Hidden Literacies: An Archive of Other Pasts
European settler colonialism emerged simultaneously with landmark developments in the history of literacy—developments that favored the European penchant for written texts as surely as capitalism and technology abetted their colonial project and the rise of the nation called the United States of America. These developments undercut non-alphabetic forms of expression in favor of a seemingly monolithic version of print culture. Between the seventeenth century and the early nineteenth, movable type became widespread, growing distribution networks carried texts over sea and land, and steam-powered presses exponentially increased the output of printed material. A rapidly growing system of public and private libraries preserved all these texts, and schools taught an unprecedented number of people—mostly the Europeans’ descendents, though sometimes others, too—how to read them and (less often) how to write texts of their own.
However easy it seems today to take this vast written record for granted along with the literacy that makes it accessible, scholars in recent decades have demonstrated that literacy has no universal effects (see For Further Reading). Reading and writing are not neutral skills every literate person uses the same way. Literacy mutates as it interacts with different cultural practices, and it can serve and be shaped by particular ideologies of knowledge. An alphabet is not a natural or inevitable medium for communication and record-keeping; it is the one Europeans spread and made dominant. And a lot of human experience never became part of the archives alphabetic literacy spawned, or it appears there only in traces—partial, indirect, obscure, or skewed by the perspectives of those with the most power to write texts and keep archives. For all the certitude a person supposes when saying something is “right there in black and white,” there are countless contingencies in the ways written texts embody, encode, make knowable—and hide—human experience.
Hidden Literacies is an archive of a sort most people—even many students and teachers of American literature—have not seen. It includes texts created by people who weren’t formally educated or whose ways of reading and writing were not mainstream in their own time; texts that have been rarely or unevenly preserved, that are hard for non-specialists to make sense of. By making these kinds of texts newly accessible, Hidden Literacies makes the human lives and experiences behind them newly visible. The kinds of texts included here—some alphabetic, others in different media or languages—can be difficult to read. They are not necessarily illegible (though sometimes they are) but hard to read for people educated in and acculturated to standard English literacy, accustomed to print rather than manuscript documents. To make this wonderful variety of texts more accessible, we have included transcriptions, occasionally translations, and paired them with expert commentary to draw out their meanings. We invite you, following this brief introduction, to peruse these texts along any number of paths.