This chapter explores the four periodicals edited by Frederick Douglass. Made possible through the contributions of various and sundry staff members and filled with pieces from a diverse range of writers, Douglass’s newspapers were collaborative productions that he not only contributed to as a writer but, more centrally, oversaw as an editor. Douglass’s newspapers were wide-ranging, diverse publications that resist any easy summary. But considering Douglass within the context of his four periodicals offers a particularly vivid example of his interest in and use of international networks and affairs. Throughout his nearly three-decade career as an editor, Douglass used his newspapers to relate the cause of black liberation in the United States to freedom struggles abroad. This chapter looks closely at the ways in which this international focus was reflected not only in the content of Douglass’s newspapers, but also in their financing, staff, and readership.

The three chapters in this part focus on how African American writers engage with national legislation or policy. Emahunn Raheem Ali Campbell explores the interplay between the genre of the slave narrative and Supreme Court cases concerning copyright and fugitivity decided in the 1830s and 1840s. Looking in particular at the 1838 Narrative of James Williams, a work quickly challenged for its veracity, Campbell reveals important connections between literary works and legal decisions. Nihad M. Farooq moves from the courthouse to the post office as she interrogates the multiple and nuanced ways in which Harriet Jacobs engaged with developing communications technologies and policies ostensibly designed to connect different sections of the nation to one another. Reading Jacobs’s experiences in the 1830s in relation to an ongoing communications revolution in the United States, Farooq shows how Jacobs ingeniously manipulates formal and informal networks in order to secure freedom for herself and her family. With a focus on national legislation, Susanna Ashton reveals the profound impact that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had on the slave narrative by comparing narratives from the same author published before and after the passage of the act. Consulting pre- and post-1850 narratives by Henry Box Brown, William Grimes, and Josiah Henson, Ashton illuminates key ways in which the Fugitive Slave Act shaped one of the premier genres of African American literature.

The six chapters in this part chart the myriad ways in which African American writers engaged with concerns and communities located beyond the boundaries of the United States. Hannah Spahn reveals the key theoretical intervention made by David Walker in his Appeal. Examining the work in its 1830 and 1848 iterations, Spahn unpacks the theory of cosmopolitanism developed by Walker and traces its effects. The part’s next two chapters take up the effect of emancipation in the British West Indies on African American literature. Pia Wiegmink explores the effect of emancipation in Jamaica, in particular, on the work of Nancy Prince. Connecting Prince’s commentary on Jamaica to her struggles with white-led abolitionist organizations, Wiegmink looks closely at how Black freedom abroad could be used to critique the policies of US-based abolitionists. Moving from prose to poetry, Nicole N. Aljoe traces how August 1st celebrations of West Indian Emancipation in the United States impacted the works of Frances Ellen Watkins and James Whitfield. As Aljoe shows, such celebrations not only provided an occasion for Watkins and Whitfield to write and perform poetry, but also indelibly shaped the form and content of their works. David Luis-Brown’s chapter remains in the Caribbean but shifts to the island of Cuba and the La Escalera conspiracy in the mid-1840s. As Luis-Brown reveals, this conspiracy between free and enslaved people of color in the Spanish colony to overthrow their oppressors takes center stage in the later novels of Martin Delany and Andrés Avelino de Orihuela, each of whom turns to La Escalera in order to develop a particular vision of Black revolution in the hemisphere.

The Black periodical is important in its materiality, circulation, and the serial possibilities it affords. This chapter asks us to think about the periodical not only as where mid-century Black literature can be found but also as a media technology that uniquely facilitated a “transition from a transnationalism routed through a white transatlantic sensibility to one grounded in a Black hemispheric imaginary” through serialization. The political import of serializing novels in the Black press from the early 1850s to early 1860s is explored, including Dickens’s Bleak House in 1853 in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Martin Delany’s Blake in the Weekly Anglo-African from 1861 to 1862. This chapter argues that these papers used serialization “to teach their readers how to relate the fight for Black freedom in the United States to transnational liberation movements.” While Bleak House taught readers not to be distracted by distant suffering, Blake’s serialization taught them that the Civil War was but one front of a Black hemispheric revolution. Haiti is located in an African American literary and political imaginary that was also mobilizing the Hungarian Revolution through serialized publication, meaning the political struggles at these sites could not be readily divorced from those of African Americans.

Chapters in this part explore the local events and institutions that shaped and were shaped by African American literature. In these four chapters, the local operates at the level of the city and the region. Carla L. Peterson looks closely at how literary societies in New York and Philadelphia served as engines of the creation of a particular kind of Black modernity, as expressed in the speeches, essays, and poetry of the members of such societies. Jasmine Nichole Cobb remains in Philadelphia, with a particular focus on a community of Black women writers who contributed essays and poetry to the Liberator newspaper. The Liberator provided a venue for such writings, but Philadelphia’s free Black women also decisively shaped the tone and politics of the nation’s leading abolitionist newspaper.

An introduction to the volume, with a particular focus on the relevance of the writings of David Walker to the period.