The Racialization of Print

Readers since Thomas Jefferson have believed it possible to judge entire races of people based on a single book, yet no one has attempted to explain the origins of this preconception. In The Racialization of Print, Joseph Rezek traces the history of this belief from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth and examines its extraordinary power in Anglo-American culture. Through an intertwined history of print, race, and authorship, Rezek argues that printed books first became associated with racial categories in the early modern period and that, by the late eighteenth century, books by minority writers were seen as “specimens” of racial genius. Rezek also shows how Black and Indigenous authors of the nineteenth century strategically embraced the printed book’s representative potential for sovereignty and political justice.

Offering a provocatively original story about familiar media—and new stories about authors such as John Smith, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Baron de Vastey, William Apess, and Frederick Douglass—Rezek shows that understanding the origins of the connection between print and race can help us grapple with what it means to read across racial divisions today.