Literary Dimensions Seminar

This talk offers a brief sketch of my new project, Serial Blackness: Periodical Culture and African American Literary History and draws on William Still's Underground Rail Road (1872, 1879, and 1886) to think through serial blackness as a print practice, a way of narrating Black life, and as a way of thinking about and engaging the world. Underground is a quilting together of a variety of texts and forms: as-told-to narratives, epistolary stories, fugitive slave ads, legal documents, sketches, biographies (including one of the best sketches of Harper's life available to us), and sensational narratives. Still's book brings together three elements of seriality that the book explores in more detail: the structure of serialized storytelling and serial format, the connectivity of serial networks, and the ways that material text both mediates and functions as a tangible vector for serial blackness. Focusing on Underground as a case study in serial blackness, self-publishing, and Reconstruction literature allows us to think about the text's publication in terms of aesthetic experimentation and creative storytelling.

Derrick R. Spires a John and Patricia Cochran Scholar of Inclusive Excellence and Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware and a Just Transformations Mellon Colored Conventions Project (CCP) Senior Research Fellow at Penn State's Center for Black Digital Research (#DigBlk). He specializes in early Black print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. Spires is a member of the editorial team for the Broadview Anthology of American Literature and coeditor of the book series, "Black Print and Organizing in the Long 19c," at the University of Pennsylvania Press with Gabrielle Foreman and Shirley Moody-Turner. His work appears in journals such as American Literary History, African American Review, and American Literature; as well as edited volumes on the Colored Conventions Movement, African American Print Culture, and Black Reconstruction.