Marcy Dinius (DePaul University): "David Walker's Textual Engagements"

Our speaker writes:

My talk will be centered on Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, the radical political pamphlet published by activist David Walker in three editions in Boston between 1829 and 1830. The first half of the talk will be drawn from my forthcoming book The Textual Effects of David Walker’s Appeal: Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829-1851, focusing on how Walker modeled critical textual engagement as vital to Black Americans’ intellectual development, political citizenship, and social advancement. I will briefly survey the effects of this advice on four writer-activists who published important pamphlets between 1831 and 1851 that adapted and extended Walker’s powerful arguments to other Americans in times of great political and social change. In the talk’s second half, I will share the early stages of ongoing work on Walker and his pamphlet that looks back to understand the late Enlightenment intellectual roots of Walker’s theories and practices of history, pedagogy, politics, and textuality by way of his explicit and implicit engagements with an impressive range of texts.  

About our speaker:

Marcy J. Dinius is an Associate Professor of English at DePaul University. Her research focuses on aesthetic and political representation at sites of technological reproduction (early photography, the type case and the printing press) and in theorizations of the human and human (in)capacities. Her first book, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype was published by Penn Press in 2012. Her second book is also forthcoming from Penn this April.