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This introductory chapter demonstrates how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture used Victorian literature to conduct acts of “African Americanization.” Here, close engagement with Victorian literature represented no mere capitulation to existing constraints, but instead constituted a deliberate political strategy and means of artistic expression. The chapter shows that this practice did not impede or undercut the development of a distinctive African American literary culture and tradition, but on the contrary contributed directly to its development. It did so through the very repetition of African Americanizing engagements, repetition that grew increasingly self-conscious and self-referential, as writers and editors built on, responded to, and positioned themselves in relation to prior instances. Victorian literature's role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture, the chapter also argues, makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature.

This chapter illustrates how the African Americanization of Charles Dickens' Bleak House makes newly visible and meaningful certain aspects of the novel even as it calls into question the power of such features to determine the cultural work the novel—and, by extension, any text—performs. This doubly estranging dynamic will be particularly clear with regard to a cultural task that has come to be seen as one of the novel-form's most important: the cultivation of national identity. As the chapter shows, Bleak House does not merely fail to imagine a community that includes Africans, African Americans, slaves, and people of color in general. Rather, it consolidates the national community it does imagine by means of their exclusion. Paradoxically, however, this strategy becomes most conspicuous when it is least efficacious: engaging in their own forms of close reading at a distance, members of these groups and their advocates find in Dickens's novel a material and imaginative resource for their own efforts to tell the stories they want to tell and build the communities they seek to build.

This chapter discusses the African Americanization of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It argues that what makes “The Light Brigade” an inspired choice for this kind of task is its history and historicity. There exists a history of placing Tennyson's poem in relation to African American culture, and this history is one in which this relationship has been variously construed and vigorously contested. As the chapter shows, from the moment it was published, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was mobilized, especially though not exclusively by African Americans, as a site or tool to address certain issues. These include: the relationship of African Americans to the dominant cultural tradition; the nature and politics of interracial cultural rivalry, mimicry, and appropriation; and the role of poetry and the arts—and violence—in the fight for racial empowerment and equality.