Harriet Jacobs, Editor

Abstract: This article analyzes Jacobs’s editorial engagement with white print culture in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). It focuses specifically on Jacobs’s treatment of manuscript (handwritten) as well as printed documents—how she reprints but also prints for the first time a handful of white-authored letters, which she strategically juxtaposes in and around her own printed prose. The article begins by contextualizing Jacobs’s editorial work through a discussion of kindred efforts undertaken by William Wells Brown and William Still. It then turns to Incidents , exploring how Jacobs conjures and positions herself as a literary editor of the seduction novel through her presentation of white men’s use of letters to “seduce” her. Placing allusions to well-known white-authored British texts within the world of American enslavement her narrative describes, she likewise acts as their editor, subordinating the writers of the imperial metropole to her own story. Finally, Jacobs edits American writings that directly uphold enslavement, making Incidents itself an archive of white print culture’s violence—and her narrative’s a retaliation to it. Reading Jacobs as an editor creates productive potential for new approaches to other Black authors—to their engagements not only with white print culture but also with each other.