Reading Pleasures Everyday Black Living in Early America

"What is most beautiful about these chapters is the way that Bynum maintains a delightful voice, a first-person perspective that centers her own pleasure in the researching and writing of this book. Her curiosity permeates each page. . . . She models for the reader what it is to read with curiosity and how to allow the interiority of others to inform our own, resulting in a communal experience." --Little Village Magazine
"Sit down, read this book, and become a changed reader, scholar, and human. Sit down, and learn from Tara Bynum about worlds of Black experience--joy, longing, pleasure--beyond the white gaze. Through her brilliant literary research and reading of early African American literature, Bynum achieves the full humanity that a viciously segregated, racialized world denies all of us: some in body, some in understanding and spirit. In so doing, this book exemplifies what the humanities should be all about."--Joanna Brooks, author of Why We Left: Untold Songs and Stories of America's First Immigrants