Introduction: Reclaiming Julia C. Collins, Forgotten 19th-Century African American Author

In April 1864, Julia C. emerged out of anonymity in the small town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, into the literary spotlight. presented herself readers nationwide, captured them with several didactic essays and a domestic novel, and then disappeared from history. All of Collins's known literary production, consisting of the serialized novel--The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride--and six essays, were published in the African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder, a leading 19th-century African American newspaper with a nationwide circulation and a large, mostly African American audience both literate and non-literate. (1) When died in November 1865--just 19 months after her publishing debut--her voice was silenced for more than a century. Today few scholars have heard of Collins, and even fewer have actually read her work. Historian Mitch Kachun's recovery of Collins's writing in the archives is an important achievement. (2) Collins's recovered texts have already reopened speculation begun in the nineteenth century about the author and about the novel's intended--though unfinished--ending. As this special edition of African American Review demonstrates, questions about Collins's life, her antebellum aesthetics and Reconstruction politics and her place in the African American literary canon are already generating lively scholarly discussions. Oxford University Press's publication of Collins's essays and novel, The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (2006), will enlarge the community of readers who can participate in discussions of Collins's work. This special issue of African American Review, devoted Collins's life and work so as situate it within the aims and sites of literary activity for 19th-century African Americans, launches unprecedented critical discussion of and her work. The essays in this issue and in the Oxford edition by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun will initiate and shape the contours of future debate on Collins's work. There is, in fact, much debate. Collin's absence from history both before and after her brief literary career presents unusual challenges and opportunities for scholars. As Kachun explains, everything known for certain about comes from what she published in the Christian Recorder and what contributors the Recorder said about her. The magnitude of uncertainty enveloping compels scholars listen attentively the subtleties of her expression, interpret carefully remarks others made about her, and re-imagine the settings that traveled. Melba Joyce Boyd's poem in this issue Eulogy for Julia C. Collins powerfully evokes one setting where traveled--Oswego in northern New York on Lake Ontario. Boyd's poem also re-animates Collins's voice by combining invented speech with quotations from Collins's essays. Indeed, the missing biographical detail on places a heavy burden on the imagination and on the known contexts of Collins's life, labors, and dreams. In the study of African American history this predicament is not uncommon. As Frances Smith Foster points out, to discover the stories of the silenced or ignored, we must look beyond official or privileged records [that] do not document the perspectives, ... failures or dreams of the silenced or ignored (9). Neglected African American women's stories, if they survive at all, survive in fragments that cannot be fully comprehended without first being recontextualized. Foster encourages adopting the critical standpoint of a literary archaeologist committed understanding the context of fragments and optimistic that fragments often reveal their context and intent (10). The literary archaeologist's questions and insight may be the only guides unearth the social and subjective spaces from which expressed herself. Literary archaeology obliges an interrogation of the extant fragments of Collins's life and work. …

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