Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America by Tara Bynum (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America by Tara Bynum Karen Cook Bell (bio) Keywords African American history, Literary analysis, Phillis Wheatley, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, David Walker Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America. By Tara Bynum. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. 184. Cloth, 110. 00; paper, 25. 00; ebook, 19. 95. ) Tara Bynum's Reading Pleasures examines the ways in which a relatively elite group of Black people in early America lived outside of the "white gaze. " By examining the letters and narratives written by four literate Africans and African Americans, Bynum states as her argument that "we—as scholars, students, or as a general public—don't talk enough about what feels good to Black people when there is no white gaze" (1). Bynum is a literary scholar and Reading Pleasures is not a history text, but a literary analysis of the writings of poet Phillis Wheatley, ministers James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and John Marrant, and pamphleteer David Walker. Specifically, Bynum examines the "interiority" of their lives and what made them "feel good and write about it despite living while enslaved or nominally free" (3). Poet Elizabeth Alexander defines "interiority" as "the 'inner space' wherein lies those selves that go far, far beyond the limited expectations and definitions of what Black is, isn't or should be" (2). Reading Pleasures' four chapters challenge discursive ideas about Black people in early America, self-making, and community. By focusing on quotidian and simple pleasures that made life easier, Bynum presents a counter-narrative to the depiction of Black people in early America as one-dimensional beings. Wheatley, Gronniosaw, Marrant, and Walker's reading practices memorialize a racial identity even as it suffers its way into being. What these writers have in common is their concern for and belief in a Christian faith. Their faith "brings them together intertextu-ally by way of a friendship or collaboration, masonry, Protestantism, the popular itinerant minister the Reverend George Whitfield, or publishing—in mobile, Atlantic, Protestant communities" (6). Bynum makes contemporary applications of recent history to understand the everyday pleasures of Black life in early America in a section titled "Reading #Black Lives Matter. " She posits that behind the call for resistance and refusal in protests to the murders of many Black women and men is End Page 138 "the very possibility and pursuit of its pleasures" (9). By using #Black-LivesMatter as a modality of reading, Bynum seeks to make meaning out of the collective and affective experiences of Wheatley, Gronniosaw, Mar-rant, and Walker. The writings Bynum examines are integral to the study of early Black life in America. Phillis Wheatley's correspondence with Obour Tanner, whom Bynum describes as a "sister-in-Christ and a sister-in-love, " reveal an intimacy through a reading and exchange with a dear friend and the inner pleasures that the letters convey. In seeking to reveal the many interiorities of Wheatley, Bynum provides a portrait of Wheatley that has not been fully captured in other studies. Wheatley writes about joy and even tells jokes, and in so doing reveals that the interior lives and erotic subjectivities of enslaved Black people do matter. According to Bynum, "Wheat-ley's letters and their resulting pleasures publicize the interiority that makes real what matters to her as a faithful believer, a writer, poet, a friend, and wife" (50). The reading lives of James Gronniosaw and John Marrant are especially didactic. Gronniosaw, a Methodist and former slave who eventually lives free in England, published his Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince in 1774, the first text printed in England authored by an African man (51). A decade after Gronniosaw's publication John Marrant published his Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black in 1785. Both Gronniosaw and Marrant use the conversion narrative form to celebrate their faith and their call to ministry. Interestingly, Wheatley, Gronniosaw, and Marrant each received financial assistance from the Countess of Huntingdon to publish their respective works. Another thread that runs through the writings of these three writers is the enjoyment, happiness, and. . .