Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America - with Tara Bynum and Kabria Baumgartner

On Thursday, March 2, 2023, Professors Tara Bynum (English, University of Iowa) and Kabria Baumgartner (History and Africana Studies, Northeastern University) discussed Bynum's new book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press), which tells the stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free.
Baumgartner and Bynum, a 2021 recipient of the Book Ends: Obermann/OVPR Book Completion Workshop award, discussed "the pleasure of reading in the 'archive,' the individual and collective experiences of joy in the lives of Wheatley, Gronniosaw, Marrant, and Walker, and what these 18th-century pleasures mean for us at present."