Introduction

Our project, Black Women and the 1884 World’s Fair, attempts to recover information about the Black women authors, orators, and craftspeople at and around the 1884 New Orleans Exposition as a way of responding to their exclusion from exhibiting with the Woman’s Department. When we started this project, we had to determine what recovery means in such a context: What does meaningful recovery look like, and how should we approach it in relation to Black women twenty years post-emancipation at an event billed as the “World Cotton Centennial”? A basic definition of literary recovery is the search for previously overlooked works to expose them to a larger audience for examination, teaching, and analysis. In order to arrive at such a seemingly simple definition, however, a slew of important caveats and questions go unspoken. Part of the work of recovery — especially for us: a group of white graduate students — is to examine and interrogate those unspoken considerations and use them to inform our methodology as we worked to foreground Black women creators. We remained aware that, as Cary Nelson says in the introduction to his monograph on this type of work, literary recovery “is never an innocent process” (Nelson 12). What are the limitations of recovery, and how can we work within them to nonetheless create a responsible recovery project? These introductory remarks attempt to name those challenges and outline our efforts to negotiate them in the
exhibits that follow.

Recovery Bias

First, we must recognize our own biases as scholars enacting the recovery process. Nelson makes clear that “what we ‘recover’ we necessarily rewrite” (Nelson 12), meaning that a given text’s reappearance in our exhibit in the 2020s will inevitably change how it will be interpreted — in effect, “rewrit[ing]” it. Nelson also reminds us that “we recover what we are culturally and psychologically prepared to recover” (12). In other words, our project cannot help but fall victim to our own biases and preferences as we judge the relevance of various women and works. The initial contributors to Black Women and the 1884 World’s Fair are all white, from similar educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, and, for the most part, close in age.

Similarities like these can lead to unconscious biases in how we have selected and especially in how we have analyzed works. Similarly, the biases of scholarship shape who and what we recover; our initial selection of women and works to recover relied on what kind of foundational scholarship (or lack thereof) already existed. Some women, such as Francis “Fannie” Barrier Williams, are included in our exhibits because they are already well known; others may have fit into the contemporary analysis of Black women’s literature better, such as Harriet Jacobs, and thus are more likely to be included in scholarly discourse.

In addition, to consciously avoiding as many of these biases as possible, our recovery efforts have sought to avoid the deification of the women we have recovered. We aim to recognize recovered figures as complex, flawed, and human, rather than overlook or gloss over these complexities when discussing their lives and works. To engage in recovery that aims to
correct an absence, we must do what we can to ensure that we are providing an accurate representation.

For an example of our own efforts, Julia Creson engaged in archival research in dozens of Black newspapers to locate coverage of the fair and the people involved with it. This examination of primary sources attempts to practice a less biased recovery by prioritizing Black thought about the fair instead of depending on more readily available, predominantly white newspapers. Julia’s research was, however, still limited by the widespread exclusion of women from the Black public sphere in this period, as well as by her own well-informed but subjective analyses.

The Wish List is another example of our attempt to ameliorate recovery biases. The list includes a wide range of underrepresented women who may not fit into contemporary trends in scholarship on Black women, or who are otherwise not yet widely familiar. The fact that the majority of the authors of this exhibit were graduate students meant that we did not need to consider whether these efforts would be likely to be published, since we were not yet professional scholars. Our relative flexibility allowed us to take more risks in studying women outside of our typical, accepted canons than would have been possible if we
had publication requirements.

We also attempted to avoid biases in how we present our works. For example, Madison Cramer and Julia Creson created a map using the newspapers Julia researched. While creating this map, they kept in mind the tendency of maps to perpetuate colonial ideologies. As a result, they centered their efforts on ensuring that the map would be structured by the voices of the Black Press, using whatever medium best suited their
presentation. While the initial contributors have sought to make unbiased recovery the guiding ideal for our work, further contributions to these exhibits will continue to improve our recovery. Our hope is that our efforts to offset biases will be augmented as more scholars contribute to this recovery project in the future.

Recovery as a Continuous Process

The focus of our recovery in Black Women and the 1884 World’s Fair has been the writings of Black women, which has also been the focus of many recovery projects — and rightly so, since Black women have been historically underrepresented in the literary canon. The story of American literature for the past few hundred years has been told with many gaps and exaggerations, due to white hegemonic control of the publishing and curricula, so this — often purposeful — centering of whiteness in what we think of as American Literature must be corrected. Uncovering a truer story is one central purpose of literary recovery: in Brigitte Fielder’s words, “recovering Black histories—and especially histories integral to print—offers us a much richer and a more honest sense of American literature and history” (18). Yet to gain that “sense” and change these conceptions, recovery must go beyond a “once and done” mentality. Instead, recovery is a continuous process that involves combating what Desirée Henderson calls “post-recovery neglect.” Recovery is perpetually incomplete because of the sheer volume of marginalized histories that have been erased and excluded, so recovery projects must be intentionally created to last and remain available for use. Too often, Black women’s work must be re-recovered when, at its initial presentation, it was not integrated into scholarship and/or further education. Instead, these women eventually fade back into relative obscurity.

We chose a digital platform – to which we encourage other scholars to contribute — in an effort to avoid such “post recovery neglect” (Henderson). That our site is fully available and not constrained by institutional access and/or pay walls makes it more accessible for ongoing
recovery efforts than more traditional avenues of dissemination like many academic journals. While websites can be forgotten, it is our hope that years from now this one will still be read, cited, and — most importantly — added to by students interested in the many recovery efforts comprised in these exhibits.

Recovery as Relational Canon

Recovery is not simply about adding voices to an established canon with the hope of filling in gaps to make it whole, but about how such additions transform the canon when they are included. This is the essential difference between working toward a relational understanding of canonicity rather than an additive one: Taking an additive view of recovery, already canonical
works remain unchanged as newly recovered works from previously excluded people are simply added alongside them. Just as with adding a new shirt or pair of shoes to a closet already full of clothes, the clothes that were already there are unaffected and the closet’s overall style will only change very slightly. A more thorough and lasting change would alter the whole by affecting all of the parts, rather than adding only one new piece. A better approach, then, is the relational notion of canon, where the inclusion of recovered literature not only transforms the overall collection but also changes the meaning of the items already there. This upheaval necessitates
not just new thought about the people added, but new thought about who was there before — and why. When it comes to works by Black women authors, “extending the canon to include such texts will contribute to a diverse and democratic society in need of an oppositional language,
socially critical perspectives of anger and idealization, and subject positions we can take up consciously” (Teres 64). Our recovery project aims to draw attention to the long history of Black women scholars, thinkers, and creators who acted as agents of their own liberation, adding them to a canon that has privileged the agency of white creatives and scholars.

In an effort to expand and also understand the original limits of the canon of the literary department of the Woman’s Department, we pose the question: What does Julia Ward Howe’s denial of Black women’s entry into the Woman’s Department do to our understanding of the Woman’s Exhibit, and how would the original inclusion of Black women have altered that understanding? To begin to answer, we must remember that the Woman’s Department was about modernity and national reconciliation: modernity in terms of working both inside and outside of the home (leaving room for Howe’s own motivations concerning (white) women’s suffrage) and reconciliation in terms of healing after the Civil War. As Miki Pfeffer said in a lecture about the Woman’s Department, “one of the reasons for being here was also to show the other women visitors what women could do in their lives… it was a needy time: Women needed to find work, either in the home or elsewhere” (Pfeffer 11:39). This sentiment is similar to Fannie Barrier Williams’ activist work, which prioritized professionalizing Black women’s labor in the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries. If Black women were included in the Woman’s Department, and not only the Colored Department, they would have not only bolstered white women’s display of women’s skills, but also gained attention and possibly more job opportunities for Black women. In addition, Pfeffer says that Howe “talked about how women were all ‘under one flag now’ after having been separated by Civil War and Reconstruction” (Pfeffer 3:36). We can assume she was referring to Northern and Southern white women, who would have been divided by the Civil War, but certainly excluding Black women did not support Howe’s idea that all women are “under one flag.” The inclusion of Black women thus would have fundamentally altered the message that Howe was attempting to convey with the Woman’s Department, as it would include Black women as capable of engaging in numerous kinds of productive labor, as well as deserving of a vote. Further, it would have given Black women a place in the reconstruction of the country after emancipation, doubtless altering history and literature.

Black Women and the 1884 World’s Fair includes several analyses of how exclusion
shapes our understanding of the Woman’s Department at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair.
“Fannie Barrier Williams and the Synecdochal Whole” and the Fannie Barrier Williams timeline jointly explore the dynamic and interrelated world of Black women’s authorship and activism through four key women who share a network of connections and who serve as exemplars of Black women who left their unimpeachable mark in the public record of their time. These readings of Fannie Barrier Williams (who exhibited in the Fair with the Colored Department) and Mary Church Terrell, Frances E. W. Harper, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (who might well have exhibited with the Woman’s Department had they been permitted) discuss how the world’s fair(s) at the turn of the twentieth century succeeded and failed to support an intersectional women’s, class, and racial liberation.

The Deliberateness of Exclusion

Another tenet of our recovery efforts has been to keep the deliberateness of the exclusion in mind at all stages of our work. As recovery scholar Fielder mentions, there is a tendency to use the healing of a disease as a metaphor for recovering lost works into the canon, but the canon is not suffering from some natural affliction; it has been deliberately and methodically curated in a way that excludes marginalized people, especially Black, queer, and trans folks. Our recovery project, therefore, attempts to embody “a practice of archival discovery that attends to the conditions that would produce textual absence” (Nishikawa 183). In other words, it is just as important to focus on the archive itself as a site of inquiry as on the texts that we add to it.

Often, recovered works are too quickly classified under already accepted understandings, immediately “categorized into legibility,” effectively substituting “an ideology of textual presence (‘Look what I found!’) for an assessment of textual absence (‘Why is this here at all?’)” (Nishikawa 176-177). This categorization serves to bolster existing beliefs about literature
instead of raising questions and thoroughly investigating. In Black Women and the 1884 World’s Fair, we begin not with the texts of Black women writers, but with the fact of and motivations for their exclusion from the Woman’s Department. Approaching a recovery effort this way often
forces us to reconsider our perception of these works and the society to which they belonged. For example, Madison Cramer has written a series of essays that view some nineteenth-century authors – both part of the World’s Fair and excluded from it – through the frameworks of trans and queer theory, frameworks that are often not used by scholars because the terms “trans” and “queer” were not in use during the nineteenth century. As recovery scholars, we have looked at these works with fresh eyes and an open mind, from a variety of angles and through a variety of lenses, in order to not reify thoughts about the established canon and the categories of meaning that produce and are produced by it. McCaskill raises a related point, asserting, “we may benefit from concentrating less exclusively on recovery and its uncertain outcomes and more on what the investigative process itself reveals about how to frame and then pursue questions about early African American women’s print cultures: where to look for traces of them, how to interpret what we find, and, in the first place, why these mechanisms matter” (McCaskill 13). The process of recovery itself is illuminating, not just the texts recovered.

Julia Creson’s aforementioned work researching Black periodicals published in the years around the 1884 New Orleans Fair also takes the deliberateness of Black women’s exclusion as the focal point of her analysis. Her examination deals with what the Black press thought of the Fair’s segregation of Black Americans’ exhibits into the Colored Department and whether those papers discussed the exclusion of Black women from the Woman’s Department. In the more than fifty newspapers about Black figures that she examined, only eight mentioned Black women by name. None discussed the exclusion of Black women from the Woman’s Department, although many
challenged the segregation of Black exhibits into the Colored Department. What does this say about the relative importance granted to Black women versus Black men, even in articles specifically about Black accomplishments? Beyond what was found (and, importantly, not found), Julia’s project also sheds light on the limits of the research process. The limitations of
preservation were obvious in the absences, but even among digitally-recorded articles, some of the newspapers that had been digitized were too blurry or had print too fine to read by search programs. In addition, Julia’s recovery of Black periodicals was only possible through her use of
Tulane University resources; without being associated with a university, many of the sites that she used to access newspapers would not have been available. Recovery of this sort was only possible because of enrollment in expensive and time-consuming higher education, and even with university affiliation some materials are further gated behind paywalls. Our recovery efforts attempt to increase accessibility by adding the Black newspapers and periodicals Julia found to This Beautiful Sisterhood of Books.

For Whom are We Recovering?

For this project, we hope to recover and make accessible works by Black women for a diverse audience with diverse needs. Much care has been taken to adhere to best practices developed for the digital humanities to make its findings as accessible as possible. The website is free and available to everyone, rather than locked behind a university or institutional affiliation,
not to mention the pre-emptive thought that has gone into website and exhibit layout and design. As noted, the purpose of literary recovery is to offer previously buried works for new practices of reading, teaching, and analysis, and we hope that all three goals can be achieved here. This website is open and accessible to those who wish to read about these women and their works, as well as those who wish to educate and be educated, from scholars and college students to high school teachers and students researching for a project or other coursework. Our wish is that this site inspires scholars to analyze previously under-studied Black women, for as Fielder says, “‘recovered’ texts are not simply ‘found’ but recognized and valued by scholars with the expertise to interpret them” (Fielder 19). Digital archives are a powerful tool for recovery scholarship, as Henderson observes, with the versatility they offer easing our ability to “make visible the diversity and flexibility encompassed by the label” African American writing
(Henderson 2).

Digital archives have yet another revolutionary aspect in their power: crowdsourcing. We at This Beautiful Sisterhood have not crafted this project solely to educate about the 1884
World’s Fair, but also to inspire others, including you reading this, to dig even deeper, both in recovery and in analysis. As a member of the crowd we are sourcing, we hope our readers examine our exhibits with as critical an eye as we have attempted to deploy in our recovery efforts.

Works Cited

Adams, Katherine, Sandra A. Zagarell, and Caroline Gebhard. “Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson for the Twenty- First Century: An Introduction.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 33, no. 2, 2016, pp. 213-253.

Barbara McCaskill. “Beyond Recovery: A Process Approach to Research on Women in Early African American Print Cultures.” Legacy, vol. 33, no. 1, 2016, pp. 12–18. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5250/legacy.33.1.0012.

Fielder, Brigitte. “Recovery.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, vol. 30, no. 1, 2020, pp. 18-21. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/751770.

Foster, Frances Smith. Introduction. Love and Marriage in Early African America. Northeastern U P, 2008.

Henderson, Desirée. “Recovery and Modern Periodical Studies.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, vol. 27, no. 1, 2017, pp. 2-5. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/652261.

Lauter, Paul and Sandra A. Zagarell. From “Forum on Democracy and Recovery.” Legacy, vol. 36, no. 2, 2019, pp. 236-266.

Moody, Jocelyn. Preface. “‘Sympathy and Revolution’ Notes.” Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women, 2001, pp. ix-25 and 179-183.

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945. U of Wisconsin P, 1989.

Nishikawa, Kinohi. “The Archive on Its Own: Black Politics, Independent Publishing, and The Negotiations.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 40, no. 3, 2015, pp. 176-201. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/593058.

Pfeffer, Miki. “Writing Women at the Fair, 1884-85.” YouTube, 29 Mar. 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coPM0cV84m8.

Teres, Harvey. “Repression, Recovery, Renewal: The Politics of Expanding the Canon.” Modern Philology, vol. 89, no. 1, 1991, pp. 63–75. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/438055.