Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing - Softcover

Christopher Hager

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674088069 ISBN 13: 9780674088061

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Consigned to illiteracy, American slaves left little record of their thoughts and feelings-or so we have believed. But a few learned to use pen and paper to make sense of their experiences, despite prohibitions. These authors' perspectives rewrite the history of emancipation and force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom.

About this title

Review

Hager seeks to craft an intellectual history of a people too often dismissed as illiterate and lacking a culture of letters. His focus is not on stars who are well known from fugitive slave narratives, but on a handful of more or less literate blacks whose previously unpublished letters provide pieces of a complex and rich narrative of liberation. Hager discusses the mental process of writing, exploring the inner lives, secrecy, and subversion shown in black initiatives to learn how to write and how to use writing to end enslavement and to embrace emancipation.--Thomas J. Davis"Library Journal" (02/15/2013)

Hager provides an informed and informative view of writings produced by formerly enslaved African Americans, often overlooked as an illiterate group. Hager reminds readers to attend to those texts that have the power to give scholars a broader perspective of particular moments...By paying attention to these authors, Hager aims to develop new models for the interpretation of historical sources and give voice to both the unknown and the underappreciated.
--T. T. Green"Choice" (08/01/2013)

Through a series of bold, imaginative and insightful case studies, Christopher Hager uncovers the intellectual world of U.S. slavery and charts the hopes, expectations and fears of enslaved writers...By understanding emancipation as a slow process rather than a rapid transformation, "Word by Word "shows how literacy was an incomplete and sometimes flawed instrument of black self-determination. The idea of emancipation as an unfinished revolution is not new, nor is the attention to subterranean networks of enslaved information and exchange particularly novel in slavery studies. By rendering legible and audible the writings of the literate minority, however, Hager reveals the desperate and creative measures taken by former slaves to assert their communal and individual voices. Most of course continued unlettered, but the striking improvement in black literacy during the two decades after emancipation (from 10 to 30 per cent) is testimony to the enduring importance attached to the written word and the empowering potential of African-American writing.
--Richard Follett"Times Higher Education" (07/04/2013)

A penetrating and revealing portrait of people in the process of defining freedom, "Word by Word" is a stirring, important work that reshapes our understanding of slavery and emancipation.--Louis P. Masur, author of "Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union"

From its first pages, where a stumbling black writer in Civil War New Orleans picks up the U.S. Constitution, "Word by Word" focuses on the initial tremors of freedom for ordinary people amid wartime turmoil and the process of emancipation. This is original work of the highest order.--Kathleen Diffley, editor of "To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861-1876"

Hager brilliantly imagines scenes of writing among freed people in the decades immediately following emancipation, showing how former slaves turned to writing as a way of taking control of their world. "Word by Word" is a major and revelatory act of historical recovery done with imaginative sympathy and critical verve.--Robert S. Levine, author of "Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism"

Christopher Hager does a fascinating job of sifting through these letters [written by slaves], fleshing out as much as possible the stories of their authors, and casting it all as black America's first attempts at forging a voice in this strange land, in "Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing."--Mark Reynolds"PopMatters" (03/04/2013)

About the Author

Christopher Hager is Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of English at Trinity College.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0674088069
• ISBN 13: 9780674088061
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328