Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture by Michaël Roy (review)

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• Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture by Michaël Roy
• Bryan Sinche (bio)

Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture
michaël roy; translated by susan pickford
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
222 pp.

Following in the wake of scholarly leaders like I. Garland Penn, Dorothy Porter, and Marian Starling came a new generation of Black print culture specialists who have expanded and shaped the field. Articles and books by William L. Andrews, John Ernest, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Frances Smith Foster, Eric Gardner, Leon Jackson, and Joycelyn Moody—along with the emergence of searchable digital databases—have helped inspire a flurry of scholarship that shows no signs of abating. To wit: Benjamin Fagan's The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (U of Georgia P, 2016), Gardner's Black Print Unbound (Oxford UP, 2015), and Derrick Spires's The Practice of Citizenship (U of Pennsylvania P, 2019) have fueled an interest in Black newspapers and periodicals, and collections like Early African American Print Culture (ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein [U of Pennsylvania P, 2012]), The Colored Conventions Movement (ed. Jim Casey, P. Gabrielle Foreman, and Sarah Patterson [U of North Carolina P, 2021]), and Against a Sharp White Background (Brigette Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne [U of Wisconsin P, 2019]) have further expanded our understanding of the genres and forms in which African American writing appeared. The effect of much of this work has been to reconsider the role of the slave narrative in pre-1900 African American literature. Michaël Roy's Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture helps to further this critical project by attending to the materiality and diversity of antebellum narratives.

Roy's monograph is a revised version of Textes Fugitifs, first published in France in 2017. The American edition, translated by Susan Pickford, [End Page 210] updates the scholarly apparatus, but it is largely unchanged from the 2017 publication that won the research prize of the Association Française D'Études Américaines. As Roy notes, his book fills a major gap in African American literary scholarship, as it is the first monograph focused on the printing, distribution, circulation, sale, and reception of the texts we have come to call "slave narratives." Moreover, Roy complicates that term throughout Fugitive Texts, arguing that to understand the genre in all its complexity, we must attend to the narratives' publication histories. Roy argues that a "book history approach to the antebellum slave narratives … illuminates the heterogenous nature of what is often perceived as a homogenous whole" (9). Roy shapes his argument by focusing on two key factors: the decade during which a narrative was published and the mode of publication. As Roy explains, these factors are tightly correlated for narratives published during the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and Roy's three chapters marry historical context to publishing case studies for each of those decades.

Roy's first chapter attends to slave narratives published in the 1830s under the aegis (or with the support of) major abolitionist organizations, especially the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). As Roy notes, there were several slave narratives published in the United States before 1830, but all those narratives were self-published and, as such, circulated locally rather than nationally. The one exception to this pattern of circulation—David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829)—is not a slave narrative, and Walker's pamphlet relied on a unique distribution method (it was smuggled south by sailors) that was not viable for most authors or publishers. Even so, the hysteria generated by Walker's provocative pamphlet confirmed the power of print for newly formed abolitionist organizations, and in the mid- to late 1830s, the AASS sought to blanket the country with antislavery publications. As part of this campaign, the AASS decided to publish and distribute the Narrative of James Williams in 1838. Most criticism on Williams's Narrative has focused on the controversy generated by pro-slavery southerners who cast doubt on aspects of Williams's story and thereby undermined the political efficacy of his story, but Roy adds a crucial piece to the history of the Narrative by focusing on...