Review by Derrick R. Spires
Project authored by Lavonda Kay Broadnax
Derrick R. Spires is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. He specializes in early Black print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His scholarship and teaching are invested in fleshing out as rich and as a full an account of earlier African American literature and Black aesthetic sensibilities as possible from the tragicomic to the mundane. He is committed to recovering the rich imaginative worlds African descended people generated through print and how that process of imagining enabled Black folk to make material change.
Shining Stars: African American Women Authors of the Civil War Era, curated by Lavonda Kay Broadnax, is a welcome and important addition to a growing constellation of projects focusing on Black women authors, Black women’s intellectual history, and Black women’s writing during the Civil War Era. Broadnax’s opening gambit, “it is unusual to anticipate the existence of publications written by African Americans” from the Civil War era, echoes a tradition of bibliographers challenging scholarly presumptions about absences. And, like Dorothy Porter, Frances Smith Foster, and others before, Broadnax explodes this absence model with a collection of “over 140 full-text publications,” over 100 author illustrations, and access to nearly 140 articles from historic newspapers that prove these women were neither hidden nor obscure.
Shining Stars offers indispensable access to Black women’s writing and is organized in a way that will be useful for K-12, undergraduate and graduate courses, and researchers more broadly.
Shining Stars includes a robust introduction plus five content sections—“Exhibit,” “Biographical Data,” “Full-Text Documents,” “Images,” “Historic Newspaper Articles”—and an extensive “Further Reading” list. In addition to title pages for each work, the section “Images” offers portraits of familiar faces like Sojourner Truth’s alongside lesser-known figures like Rosetta Douglass Sprague, daughter of Frederick Douglass; biographer of her mother, Anna Murray; and contributor to Frederick Douglass’ Paper in both content and infrastructure. Data visualizations (e.g., authors by birth status, genre of publication) provide a bird’s eye view of Black women’s writing. Interestingly, poetry, autobiography, and speeches far outweigh other genres. And, perhaps most exciting for archive nerds, “Newspaper Articles” collates articles written about the writers from newspapers digitized by Chronicling America.
Shining Stars’s centerpiece exhibit, “Three Freedom Seekers,” showcases three formerly enslaved writers: Lucy A. Delaney (1830-1891), Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907), and Ellen Craft (1824-1900). The three women demonstrate the wide array of means Black women and their families used to secure freedom. Delaney’s mother successfully sued their enslaver. Ellen Craft and her husband, William, famously escaped with Ellen passing as a white man and William as his servant. And, after years of lobbying, Keckley convinced her enslaver to allow her to purchase herself and went on to become a dressmaker to the wives of prominent politicians. The exhibit’s emphasis on family in sections like “Inheritance” and intergenerational routes to freedom reinforces the importance of Black kinship networks. Where the classic slave narrative tradition typified by Black men writers like Frederick Douglass tended to portray escape as a solitary project, these three writers ground freedom narratives in community and kinship. “This set of examples,” writes Broadnax, “illustrates the forward thinking and resilience of these authors and expands our knowledge of history by documenting the savvy of these three women gaining their freedom.”
Broadnax has provided a wonderful service to the fields of African American literary studies, Civil War studies, print culture, and digital humanities. Shining Stars compliments more expansive projects like the Black Women’s Organizing Archive and the Colored Conventions Project, which, though not focused solely on Black women, makes recovering Black women’s labor and activism a central principle. Additionally, Broadnax’s site allows readers to browse by genre, making it a useful nineteenth-century companion to the Black Lit Network’s Novel Generator Machine. Users can also browse by name, place of residence, birthplace, status at birth, and occupation. The occupation menu also allows for multiple selections (e.g., college professor and activists), highlighting the complexities of Black women’s labor and intellectual lives. While the project focuses mainly on the Civil War era, works spanning the nineteenth century, from Zilpha Elaw’s Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw (1841), to Pauline E. Hopkins’s pioneering science fiction novel, Of One Blood (1902), demonstrate that Black women had been fighting their own war for identity and survival well before 1861 and continued this fight well after 1865.
Shining Stars was developed through the collaboration of the History of Black Writing’s Black Book Interactive Project(BBIP) Digital Publishing Scholars Program, funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, and African American Studies Publishing Without Walls 2 (AFRO PWW), funded by the Mellon Foundation.