The editor invites chapter proposals for an edited collection exploring
the work of Dave the Potter, or David Drake (ca. 1800-1874), a
nineteenth-century African American slave and potter who worked in
Edgefield, South Carolina. In addition to making some of the largest
hand-built pottery of the period, Drake incised writing onto his
storage jars and pots—signatures, proverbs, couplets of poetry, and
witticisms. Some of this writing is documentational, but much of it is
proverbial and poetic. Overtly disobeying prohibitions against slave
literacy, these inscriptions range in tone from the audacious ("I made
this jar" or "Cash Wanted") to the absurd ("Making this Jar–I Had All
Thoughts/Lads & Gentlemen–Never Out Walks"). Save for a few
commentators, such as craft historian John Vlach, journalist and
fiction writer Leonard Todd, McKissick Museum curator Jill Beute
Koverman, and my own chapter in Fugitive Vision (Indiana, 2008), Dave
the Potter and the implications of his art and writing have hardly been
discussed by the scholarly community. This collection is an attempt to
rectify that scarcity of commentary.

Possible topics include:

- Dave the Potter as subject of contemporary art and writing in Leonard
Todd’s Carolina Clay, or Laban Carrick Hill and Bryan Collier’s award
winning children’s book Dave the Potter, or Chicago artist Theaster
Gates’s exhibit and installation “To Speculate Darkly”.

- Dave’s place in a revamped art history or literary canon of the US,
of South Carolina, of African Americans, or of the Diaspora

- Comparisons of Dave and other artisans, artists, or writers

- Dave’s work as the site for an intervention into theories or methods
of critical race studies, history, art history, slave signatures,
inscriptions, poetry, heroic couplets, hybridity, pottery, colonoware,
ceramic form, notions of interdisciplinarity, fungibility, canonicity,
Diaspora, etc.

- Analyses (from a range of approaches) of Dave’s poetic inscriptions
as well as his vessels

This list is more suggestive than exhaustive: the editor and the
university presses interested in this collection welcome a range of
topics, approaches, and disciplines.

Queries should be submitted to michael.chaneydartmouth.edu.
Please send 400-600 word proposals as well as a C.V. to the same email
address by March 1st 2012. Completed chapter-essays for accepted
proposals will be due by June 1st 2012.