The Racialization of Print
Currently under revision after peer review, this book will come out in 2027 from the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press.
The Racialization of Print traces the historical emergence of the belief that a single book, by virtue of its author’s racial identity, can reveal profound truths about an entire race of people. Drawing on a decade of archival research, as well as the works of authors like John Smith, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Baron de Vastey, William Apess, and Frederick Douglass, this project offers a corrective to our still common desire to approach books with assumptions about extracting racial knowledge. Here is a draft of the table of contents.
A program essay outlining the stakes of the project appeared in American Literary History in 2020.
London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
"Joseph Rezek's . . . capacity to animate his research and his willingness to let it demonstrate complex, sometimes contradictory movements in literary history are entirely admirable features of this impressive first book."—Times Literary Supplement
"Joseph Rezek's London and the Making of Provincial Literature is a landmark achievement in Atlantic literary studies . . . . Rezek's book deserves the widest possible audience, and should serve as reference point for all scholars of Irish, Scottish, and American literature who are interested in the Atlantic world or the history of the book."—The Wordsworth Circle
"An important and excellent book, of equal interest to specialist readers and to those unfamiliar with the story of how Scottish, Irish, and American literature arose in the shadow of London's literary power. Indebted to Bourdieu but working with a new method of his own, Rezek shows how it is still possible, in an oft visited landscape, to make extraordinary discoveries."—Pascale Casanova, author of The World Republic of Letters
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. By Edgar Allan Poe.
At the end of this Smith & Taylor Classics edition, there is a published conversation between Joseph Rezek and Nathan Wolff. Profs. Rezek and Wolf were interviewed in the Boston Globe about the project.
