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Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America: Everyday Black Living in Early America

Online ISBN:
9780252053788
Print ISBN:
9780252044731
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press
Book

Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America: Everyday Black Living in Early America

Tara A. Bynum
Tara A. Bynum
University of Iowa
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Published online:
21 September 2023
Published in print:
10 January 2023
Online ISBN:
9780252053788
Print ISBN:
9780252044731
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press

Abstract

This book considers what pleasure looks like in the lives of four early African American authors: Phillis Wheatley, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, and David Walker. For each of these authors, pleasure can look like the feeling good that come from friendship, Christian faith, or a funny joke. Their pleasures, most importantly, invite readers to consider what matters to each of them. What matters in their sermons, letters, or narratives—namely, friendship, faith, love, or activism—oftentimes feels good, and this good feeling happens in those inside spaces where they can and do feel freely. Reading of these pleasures has a twofold aim: to chart a “historiography of experience” and to take seriously the possibility of pleasure in the lives of these authors. Reading Pleasures argues these good feelings help Wheatley, Gronniosaw, Marrant, and Walker make meaning in a world that’s alive with books and letters, enslavement and captivity, friendship and love. It closely reads these pleasures as a way to argue for an alternative literary history where good feeling and creativity inspire the makings of an African American literature.

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