This session explores nineteenth-century U.S. periodical print culture as a vital yet vexed site for redefining who counts as human, and consequently, for imagining citizenship and belonging in the nation. Periodicals played an especially significant role in the development of African American political life and literary practice. As Frances Smith Foster has importantly argued, early African American print culture emerged from a desire for black self-actualization that did not limit itself to contesting slavery and white racism. Our session participates in recent scholarly efforts to theorize the recovery and growing accessibility of nineteenth-century black periodicals.

The papers in this session offer a diversity of approaches in their efforts to chart the complex relations between race and print culture and the formative role of the black press during and after the Civil War. The session begins with two papers that offer contrasting perspectives—from a bilingual black New Orleans daily and a white “Yankee” humor magazine—on the shifting rhetorical and linguistic registers of race and nation in Civil War-era print culture. The third paper investigates how black writers used turn-of-the-century black periodicals like The Colored American Magazine and The Voice of the Negro as spaces to resist U.S. imperialism, as more mainstream white newspapers began assuring readers of the nation’s rightful place in the global sphere, often by naturalizing racial and national hierarchies. Fittingly, the session ends with a paper reflecting on the politics of recovery that shaped a twentieth-century republication initiative by The New York Times and Arno Press to recuperate this purportedly lost era of nineteenth-century black print culture. By analyzing a variety of print practices and materials, including bilingual Civil War reporting, ethnographies, cartoons, reprinted novels, and book series, this session investigates the multilingual and international influences shaping early African American print culture and its various readerly communities. It also explores the challenges of deploying an ephemeral print culture as an avenue to local, national, and global political change.

Ben Fagan’s paper begins the session by asking why it matters that a daily black newspaper reported on the Civil War in English and French. Rather than simply translations of one another, the newspaper’s two linguistic sections— two pages in English, and two in French—largely carried separate content. In contrast to earlier criticism that presumes The New Orleans Tribune/La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orleans addressed different audiences through its writing in different languages, Fagan notes that coverage of the New Orleans draft of 4,000 people exemplifies how stories in the paper’s English and French sections refer to one another. Thus, the reporting on a local event in a domestic war sheds new light on its multilingual audience, inviting us to consider how imperial history and multicultural heritage informed readers’ understanding of the Civil War.

Sarah Sillin’s paper turns its attention to the Civil War-era humor magazine–Yankee Notions–and explores how this white-owned Northern periodical defines the impact of war upon the nation’s global identity. In particular, the magazine’s cartoons address anxieties and desires that changing foreign politics elicited by invoking pervasive national and racial caricatures. For example, one cartoon playfully evoked fears about the nation’s status as a “civilized” country by joking that the “King of the Cannibal Isles” identified with the U.S. South. Another fantasized that Union victory would affirm the country’s place as a white empire, leading “Johnny Bull” to solicit U.S. intervention in Mexico. By revising familiar caricatures, the cartoons hint at the war’s destabilizing effects, even while assuring white American readers that “we” already understand foreign peoples and invite “us” to share a knowing laugh at their expense. Yankee Notions thus highlights the challenge such humor posed to black periodicals that asked readers to recognize foreign peoples’ shared humanity to contest racial violence at home and abroad.

Moving to the era of U.S. empire in the Pacific, Edlie Wong’s paper explores the significance of overseas colonialism to black Americans grappling with the contradictions of U.S. citizenship and national identity during the era of legal segregation. Against the rising tide of Progressive-era white nativism, black writers drew upon the linked histories of black, Asian, and Latinx racialization to craft powerful critiques of the U.S. racial state. Wong explores the cross-racial and interethnic tensions and alliances depicted in the ethnographies and fiction of S.E.F.C.C. Hamedoe, a regular contributor to the Colored American Magazine from 1900-1904. Hamedoe’s essays map the political contours of the emerging Global South, tracing an eastward route from Haiti, Ghana, Benin, Botswana, Zanzibar, Madagascar, India, and Thailand to the new U.S. territories of the Philippines, Samoa, and Hawaii.This talk charts an early “black Pacific” literary history that emerged at the precise moment when U.S. Manifest Destiny transitioned into overseas empire.

Autumn Womack’s paper concludes the session by turning to the 1968New York Times and Arno Press venture, which republished 45 mostly nineteenth-century titles. “The American Negro: His History and His Literature” serial initiativedefined the task of constructing and recovering a “lost” epoch of black American history as crucial to imagining a black future. This equation of historical recovery with political futurity offers a critical lens onto the post-Bellum/pre-Harlem period, in which thedisappearance of the African American bound novel corresponded with the proliferation of black newspapers. The novels that bookend this lacuna–Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends(1857), Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy(1892), Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition(1901), and Paul Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods(1902)–offer a concept of history as “lost news” positioned against the ephemerality of print culture. Womack suggests that the paradox of hyper production and absence challenges the celebratory narratives of recovery that have come to dominate black literary criticism.

Taken together, these four papers address the possibility and fragility of a black public sphere, shedding new light on the political significance of the black periodical archives that proliferated throughout the long nineteenth century.