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"Until recently, scholars believed that African American children's literature did not exist before 1900. Now, Who Writes for Black Children? opens the door to a rich archive of largely overlooked literature read by black children. This volume's combination of analytic essays, bibliographic materials, and primary texts offers alternative histories for early African American literary studies and children's literature studies. From poetry written by a slave for a plantation school to joyful "death biographies" of African Americans in the antebellum North to literature penned by African American children themselves, Who Writes for Black Children? presents compelling new definitions of both African American literature and children's literature. Editors Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane bring together a rich collection of essays that argue for children as an integral part of the nineteenth-century black community and offer alternative ways to look at the relationship between children and adults. Including two bibliographic essays that provide a list of texts for future research as well as an extensive selection of hard-to-find primary texts, Who Writes for Black Children? broadens our ideas of authorship, originality, identity, and political formations. In the process, the volume adds new texts to the canon of African American literature while providing a fresh perspective on our desire for the literary origin stories that create canons in the first place. Contributors: Karen Chandler, U of Louisville; Martha J. Cutter, U of Connecticut; LuElla D'Amico, Whitworth U; Brigitte Fielder, U of Wisconsin-Madison; Eric Gardner, Saginaw Valley State U; Mary Niall Mitchell, U of New Orleans; Angela Sorby, Marquette U; Ivy Linton Stabell, Iona College; Valentina K. Tikoff, DePaul U; Laura Wasowicz; Courtney Weikle-Mills, U of Pittsburgh; Nazera Sadiq Wright, U of Kentucky"-- Machine generated contents note: -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I. Locating Readers -- 1. Conjuring Readers: Antebellum African American Children's Poetry -- Angela Sorby -- 2. Free the Children: Jupiter Hammon and the Origin of African American Children's Literature -- Courtney Weikle-Mills -- 3. "Ye Are Builders": Child Readers in Frances Harper's Vision of an Inclusive Black Poetry -- Karen Chandler -- Part II: Schooling, Textuality, and Literacies -- 4. Madame Couvent's Legacy: Free Children of Color as Historians in Antebellum New Orleans -- Mary Niall Mitchell -- 5. Black Childhood Innocence in Susan Paul and Ann Plato's Antebellum Children's Biographies -- Ivy Linton Stabell -- 6. Equiano as Role Model for African American Children: Abigail Field Mott's Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano and White Northern Abolitionism in the 1820s -- Valentina K. Tikoff -- 7. The Child's Illustrated Anti-Slavery Talking Book: Abigail Mott's Abridgment of Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative for African American Children -- Martha J. Cutter -- Part III: Defining African American Children's Literature: Critical Crossovers -- 8. "Our Hope Is in the Rising Generation": Locating African American Children's Literature in the Colored American's "Children Department" (1840-1841) -- Nazera Sadiq Wright -- 9. "No Rights That Any Body Is Bound to Respect": Pets, Race, and African American Child Readers -- Brigitte Fielder -- 10. Finding God's Way: Amelia Johnson's Clarence and Corrine as a Path to Religious Resistance for African American Children -- LuElla D'Amico -- Part IV: Bibliographic Essays -- 11. Nuggets from the Field: The Roots of African American Children's Literature, 1780-1866 -- Laura Wasowicz -- 12. Children's Literature in the AME Christian Recorder: An Initial Comparative Bio-Bibliography for May 1862 and April 1873 -- Eric Gardner -- Acknowledgments -- Appendix -- Contributors -- Index
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