Bucknell University Press

Edimus quod nobis libet.

November 8, 2021 by Pamelia Dailey

University Press Week Day 1: Guest blogger Manu Chander

To kick off the 10th annual University Press Week (UP Week) celebration, we invited author Manu Samriti Chander to share his thoughts on publishing with university presses and why they matter. Professor Chander’s first book, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century, published by Bucknell UP in 2017, calls for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry. Reviewers agree, proclaiming it “the kind of book that Romantic literary studies has needed for a very long time”[1] and declaring, “[t]here’s no doubt that it will be looked back upon as a landmark work in Romantic studies.”[2]

“‘Leo’s’ poems have not even the thinnest guise of poetry. They illustrate a strain of trite, and often silly reflection, and a sentiment of ‘goodiness’ that is nauseating.” That was one London reviewer’s assessment of a poetry collection called Leo’s Poetical Works, which was published in 1883. The author in question, “Leo,” was an Afro-Guianese poet and essayist whose birth name was Egbert Martin. The review, which appeared in the Saturday Review on May 3, 1884, made its way across the Atlantic and back to Martin, who, understandably, took offense, writing in the preface to his second collection, Leo’s Local Lyrics, “Some…held that my book of poems published in 1883 contained too much ‘goody-goodiness,’ and I must confess that I have deliberately searched through at least two dictionaries without being able to discover such a word.” In a world in which an English reviewer’s opinion would always trump that of a Black colonial subject, Martin nevertheless found a way to express his frustration with the imperial order of things.

I learned of Martin’s poetry while conducting research for my first book, Brown Romantics, which looked at the way that colonial writers in the nineteenth century struggled to be considered as what Emerson (whom Martin had read and admired) called a “representative man”: “a monarch who gives a constitution to his people; a pontiff who preaches the equality of souls and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an emperor who can spare his empire.” Or, in the case of the Brown Romantics, a poet capable of unifying diverse readers into a coherent whole. Martin, along with such figures as Henry Derozio in India and Henry Lawson in Australia, saw poetry as a means of community-building, a way of forging connections among peoples through the shared experience of reading. My book sought to recognize these figures in a way that reviewers from centers of literary power rarely did. 

Shortly after the publication of Brown Romantics, as I was preparing an edition of Martin’s collected works, I visited Le Repentir Cemetery in Georgetown, Guyana, where, I knew from my research, Martin was buried. When I arrived at the cemetery office I was met by a woman who had never heard of the poet. She asked me to write down his information, name and date of death: “Egbert Martin,” I wrote, “June 24, 1890.” Just wait, she told me, and she headed to a back room, returning after several minutes with a large log book. When she found the page for June 1890, my heart sped up, and it continued to race as she ran her finger down the yellowed page. It landed on Martin’s name, penciled in neat cursive. Age: 29. Nation: Demerara. The log indicated where he was buried by division (New General), space number (30), and grave number (108). I asked if I could visit the spot, and I was told it’s a “mud grave,” no marker, nothing to see.

“Pecuniary success,” wrote Martin in the preface to Leo’s Poetical Works, “is…outside the Author’s anticipations; and fame, the idol of so many, for him has so little attraction that he cares not so much as to couple his name with his works.” And yet, we know from his response to his London critic, he was not without pride. I wonder what it might have meant to him to know that, over a one-hundred twenty years later, someone would see in his poetry something more than “trite” and “silly” “goodiness.” I wonder what it might have meant to him, as he labored daily over his verse, a “confirmed invalid,” as one British Guianese newspaper described him, largely confined to his home at 317 East Street in Georgetown (this, at least, is the address listed in an issue of the London periodical Truth on January 6, 1887)–I wonder what it might have meant for him to know that someone would one day see in the poems he wrote a serious contribution to that literary movement we call “Romanticism,” worthy of collecting and making available to readers across the globe.

Poetry is not as popular as it was in Martin’s time (although it is making a bit of a comeback). It is not regularly published in daily newspapers for readers to peruse casually as they get caught up on the events of the day. Nor is the study of poetry the stuff of popular books, not usually at least. It is largely sustained by scholars and, importantly, publishers who see value in poetic labor, both the labor of producing poetry and that of thinking through poetry in prose. Beyond–to recall Martin’s phrase–“pecuniary success,” we believe that something is gained, that the world is somehow better when we reserve a space for the analysis of line breaks and metrical substitutions, textual variations and publication histories. Perhaps that belief makes us Romantics, as well. If so–if we who publish with and work for university presses are inheritors of certain Romantic commitments–we have figures such as Martin to thank for sustaining these commitments, and for reminding us to sustain them as well.

Manu Samriti Chander is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark and the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell UP, 2017). He is currently editing The Collected Works of Egbert Martin (Oxford UP) and The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge UP) and writing a second monograph, Browntology, under contract with SUNY Press.


[1] “Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century is the kind of book that Romantic literary studies has needed for a very long time. Brown Romantics examines how and why poets from India, Guyana, and Australia placed themselves into conversation with authors now commonly associated with British Romanticism. The book significantly expands our understanding of canonical Romanticism’s transnational reach and revises critical commonplaces that have defined Romantic aesthetics since the nineteenth century.”
— Papers on Language and Literature

[2] “This book has already provided a focal point for a new direction in Romantic studies, as emerging research clusters around its central claims. There’s no doubt that it will be looked back upon as a landmark work in Romantic studies.”
— Romantic Circles

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Brown Romantics, Manu Chander, poetry, Romantic, University Press Week, UP Week

November 9, 2020 by Pamelia Dailey

Amplifying Voices from Sierra Leone

A Guest Blog Post for University Press Week

“Sierra Leone, your tragedy was too painful to be a poem.
If you could speak, it would be raw in my bones!”
–Syl Cheney-Coker, “Lake Fire,” in Stone Child and Other Poems (2008)

My work in postwar settings has taught me that our moral indignation and empathic response to others’ pain sometimes recedes, and we grow numb, no longer capable of effective political action to prevent, oppose, or end injustice. Unlike sterile news reports, creative expression such as poetry can help us move past numbness and retain (or regain) a capacity to respond. After spending more than five years working as a psychologist and human rights advocate in international contexts, I was drawn to “found poetry,” a genre in which phrases from existing sources are presented in new ways. Found poetry is a vehicle for transforming seemingly indescribable events into literary expression, and powerfully impresses on the mind of the reader the voices of those affected.

I first encountered public transcripts from the UN-backed international war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone in 2005, when serving as a psychologist for the trials held in Freetown. It became evident to me that eleven years of civil war had resulted in a new reality in which the unthinkable had become a part of daily life:

“…in Kono
when they chop off people’s hands
we use tobacco leaf
to tie it round the wounded place.”

The rebels who had tried to overthrow the Sierra Leonean government were eventually defeated, but the country suffered tremendous losses. The testimonies – comprising hundreds of witness reports – deserved the attention of the international community, but that attention was limited. A number of poets from the West African sub-region have tried to rectify that by creating poems pertaining to the war. Among these, the most notable are Liberian American Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, who has published several collections featuring poems about the two civil wars in neighboring Liberia, and Syl Cheney-Coker from Sierra Leone, whose 2008 collection contains compelling poems about the civil war in his homeland. Now, I have rendered the public transcripts into poetry to make a broader global community aware of the war’s impact and to underscore the twin truths of survivor suffering and resilience.

After I compiled this collection, I was faced with the task of identifying a publisher who would consider a book by a first-time author, the subject matter and genre of which were largely unfamiliar. I had a hunch that commercial publishers would not accept this book, but that a university press might. In spring 2019, I was blessed to contact Dr. Carmen R. Gillespie – poet, literary scholar, professor of English, founder and director of the Griot Institute for Africana Studies at Bucknell University, and editor of Griot Project Book series. She had a warm, encouraging attitude toward my proposal, and despite her sudden passing in August 2019, the book is now due out from Bucknell University Press in July 2021.

 As I sit here today reflecting on the results of the U.S. presidential election, my mind and heart go back to the many Sierra Leonean women, men, and children whose limbs, lives, and voices were taken from them as a punishment for exercising their right to vote for a civilian government and their refusal to support a rebel force that tried to rob them of that right:

 “Since you say you love a civil government
we are going to chop off your hands,
we will not let you go free.
If we don’t chop off your hands,
we’re going to kill you.”

After the war finally ended, Sierra Leoneans began the long, hard work of attempting to rebuild—and restore faith in—their society and country. That effort is ongoing in Sierra Leone as, indeed, it is in the United States and many other countries across the globe where rights have been violated and power abused. In August 2007, shortly before I left Freetown, millions of Sierra Leoneans all over the country braved long lines to vote in the first presidential election since the end of the long civil war. Those who had had one arm severed by the rebels voted with the other. Those who had been cruelly robbed of both arms voted with their toe-print. There is so much, so very much, that the world can learn from Sierra Leoneans’ determination to survive and to preserve or reclaim their dignity and human rights, including the right to vote and be counted.

University presses help make it possible to know about these stories, and to develop a keener alertness to the ways that language is used in public life: the kind of rhetoric that rationalizes aggression and the kind that serves to reduce it. If we strive to pay attention, we can discern truths that would otherwise slip away. Where do we locate the words to give voice to these truths? The words that we need might be anywhere. The words that we need might be everywhere. Listen. Read.

Shanee Stepakoff is a psychologist and human rights advocate whose research on the traumatic aftermath of war has appeared in such journals as Peace and Conflict and The International Journal of Transitional Justice. Her collection of found poetry, Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone, is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press in June 2021.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Found Poetry, Shanee Stepakoff, Sierra Leone, UP Week

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