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Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880)
Doers of the Word is an intelligently written, well-researched, and very useful addition to the growing canon of critical work on nineteenth-century African American women writers. Surveying the works and practices of ten speakers and writers who thought of themselves as social actors and participants in racial uplift, Doers both embeds these activists within the historical contexts in which they were working and writing and analyzes the texts in question in terms of their formalistic qualities of rhetoric, genre, and narration. Doers also makes helpful connections among this diverse group of speakers and writers, comparing Sojourner Truth and Jarena Lee, for example, as itinerant preachers, or Nancy Prince and Mary Shadd Cary as ethnographic writers, or Frances Watkins Harper and Sarah Parker Remond as orators. This book will be of importance to anyone interested not only in African American women's writing or in African American literature and culture more generally, but also in the critical apparatuses with which we understand the past.
Peterson's argument makes three central theoretical points, asserting: (1) the diversity and range of historical figures and texts under consideration; (2) the hybrid character of their written and rhetorical forms; and (3) the importance of understanding their construction of an African American "local place" (7). The first two points contribute to the ongoing debate within African American literary criticism regarding earlier, particularly pre-Harlem Renaissance, literature. The third demonstrates Peterson's use of anthropological methods through her identification of...