7.30pm, Monday 21st February, Erasmus Room, Queens’ College

Dr Becca Weir (Jesus) will be speaking to the Queens’ Arts Seminar on ‘Pay, Poetry, and the Culture of Reprinting: Soldiers in the Anglo-African, 1863-1865′ (abstract below). Wine served; all welcome. For more information, contact Harriet Phillips (hp278) or Natasha Moore (nlm31).

Abstract:

In the latter half of the American Civil War, Robert Hamilton’s Anglo-African newspaper championed enlistment as an opportunity for African American men to assert their right to full citizenship. Even as soldiers in the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments used the newspaper to challenge the War Department’s decision to pay them less than their white counterparts, the Anglo-African used ‘original’ and ‘selected’ poetry to further its campaign. Readers recognised the poetry column as a site for public debate and contributed their own verse, whilst Hamilton and his associates reprinted ‘selected’ texts from a host of antislavery titles. These poems raise crucial questions about the ways in which civilians and combatants sought to define black volunteers as representative men. This paper adapts Meredith McGill’s notion of a ‘culture of reprinting’ in order to explore the significance of poetry in the Anglo-African, and suggests that newspaper poetry can help us rethink ‘Civil War literature’.