and print cultivator who deeply considered the infrastructural conditions that affected Black readership. Seeing Walker's call for violent revolution as only one of a number of different rhetorical strategies in his pamphlet, she positions Walker as a writer who was also thinking about how chattel slavery disrupted both free and enslaved people's ability to achieve liberation and develop their education and religious practices. [End Page 769] Each of the six authors in this study used practices of imitation and revision to show solidarity, to build trust between racial groups and political parties, or to bring Walker's message to a new audience.

Dinius's book also expands evangelical history by focusing on Christian print activism. Many of the writers here practiced Methodism and looked to Methodism's textual practices and performance cultures to further develop Walker's initial revolutionary plea. This common faith between activists allows Dinius to find similar thematic decisions across these works and to bring writer-preachers like Maria Stewart and William Apes into conversation with one another. For example, providing a close reading of Stew-art's 1831 pamphlet, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, Dinius shows how Stewart subtly, but effectively, challenged the patriarchal ideals and gendered limitation of Walker's Appeal. Stewart, a comrade of David Walker's and another Boston activist, used the format of the politico-religious pamphlet to encourage free Black women to join her in the fight against racial and gender discrimination and to...