ENG 4834 Fall 2020 Ward

This course explores the history of publishing and editing in the context of the colonial Caribbean, focusing on the production and distribution of printed texts during the period of Atlantic slavery and emancipation. We will explore the establishment of the Caribbean press over the course of the eighteenth century, when it served and facilitated the rise of a plantocratic economy dependent on institutionalized slavery. We will then turn to the emergence of an alternative press that challenged the planter class and forwarded the abolitionist cause, and that—in the wake of emancipation—agitated on behalf of newly-liberated working classes. The course examines publishing and editing as material processes, taking into account the physical and social conditions of textual production and reproduction. It relies extensively on archival sources, including works produced by the planter press, read and analyzed alongside readings from the Jamaica Watchman and Free Press, the first Anglo-Caribbean newspaper edited and published by people of color, and the Liberal, edited by Samuel J. Prescod, a Barbadian national hero. Through class readings, writing assignments, and projects, students will engage with such issues as readers and readerships (the public sphere), the “power” of the press and its implementation, and representations of a “free” press in slave and post-slave societies.