The Racialization of Print

Description

Readers since Thomas Jefferson have believed it possible to judge entire races of people based on a single book, yet no one has attempted to explain the origins of this preconception. In The Racialization of Print, Joseph Rezek traces the history of this belief from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth and examines its extraordinary power in Anglo-American culture. Through an intertwined history of print, race, and authorship, Rezek argues that printed books first became associated with racial categories in the early modern period and that, by the late eighteenth century, books by minority writers were seen as “specimens” of racial genius. Rezek also shows how Black and Indigenous authors of the nineteenth century strategically embraced the printed book’s representative potential for sovereignty and political justice.

Offering a provocatively original story about familiar media—and new stories about authors such as John Smith, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Baron de Vastey, William Apess, and Frederick Douglass—Rezek shows that understanding the origins of the connection between print and race can help us grapple with what it means to read across racial divisions today.

About The Author

Joseph Rezek is associate professor of English at Boston University.

Reviews

“This book will speak to scholars in book history, in early American literary studies, in early Black studies, and in early Indigenous studies. Rezek conveys complex histories in accessible, elegant prose while attending to an astonishing range of historical periods and places. This long arc illuminates how conceptions of race developed alongside the printed book and conceptions of authorship in the Atlantic world.”—Kelly Wisecup, author of Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

“’What is an author?’ Rezek offers a genuinely new interpretation of that important query. This book is impressive in its historical scope and theoretical sophistication, its critical mastery of the histories of racial ideology, literary history, history of the book, and the developments of slavery and empire. It’s one of those very few works that are both sweeping and precise.”—Philip Gould, author of War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North