Hidden Literacies

What It Means to Be “Hidden”

The political scientist James C. Scott has written, “You could say that, historically, the goal of peasants and subaltern classes has been to stay out of the archives. When they do make an appearance, you can be pretty sure that something has gone terribly wrong.”1 The kind of discovery that may delight a modern researcher—an intriguing glimpse, tucked inconspicuously in an acid-free folder, of the kinds of lives or activities rarely reflected in textbook histories—is oftentimes also the trace of a tragedy. An intimate letter that would have disappeared in private hands may survive to this day in a government archive because it was captured in wartime. A letter written by an enslaved woman to her distant husband may be preserved in the voluminous family archive of the wealthy planters who enslaved him—and didn’t give him the letter. A Native American leader’s ideographic signature speaks to us from the bottom of a land deed she brokered under the duress of unstoppable settler colonialism.

There are many ways the work of someone’s literacy may be hidden—truly buried away from view, or hidden in plain sight; misunderstood, or inscrutable according to dominant understandings of reading and writing. At every turn, our contributors have reminded us that “hidden” is a fraught notion: hidden from whom, by whom, and for what purpose? Texts written in the Cherokee syllabary, for instance, are in no way hidden from those fluent in the language and familiar with the writing system. Our characterization of the texts and literacies represented here as “hidden,” therefore, should not be taken to mean they are in any objective sense obscure or marginal. Also, some texts are hidden for a reason—texts that are intimate, or personal, or even sacred and were never meant to be publicly consumed—and we have a responsibility to approach such texts respectfully and with integrity.

Most of the texts included here are accidental or casual creations. Certainly some of them are very carefully constructed, but all were produced outside traditional understandings of literary production and consumption. Most were never published (and the one that was, the Narrative of the Imprisonment of John Maroney, survives only in a single copy). They circulated in a limited way, usually reaching an audience of just a few or no audience at all. The Nelson brothers’ homespun magazine, “Chit Chat,” may never have left the walls of the family home. Cesar Lyndon’s account book was probably for his eyes only. But these texts harbor explanatory power that published texts generally do not. They tell us about what the process of actually putting a pen to paper was like for an individual who didn’t have access to publishing; oftentimes, unusual or innovative ways of using language will be seized upon by just those people who were excluded from more conventional modes of literacy. 

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