Our session ties African American print culture studies with Black feminist criticism, highlighting the multiplicity of postbellum African American literature and sites of its production. We discuss well-known and obscure texts published in a variety of genres and print formats: the book-length epic poem, periodical fiction and advertisements, and serialized proto-science-fiction mystery. Patricia Hill Collins argues that dialectical relationships between opposing forces constitute U.S. Black feminist thought (2009). Taking the cue from Collins, we address the dialectics of reality and imagination, loss and recovery, old and new generations, resolution and indeterminacy, and disruption and reconnection that appear in Black-authored texts, especially those by women. In this way, our panel engages the Convention’s presidential theme, “Celebration: Joy and Sorrow.” African American writers have always recognized that joy often comes through or amid sorrow. Our panel shows how particular literary forms - from genre to image to style - advance a Black feminist vision to guide readers amid Reconstruction- and post-Reconstruction-era uncertainty. In so doing, our panel responds to Frances Smith Foster’s historic call for attention to the diversity of African American print culture (2005), showcasing the kaleidoscopic range of early African American literature.

We begin with Jewon Woo’s “Lost and Found in the Newspaper.” With examples from Philip A. Bell’s San Francisco-based Black newspaper, The Elevator (1865-98), she examines how periodical literature in the Black press offers solace to Black Americans who underwent collective sorrow from losing loved ones during slavery. The Elevator contains ads looking for lost kin that appear along with short stories and poems about new love and reunited families. If the loss of loved ones was hard to re/discover emotionally and physically in reality, this kind of fictional imagination about a dramatic reunion with lost kin would allow the readers to cope with their loss. The paper provides not only a hopeful narrative about the future that Black Americans never experienced before yet deserved, but also a dialogic imagination to cope with the irrecoverable loss.

The session’s attention to Black periodical literature continues with Marlas Yvonne Whitley’s “Pauline Hopkins' Spiritual Politics,” which examines Hopkins’s last serialized story for The Colored American, Of One Blood, or the Hidden Self (1903-04). Hopkins conceptualizes Black kinship not only in the form of covert, familial relations, but also in the use of celestial motifs that she deploys throughout the story. These astral motifs harken to the history of fugitives from slavery looking to the sky, particularly constellations and the position of stars, in navigating their paths to freedom. Hopkins’ use of the celestial in Of One Blood and the political alignment to Black liberation in The Colored American constitute a reading of spiritual kinship to the heavens; a kinship that Hopkins highlights and one that connects Black Americans together in the continual fight for freedom.

The structured part of the session ends with Magdalena Zapędowska’s “Thinking the Unknown: Pararaxis in Frances E.W. Harper’s Moses: A Story of the Nile.” Moses was a key figure for African Americans, who saw Israel’s bondage and deliverance as an allegory of their collective experience. Returning to this story during Reconstruction, Harper harnesses the epic poem’s nationalist associations to envision Black Americans’ journey toward a home in freedom. But while the book format and epic genre imply a finality distinct from ephemeral newspaper literature, Harper disrupts this finality through parataxis. Parataxis’ biblical echoes evoke the teleology of Exodus, implying the certainty of reaching the promised land. However, as a figure of discontinuity and indeterminacy, parataxis also indexes Reconstruction’s promise to end oppression and conveys an unknowability of the social order that is yet to emerge.

To promote audience engagement, presentations will be limited to 15 minutes, leaving 25 minutes for discussion.