Reading Pleasures

In the early United States, a Black person who read and wrote was committing an act of resistance. Tara A. Bynum argues that this familiar account leaves out something important: reading and writing were also a source of pleasure. Her book tells the stories of four early American writers who described feeling good even though they were enslaved or only nominally free.

The poet Phillis Wheatley takes delight in writing letters to a friend. The ministers John Marrant and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw record their love for God. David Walker, in his pamphlets, urges Black Americans to claim their victory over slavery. Taken together, their writings show a joyous, if untidy, humanity in each author.

Bynum treats these expressions of good feeling as evidence of a thriving inner life, and she holds that this evidence compels readers to face the fact that Black lives matter. Reading Pleasures asserts Black people's humanity boldly, showing how four Black writers experienced positive emotions and analyzing how those feelings served creative, political and racialized purposes.