Introduction to Collaborative Space
While Black and Indigenous literary contributors were required to collaborate with their white Euro-American counterparts who dominated the publication culture, this collaboration between Black and Indigenous contributors in this space is voluntary and desired, as the two groups aspired to blueprint ideas collectively.
White Euro-American writers were purposefully not invited to this collaborative space for several reasons. First, as the contributors will discuss, the Euro-American’s motives often did not align with Black and Indigenous participants, and their directly opposing views would cause too much strain in the space. Second, without Euro-American writers in the room, it allows Black and Indigenous participants to safely express concerns and critiques of print culture with no repercussions. Last, it is vital to imagine environments without dominant and oppressive contributors, and this section of the exhibit puts forward a safe space for contributors of color to speak for themselves and explain why they made the decisions they did regarding paratextual work and their conversations off the page.
Perhaps the formulation of a collaborative space may be perceived as speculative, but I would like to remind us of Simon Gikandi’s compelling point about how the archives were heavily controlled and regulated,[1] along with Joseph Rezek’s insight regarding the silences and restrictions in the archives.[2] There is a possibility that Black and Indigenous literary contributors were in conversation during the 17th and 18th centuries, but there is limited information about their collective work in the archive because of white supremacy’s strong incentive in keeping the communities apart.
As a reminder, the four participants consists of James Printer, Katherine Garret, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant. Their participation creates a space that is diverse in terms of racial and gender representation, and they each have unique insights to share regarding their experiences with print culture. In more conversations to come, hopefully even more Black and Indigenous contributors can provide their judgments as well.
In creating this collaborative space, I thought heavily about the ethical implications. The project is not a definitive conversation of what is, since we will never know the exact words spoken during their potential conversations. Instead, it is a conversation of what could have been. The what could have been is not an ignorant or haphazard one as I tried to craft their notions based on the primary materials I consulted with at the special collections and archives at the Newberry Library, along with the secondary sources I read from Northwestern University Library and other online databases. Throughout their conversation, I incorporate citations that signal where I derived the idea that perhaps Printer, Garret, Wheatley, and Marrant could have believed this and could have articulated this thought (and this is why in this collaborative section there are a lot of citations because the citations help justify why I included certain thoughts for each literary contributor). In her article on historical imagination, Vivienne Little shares that scholars “must know a great deal about the exact size, shape, fit, and constituting material of those shoes,”[3] which is why fully immersing myself with primary and secondary sources about early Black and Indigenous print culture was pivotal for formulating the collaborative conversation between them.