Johanna Pelikan

Literary Crafticipation: Craft and Emancipation in African American Literature
and Literary Culture of the Long Nineteenth Century

Johanna Pelikan’s postdoctoral project “Literary Crafticipation: Craft and Emancipation in African American Literature and Literary Culture of the Long Nineteenth Century” explores the entangled relationship between craft and emancipation in African American literature of the long nineteenth century. Approaching craft as a conceptual rather than a purely physical activity, the project investigates how the persistent presence of crafting, understood as the skilled, hand mediated transformation of raw materials into meaningful objects, is bound up with African American emancipatory efforts. The project considers how, for example, sewing in Harriet Jacobs’ narration shapes her flight into freedom, how woodworking informs Booker T. Washington’s postbellum accounts of industrial education as a path toward emancipation, and how Frederick Douglass’ narration of writing and printmaking as craft practices shape the emancipatory power of authorship and an arising Black literary public. It also considers how the printed narrative itself is not merely a vehicle for but an object with emancipatory power rooted in its very crafted nature. Moving beyond the conception of craft as mere representation of socioeconomic reality, the project proposes a multilayered entanglement of craft and emancipation in long-nineteenth-century African American literature and literary culture, which is captured in the term crafticipation.