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Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions by Geoffrey Sanborn (review)

Geoffrey Sanborn’s groundbreaking new book reveals stunning information about the extent of William Wells Brown’s textual appropriations. In Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions, Sanborn uncovers that Brown “plagiarized at least 87,000 words from at least 282 texts. He did not merely borrow ideas or creatively metabolize a major source text or two; he copied, for the most part, word for word” (8). Sanborn supports this discovery with an appendix that charts the plagiarized passages in ten of Brown’s written texts. The bibliography of plagiarized sources runs thirteen pages and includes government documents, abolitionist tracts, novels, short stories, and texts by, for example, Horace Greeley, Angelina Grimké, Wendell Phillips, Thaddeus Stevens, and Lydia Maria Child. Plagiarama! is an important new book that, in addition to this game-changing information, offers a provocative and celebratory reading of Brown’s texts and personae. Plagiarama! examines Brown’s appropriative methods through a formalist and poststructuralist lens. In chapter 1, Sanborn speculates that Brown may be “the most original artist of nonoriginality in American literary history” (17). Observing that the idea of a stable identity is central to moralizing about plagiarism, Sanborn focuses instead on Brown’s evasion of a stable identity and his “highly performative understanding of the self and its signifiers” (8). Sanborn briefly discusses nineteenth-century attitudes to plagiarism, noting that although Frederick Douglass had caught and publicly critiqued an episode of Brown’s plagiarism (36), the public exposure did not stop him. Brown soon penned a defense of Alexandre Dumas who had been accused of plagiarism. Brown’s apologia, however, was itself plagiarized (39). Brown’s boundary blurring—for a moment’s pleasure or a political goal—is the major theme of Plagiarama! Chapter 2 discusses Brown’s expert manipulation of folk tales, jokes, and anecdotes as part of Brown’s “thoroughly American” (50) “spirit of capitalization” (53) that manifests in wit, self-interestedness, ethics-mocking, and code-switching. According to Sanborn, Brown employs these strategies as part of an attempt to create oral and written texts “capable of joining very different people in an enjoyable physiological and psychic experience” (63). Sanborn’s perceptive and in-depth historicizing of dominant white culture, however, fails