A Symposium: “The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict” |
" A Symposium: “The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict” Event time: Friday, March 4, 2016 - 8:00am Location: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (BRBL) 121 Wall St. New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: “The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict” exploring the significance of Austin Reed’s work to the canon of African American literature and the histories of slavery and incarceration in the United States.
Organized by Professor Caleb Smith, Department of English, speakers will include Louise Bernard (Ralph Applebaum Associates), Jeannine DeLombard (UC Santa Barbara), Joy James (Williams College), and Geoff Ward (UC Irvine).
There will be two panels as well as a library session with the manuscript itself.
Sponsored by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; and by the Departments of English and African American Studies. Open to: General Public
(Ficklin Media Note:
A rare manuscript discovered years ago in Rochester, N.Y., is believed to be the first recovered memoir written by a black prisoner, the New York Times reported.
The memoir, dated 1858, was authenticated by Yale University to put in its Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
"The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, or the Inmate of a Gloomy Prison" details the life of Austin Reed, a prisoner in upstate New York, from the 1830s to the 1850s.
"It’s still a very unusual thing for us to find any previously unknown document from this period by an African-American writer," Caleb Smith, an English professor at Yale, told the Times. "From a literary point of view, I think there’s no other voice in American literature like the voice of this penitentiary narrative, which has a very lyrical quality. And from a historical perspective, what makes this so fascinating at this moment is the deep connection between the history of slavery and the history of incarceration.”
According to Smith, news articles, court records and prison files from the same time period supported the stories detailed in the memoir. Beineke library curator Nancy Kuhl added that the memoir "significantly enriches the canon of 19th-century African-American literature and deepens our understanding of all 19th-century America."
Experts believe that Reed was born a free man near Rochester and was sent to juvenile reform school in Manhattan, the New York House of Refuse, where he learned to read and write. A string of thefts led to his imprisonment in the 1830s in Auburn, N.Y.
The New York Times describes the memoir, written under the name "Rob Reed," as being written with "the dramatic flair of a natural storyteller," but also as being riddled with grammatical and spelling errors. It tells of Reed's childhood and leads up to his time in the Auburn prison.
Comments