This essay draws upon recent developments in histories of finance and Black studies to argue for an expanded consideration of late nineteenth-century speculative fiction. In recent decades, speculation has emerged as a foundational methodology, critical framework, and literary genre in African American literary studies and Black studies. Yet, within this body of scholarship, speculative fiction is most often associated with anti-realist modes that imagine alternate futures while speculative reading and research methods double as a critique of our political and disciplinary limits. Through a close reading of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition, this essay considers how speculation’s late nineteenth-century instruments and logics determine the novel’s political horizons and narrative structure. By attending to the financial workings of late nineteenth-century novels that might seem to strain against the bounds of either genre fiction or speculative research methods, this essay argues that we can begin to see how a work like Chesnutt’s interrogates a particularly postbellum outlook on the future, one in which the terms of financial speculation can only imagine a future that is an intensification of the past.

Over the course of his life, Frederick Douglass routinely made use of photography, as art object, political instrument, and metaphor with a particular investment in the relationship between image making, freedom, and progress. The frequency with which he sat for photographic portraits has earned him the status as the most photographed man in the nineteenth century. Douglass’s images circulated widely as collectable cartes-de-visites and in personal and political albums. The photographs’ networks of circulation are crucial to understanding Douglass’s photographic practice.

The complex interaction between the visual and print culture is central to transitions in definitions and perceptions of Black personhood and mid-century African American literature. Marshaled by race science and criminology, and underwriting the emergence of the periodical as media form in the United States through its advertisements for fugitives and enslaved Africans for sale, visuality was imbricated with print. Autumn Womack approaches visuality in the Anglo-African Magazine through its statistical essays in order to contend that the magazine was brokering a transition from a text-based articulation of Black freedom to one figured in and through visuality. The “visual grammar” that resulted, she argues, presented Black freedom as accomplished and aspirational. Womack thus further elaborates the scholarly contention that Black American practitioners of visuality ranged beyond those using photography, such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, to those debating the visual’s affordances in written texts, including Martin Delany, William J. Wilson, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Jacobs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Louisa Picquet, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. She argues that the Anglo-African Magazine explored and reframed the conceptual and visual dimensions of Black freedom by pursuing what optic strategies and practices it both demanded and engendered.

This chapter recovers W. E. B. Du Bois’s unpublished novel “Scorn” (1905) to argue that it announces the political and temporal posture that structures much of Du Bois’s work: apocalyptic ambivalence. Apocalyptic ambivalence registers a skeptical attitude toward history’s celebration of grand gestures and dramatic transformations and instead trains its attention on the quotidian and mundane practices that might reconstruct social arrangements and reveal an otherwise unimaginable world. In this regard, apocalyptic ambivalence is a political position and registers a temporal logic and narrative approach that Du Bois would mobilize time and time again over the course of his expansive and multimedial oeuvre. Suggesting that Du Bois often made recourse to apocalyptic tropes and rhetoric – most notably in Black Reconstruction (1935) – this chapter locates “Scorn” as a text whose formal and generic contours stage a series of thwarted and deferred apocalyptic events only to offer the fulfillment of the apocalyptic promise in the world of interracial labor and an all-black education settlement. In so doing, “Scorn” shifts the idea of apocalypse away from world-ending devastation and toward the conditions of everyday life.