Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print ed. by Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne

Reviewed by: Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print ed. by Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne Heidi Morse Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne, eds. Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2019. 336 pp. $79.95. In Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print, editors Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne define the history of print technologies as indelibly shaped by racialization. Twelve essays on topics ranging from noncanonical slave narratives and the reception of Richard Wright's Black Boy by Chicago readers to the limits of search queries in digital databases insist "that race is one of the technologies of the book and that blackness is inextricable from it" (23). Scholars of African American literature will be familiar with many of the authors under discussion, but lesser known are featured periodicals and Black editors and librarians whose interventions also fundamentally "extended, recoded, and transformed" (7) infrastructures and epistemologies of American print history. This much-needed volume brings a necessary urgency to the question of how technologies of print, bibliography, and classification affect literary and cultural expressions as well as larger social movements. Theorizing the Twitter hashtag as a "complex social indexing system" (4) that has facilitated public awareness of anti-Black police violence and organized protest in the age of Black Lives Matter, the editors open the volume by recounting the names of the dead that have so often appeared on protest signs, social media, and after the words "In Memory" as the recurring, hauntingly unfinished litany cast on the left edge of page 134 of Claudia Rankine's Citizen. Several essays directly reference the contemporary fight for Black lives. As contributing author Jesse A. Goldberg reflects in his call to rethink periodizations of African American literature, "Perhaps we cannot do the work of accounting for history without our present conditions as our own paratext" (174). Although Black bibliographers and librarians have led efforts to preserve and describe African American print collections since the late nineteenth century, it was not until recently that scholarly and archival institutions began directing significant resources toward African American print culture studies. An early signpost of these efforts was the 1998 publication of Print Culture in a Diverse America, the first edited volume produced by what is now the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture. The book under consideration was inspired by the Center's 2014 conference, "African American Expression in Print and Digital Culture." P. Gabrielle Foreman, who gave the conference's keynote address, offers a masterful reading of Black expressive practices from pottery to print to contemporary visual art and music. Her analysis of "archival sampling" by contemporary Black artists Theaster Gates and Glenn Ligon demonstrates the advantages of interdisciplinary approaches to works that grapple with "slavery's print and visual afterlives" (31). Foreman's insights resonate powerfully through many subsequent essays. Another driving force in the volume is Laura E. Helton's meticulously researched study of the pioneering role of creators of bibliographies, catalogs, and indexes in twentieth-century African American studies. Helton calls on colleagues to move the names of Black librarians and archivists such as Dorothy Porter and Vivian Harsh—who are so often mentioned in book acknowledgments—"out of the prefaces and into the center of African American knowledge production" (83). Two other essays appearing in the first section, which is aptly titled "Infrastructures," take up parallel themes. E. James West describes constructions [End Page 267] of Black history in the 1960s by the Johnson Book Division, whose archives now reside in a community art space that Gates has opened on Chicago's South Side. Jim Casey, codirector of the Colored Conventions Project with Foreman, shows how the parameters of search queries in twenty-first-century databases often miss the nuances of marginalized voices in nineteenth-century print. Mary Ann Shadd, for example, used an asterisk (which is unsearchable) to mark her editorial contributions in the Provincial Freeman, a newspaper she published in Ontario at the height of 1850s Black emigration. The following sections, "Paratexts" and "Formats," present excellent case studies derived from panels at the 2014...

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