Interracial Collaboration in African American and Native American Literature of the Antebellum Period

FAIN: FEL-257577-18

Katherine Leigh Chiles
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

Completion of a book-length study of collaborative authorship in early African American and Native American literature.

Raced Collaboration is the first comprehensive study of the crucial role that collaboration played in early African American and in early Native American literatures. This project tells the rich story of how African Americans and Native Americans—often against significant odds—produced English language texts, such as memoirs, novels, and slave narratives, through collaboration with persons of many races. Raced Collaboration investigates the remarkable ways these writers collaborated—including dictating, editing, transcribing, translating, and printing—and opens up new understandings of works whose collaborative form has become a constraint on further literary study. It reconstructs the texts’ composition histories; examines how their material form shaped their meaning; and interprets how the texts comment on their existence as collaborative works. In discerning new understandings of authorship, this project deepens our appreciation of the role of these writers in antebellum America.