A Novel as Archive: A Roundtable on Frances E. W. Harper's 1892 Novel, Iola Leroy, about the Civil War and Reconstruction

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• A Novel as ArchiveA Roundtable on Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 Novel, Iola Leroy, about the Civil War and Reconstruction
• Jim Downs, Editor and Moderator (bio), Rhae Lynn Barnes (bio), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (bio), Rashauna Johnson (bio), John Stauffer (bio), Faith Smith (bio), and Nii Ayikwei Parkes (bio)

JIM DOWNS:

Over the past year at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, there have been lots of discussions about why archives matter. These conversations have come into sharp focus based on the significance of Saidiya Hartman’s article “Venus in Two Acts” and her books Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiment and Marisa J. Fuentes’s Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, which raise critical questions about how we can uncover the lives of enslaved and oppressed people in traditional archives.¹ While their critical research has helped many of us remember the ideological forces that shaped the creation of archives and provided a model on how to rigorously interrogate surviving sources, I am afraid that some scholars have used this scholarship to become pessimistic about archival research. What I learned from Hartman and Fuentes [End Page 65] was how to think more creatively and critically about interpreting surviving sources, not a call designed to shut down archival research. But I think their work is now being used to claim that Black subjectivity is almost impossible to uncover in traditional archives. Over the past academic year at the Hutchins Center, I have had conversations over lunch with Rashauna Johnson and Rhae Lynn Barnes about this, and we decided to turn our informal conversations into a roundtable discussion that could be published in Civil War History. In part, Civil War history has been divorced from many critical conversations happening within African American studies about theory and method, so I wanted to create an interdisciplinary forum that would introduce Civil War historians to this conversation. When Rashauna, Rhae Lynn, and I discussed how to organize the conversation, we decided to select a primary source that we would all read and analyze based on our own scholarly orientations. We also thought this would be a good exercise for readers of the journal. They too could read the source and the accompanying roundtable and use it in their research or teaching.

While there are endless sources that could serve as the bridge between African American studies and Civil War studies, I decided on Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 novel, Iola Leroy, which chronicles the Black experience during the Civil War. Harper was born free to Black parents on September 24, 1825. She was a poet and devoted abolitionist before the Civil War. Decades afterward, she decided to write a novel that aimed to tell the many complicated stories of Black people during the war. While Iola Leroy received critical attention at the time of its publication, it faded from view outside of Black intellectual and feminist circles during the first half of the twentieth century.

In the early 1980s, historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. led a massive effort to recover and republish books written by Black women. Harper’s novel was often considered the first novel written by a Black woman, until Gates rediscovered Harriet Wilson’s 1859 novel, Our Nig.

In keeping with the journal’s commitment to interdisciplinary studies, I invited Gates, an eminent scholar, to join our conversation. I also invited John Stauffer, a leading historian and literary critic, who is an expert in Civil War–era studies, nineteenth-century literature, and African American studies. We hosted the forum at Hutchins and invited Hutchins fellows to attend. Faith Smith, a literary critic who specializes in Caribbean literature, added comments throughout the conversation, and so did Nii Ayikwei Parkes, an award-winning Ghanaian-British writer. [End Page 66]

JIM DOWNS:

I want to begin the conversation with asking each participant to reflect on when you first read Iola Leroy and what your impressions of the novel were. I also want the conversation to be organic, so please jump in at any point.

I’m happy to begin. I read...