The Anglo-African Newspaper
- LAST REVIEWED: 28 June 2016
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 June 2016
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0003
- LAST REVIEWED: 28 June 2016
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 June 2016
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0003
Introduction
Founded in January 1859 by New York–based journalist and book publisher Thomas Hamilton, the Anglo-African Magazine was a key site of African American literary production and political debate. Its list of regular contributors included some of the most celebrated African American writers of the 19th century: Edward Wilmot Blyden, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Martin Delany, James McCune Smith, Daniel Alexander Payne, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sarah Mapps Douglass. Two major features set this publication apart from its African American and abolitionist journal peers. First, it was introduced to the public as a literary and scientific magazine. Second, it invited contributions solely from African American and Afro-diasporic writers. In so doing, it hoped to create a safe space in which the black public could voice its opinions and concerns without fear of white censure. Six months after the founding of the Anglo-African Magazine, Hamilton introduced its newspaper offshoot, entitled the Weekly Anglo-African. He published the magazine until March 1860, after which its publication was indefinitely suspended, but the weekly ran until March 1861, when Hamilton was forced to sell it to George Lawrence Jr. and James Redpath who renamed it The Palm and Pine two months later. Thomas’s brother, Robert, revived the old Weekly Anglo-African by August 1861. It remained in print until December 1865. The similarities between the names, contributors, subscribers, and editorial staff of these two journals have led some scholars to conflate the Anglo-African Magazine with the Weekly Anglo-African. Others acknowledge that these are two distinct publications but refer to them in tandem. One way to capture the continuities between the two without glossing over their generic and other divergences is to approach the two publications as part of a print continuum. Indeed, this is what many scholars do when they jointly refer to them as the “Anglo-African.” Today the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African are best known as the journals in which Martin Delany’s Blake was first published. The resurgence of interest in the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African in the past twenty to thirty years is due largely to Blake’s introduction into the African American canon and the “archival turn” in African American literary studies.
General Overviews
Although as of the early 21st century, there is still no monograph-length study of the Weekly Anglo-African and the Anglo-African Magazine, these two journals are prominently featured in almost all surveys of the African American press. Penn 1988 is a foundational study of the journal and its founders. However, Penn’s conflation of the magazine with the weekly newspaper obscures the important differences between these interlinked forums. Bullock 1981 is an excellent source on the publication history, contexts, and intellectual networks of the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African. Whereas Bullock 1981 provides the most detailed historical account of the magazine and newspaper, Hutton 1993 offers the most comprehensive thematic analysis of the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African. It departs from the typical survey model by structuring its chapters around different aspects of the black press (such as the uses of satire, codes of professionalism, and the role of women in the press) rather than around discrete archives. Burks 1975 and Johnson 1928 focus on the Anglo-African Magazine’s status as a new kind of journal in the antebellum US literary marketplace. Johnson 1928 examines the generic traits of the Anglo-African Magazine and argues that this print forum served different purposes than those of newspapers, whereas Burks 1975 discusses its role in curating a discrete African American literary tradition.
Bullock, Penelope L. The Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838–1909. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Provides a biography of the Hamilton brothers, including information on Thomas Hamilton’s earlier publishing ventures, and offers the most detailed account of the history of the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African. Lists the journals’ most important contributors and discusses the role of the journals in promoting African American writers.
Find this resource:
Burks, Mary Fair. “The First Black Literary Magazine in American Letters.” CLA Journal 21 (1975): 318–320.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A short but informative article that identifies the Anglo-African Magazine as the first African American literary journal and examines its role as the first all-black literary forum. Surveys the impressive roster of the magazine’s contributors, with special emphasis on the diversity of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s output.
Find this resource:
Daniel, Walter C. Black Journals of the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This reference book parses the differences between the editorial policies and focus of black newspapers and magazines. Like Bullock, Daniel argues that publications such as the Anglo-African Magazine were closer to “little magazines” than to protest newspapers. Offers information on the magazine’s history, format, circulation numbers, and contributors.
Find this resource:
Dann, Martin E. The Black Press, 1827–1890: The Quest for National Identity. New York: Putnam, 1971.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Part survey, part compilation of primary sources from the 19th-century black press. Includes reprints of from the Weekly Anglo-African organized by theme (emigration, self-defense, and slavery). The articles discussing John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry are noteworthy and a useful teaching resource.
Find this resource:
Hutton, Frankie. The Early Black Press in America, 1827 to 1860. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Examines the shared editorial policies and features of antebellum black journals. Chapter 1 analyzes the political uses of humor and satire in the Anglo-African Magazine. Chapter 3 includes a discussion of the role of black women in the journal, with special emphasis on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s and Sarah Douglass’s contributions.
Find this resource:
Johnson, Charles S. “The Rise of the Negro Magazine.” Journal of Negro History 13.1 (1928): 7–21.
DOI: 10.2307/2713910Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Traces the genealogy of African American magazines back to the Anglo-African Magazine, distinguishing between the sociopolitical conditions that produce magazines such as this and those that generate more news-focused newspapers. Discusses the magazine’s exceptional status as an all-black literary and political forum. Better resource about the magazine than the weekly.
Find this resource:
Penn, I. Garland. The Afro-American Press and Its Editors. Salem, NH: Ayer, 1988.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Originally published in 1891. Includes a chapter on the history of the Weekly Anglo-African. Offers more details about the journal’s association with the Haitian Emigration Movement under James Redpath’s ownership than other surveys. Conflates the Weekly Anglo-African and the Anglo-African Magazine, but mostly provides information about the former.
Find this resource:
20th- and 21st-Century Reprints from the Anglo-African
The number of late-20th- and early-21st-century reprints of texts originally published in the Weekly Anglo-African and the Anglo-African Magazine shows the extent to which these journals aided the reconstruction of the early African American canon. The most important texts recovered from these two journals include William “Ethiop” Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery” (1859) series; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Two Offers” (1859) the first short story published by an African American (Harper 1990); and most famously, Martin Delany’s novel Martin R. Blake; or the Huts of America, first published in the Anglo-African Magazine between 1859 and 1860 and again in the Weekly Anglo-African between November 1861 and May 1862. Now a staple of African American literature surveys, Blake was virtually inaccessible to students before it was included in a collated edition by Miller of its two incomplete serial versions (Delany 1970). The collected works of Martin Delany by Levine (Delany 2003), of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper by Foster (Harper 1990), and of James McCune Smith by Stauffer (McCune Smith 2006) reveal the impressive range of their contributions and illuminate the role of the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African in disseminating African American writing. The 525-page collected edition of Martin Delany’s writings, edited by Levine (Delany 2003), includes a number of works that the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African reprinted from other journals, and vice versa. This collection thus reveals the ubiquity of reprinting, both in the Anglo-African and in mid-19th-century periodical culture. In addition to these print editions of the Anglo-African’s literary output, there are two important online resources: Anglo-African Magazine: Selected Short Stories is an edition of the magazine’s short stories, and Lorang and Weir 2013 is a meticulously annotated edition of poems published in the Anti-Slavery Standard and the Anglo-African Magazine in 1863 and 1864.
Anglo-African Magazine: Selected Short Stories. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Online edition featured in the Alexander Street Press’s comprehensive “Black Short Fiction and Folklore from Africa and the African Diaspora” collection of over 11,000 short stories. Consists of six short stories originally published in the Anglo-African Magazine and an excerpt from Martin Delany’s Blake.
Find this resource:
Delany, Martin R. Blake; or the Huts of America. Edited by Floyd Miller. Boston: Beacon Street, 1970.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
First unified version of Martin Delany’s novel, serialized in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 and in the Weekly Anglo-African between 1861 and 1862. The novel tells the story of an eponymous West Indian revolutionary who escapes slavery and travels across the US South and Cuba, inciting rebellion in his wake.
Find this resource:
Delany, Martin R. Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader. Edited by Robert Levine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Includes Delany’s numerous contributions to the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African, ranging from Blake to astronomical writing and polemics on emigration. Levine’s excellent introduction usefully contextualizes Delany’s essays and situates his writing within the central debates in the magazine.
Find this resource:
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. Edited by Frances Smith Foster. New York: Feminist Press, 1990.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
One of two existing collections of Harper’s work. Reveals not only Harper’s mastery of multiple genres and forms, but also the sheer volume and diversity of texts that she contributed to the Anglo-African, making her one of the top three contributors to the journal. The introduction discusses the recovery of Harper’s work from periodical archives.
Find this resource:
Lorang, Elizabeth, and R. J. Weir. “Introduction: Will Not These Days Be by Thy Poets Sung”; Poems of the Anglo-African and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1863–1864.” Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing 34 (2013).
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Open-source edition of almost 140 carefully annotated poems originally published in the New York–based Anglo-African and National Anti-Slavery Standard between 1863 and 1864. Outstanding teaching resource that includes a lengthy introduction, historical information about the two journals, and maps of their headquarters.
Find this resource:
McCune Smith, James. The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist. Edited by John Stauffer. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Features McCune Smith’s essays from the Anglo-African Magazine on topics as varied as chess and the climatological theories of civilizations. Stauffer’s introduction discusses his editorial work for the Anglo-African Magazine.
Find this resource:
The Anglo-African as a Historical Archive
After Katz 1968 (the incomplete run of the Anglo-African Magazine) was reprinted by the New York Times/Arno Press in 1969, this archive became more widely accessible to scholars. In addition to being important literary archives, The Weekly Anglo-African and the Anglo-African Magazine are invaluable sources for historians of the Civil War and social histories of free African Americans in the North. Given that the Weekly Anglo-African was an all-black journal published during the Civil War, it is a unique site from which to trace the shifts in African American conceptions of nationhood, rights, and freedom during this turbulent time. Ripley, et al. 1993, a selection of articles published in the Weekly Anglo-African in the early 1860s, sheds light on debates about the putative role of African Americans in the Civil War. Redkey 1992 is a collection of letters from African American soldiers, which documents the African American military experience. The letters that soldiers sent to the Weekly Anglo-African are a testament to the journal’s circulation in Southern war zones and its relative popularity among black soldiers. The edited collection by Matthews 2008 also includes various articles on slavery and resistance published in the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African.
Katz, William Loren, ed. The Anglo-African Magazine. Vol. 1, 1859. The American Negro: His History and Literature. New York: Arno, 1968.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is a reprint of Thomas Hamilton’s bound edition of the twelve issues of the magazine published in 1859, published as part of Katz’s edited series. This edition is missing the last three issues published in 1860. Includes a one-page introduction.
Find this resource:
Matthews, Harry Bradshaw, ed. African American Freedom Journey in New York and Related Sites, 1823–1870. Cherry Hill, NJ: Africana Homestead Legacy, 2008.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Annotated collection of primary sources documenting the emergence of antislavery movements in African American communities in New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina between 1823 and 1870. Includes a large number of abolitionist articles from the Anglo-African Magazine as well as letters from African American soldiers in the Weekly Anglo-African.
Find this resource:
Redkey, Edwin S., ed. A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511663574Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An excellent primary source on the African American military experience of the Civil War. Features hundreds of annotated letters from African American soldiers reprinted from the Weekly Anglo-African and thus highlights the journal’s extensive war reporting.
Find this resource:
Ripley, C. Peter, Roy E. Finkebine, Michael F. Hembree, and Donald Yacovone, eds. Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Compilation of historical documents on slavery and emancipation. Chapter 5 includes lengthy reprints of debates that unfolded on the pages of the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861 about the status of Northern African Americans in the war and whether they should fight for a government that continued to support slavery.
Find this resource:
The Anglo-African’s Imagined Communities
The Weekly Anglo-African played a key role in informing Northern African Americans about the conditions of African American soldiers and escaped slaves in the South. Jackson 2008 shows how soldiers deployed the journal’s “letters to the editor” pages as a forum through which to address a wider national public. Jackson 2004 examines the uses of this print forum to form communal bonds between readers and subscribers locally in the New York area. Whereas these two articles examine the mediating role of print in collating communities, McHenry 2007 focuses on the actual communal spaces in which the Anglo-African Magazine was read, collected, and stored for posterity. Peterson 2011 is a part memoir, part social history of black middle-class New Yorkers, which draws extensively on the archives of the Weekly Anglo-African to piece together the author’s family history. Its anecdotal and reception-history approach to the newspaper brings the people and events featured on its pages to life. Taken together, the works cited here reveal how the journals simultaneously represented communities of different scales—from the local to the transnational—and different principles of cohesion—from communities of readers to those of displaced families and soldiers.
Jackson, Debra. “‘A Cultural Stronghold’: The ‘Anglo-African’ Newspaper and the Black Community of New York.” New York History 85.4 (2004): 331–357.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Examines Robert Hamilton’s war correspondence from Virginia. Jackson contends that with the outbreak of the Civil War the Weekly Anglo-African became the key source of information on the movements of black soldiers, news from the battlefront, and news about displaced family members who had fled or were retreating to the North.
Find this resource:
Jackson, Debra. “A Black Journalist in Civil War Virginia: Robert Hamilton and the ‘Anglo-African.’” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 116.1 (2008): 42–72.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Discusses the local significance of the Weekly Anglo-African to black residents of New York. Analyzes advertisements, letters, and editorials and shows how the newspaper operated as a local “address-book” and roster of events both for newcomers and long-time residents seeking information about political gatherings, and entertainment.
Find this resource:
McHenry, Elizabeth. “‘An Association of Kindred Spirits’: Black Readers and Their Reading Rooms.” In Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States. Edited by Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter, 72–99. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
McHenry examines the contiguous relationship between African American reading rooms and magazines and identifies the Anglo-African as a portable library in its own right. She shows how both the magazine and the reading room operated as sites for curating texts and communities.
Find this resource:
Peterson, Carla L. Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Social history of 19th-century black New Yorkers viewed through the author’s family history. Peterson’s extensive use of the archives of the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African in piecing together her family history demonstrates the value of these journals as a historical resource on the everyday lives of African Americans.
Find this resource:
Martin R. Delany’s Blake; Or the Huts of America and the Anglo-African
Not only did Floyd Miller’s 1970 edited edition of Martin Delany’s Blake in book form (Delany 1970, cited under 20th- and 21st-Century Reprints from the Anglo-African) introduce a new generation of students and scholars to the novel, but the novel’s incomplete state drew scholarly attention to its publication history in the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African. Levine 1997 was among the first works to analyze the novel’s political vision in relation to the political debates that took place on the pages of these two journals. He concludes that the novel’s pro-emigration stance was “out of sync” with the journals’ general anti-emigration orientation. The “print-culture turn” in the study of 19th-century British and American literature has also brought the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African to the attention of scholars outside the purview of African American literary studies Thus, two key monographs on Anglophone periodical culture—Hughes and Lund 2015 and Okker 2003—feature chapters on the Anglo-African’s serialization of Blake. Both studies examine Blake’s serialization in relation to American and trans-Atlantic editing and publishing practices. Hughes and Lund depart from Levine’s reading of the novel, arguing that Delany fine-tuned the novel’s political vision across serial installments. The focus of both studies is on the relationship between the serial publication format of the novel and its fictional solution to the political problems of antebellum America. Whereas Hughes and Lund 2015 view the Anglo-African Magazine’s 1859 serialization of Blake and the Weekly Anglo-African’s 1861–1862 edition as the same text, Okker 2003 argues that these are two different editions and must be approached as different texts. Cole 2011 demonstrates how Blake’s serial publication format enabled it to induct readers simultaneously into multiple imagined communities. Chiles 2008 contends that Blake’s serial installments, by virtue of their fragmented form, attuned readers to the incongruities between the constitutive parts and wholes of national communities and periodicals. Rusert 2013 shifts the focus of the debates about Blake’s conceptions of freedom to the scientific realm, reading Blake in tandem with his scientific writing on comets and other heavenly bodies, also published in the Weekly Anglo-African and the Anglo-African Magazine.
Chiles, Katy. “Within and without Raced Nations: Intratextuality, Martin Delany, and Blake; or the Huts of America.” American Literature 80.2 (2008): 323–352.
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-2008-005Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Intervenes in debates about the incongruity between Blake’s politics and the Weekly Anglo-African’s anti-emigration writing. Argues that Blake challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between periodicity and nation formation both on the level of theme and publishing format by delineating the nation-state’s contingency on regional, national, and transnational formulations of community.
Find this resource:
Cole, Jean Lee. “Theresa and Blake: Mobility and Resistance in Antebellum African American Serialized Fiction.” Callaloo 34.1 (2011): 158–175.
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2011.0029Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Analyzes the tropes of mobility in Blake and other antebellum serial fiction and shows how serial fiction helped “crystallize” the multiple scales of belonging (national, diasporic, and transnational) that black periodicals imagined for their readers.
Find this resource:
Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund. The Victorian Serial. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2015.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Influential study of serial forms in Victorian culture, originally published in 1991. Features a chapter on Blake’s serial “resolution” to the national problem of slavery. The authors view the inconsistencies between the novel’s various installments as timely adjustments to shifting political conditions enabled by the serial form of the novel.
Find this resource:
Levine, Robert S. “The Redemption of His Race: Creating Pan-African Community in Delany’s Blake.” In Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity. By Robert S. Levine, 177–223. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Levine’s comparative study of Douglass’s and Delany’s political careers includes a chapter, “The Redemption of His Race,” on Blake’s serialization in the Weekly Anglo-African and the Anglo-African Magazine. Illuminates the discrepancies between the novel’s pro-emigration stance with his fellow contributors’ anti-emigration articles and suggests that the novel’s political vision was already outdated by 1861.
Find this resource:
Okker, Patricia. “William Gillmore Simms, Martin R. Delany, and Serial/Sectional Politics.” In Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America. By Patricia Okker, 79–108. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Okker traces the different ways in which the two serializations of Blake engaged with the changes in national debates about slavery and black citizenship. Argues that the two editions of Blake need to be read as separate texts, published under different political climates and different settings.
Find this resource:
Rusert, Britt. “Delany’s Comet: Fugitive Science and the Speculative Imaginary of Emancipation.” American Quarterly 65.4 (2013): 799–829.
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2013.0055Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Traces the shared preoccupation with fugitive bodies in Delany’s Blake and his lesser-known scientific essays published in the Weekly Anglo-African and the Anglo-African Magazine. Reads Blake as a work of speculative fiction that centers on suprahuman bodies that incite change and transcend human boundaries.
Find this resource:
The Anglo-African’s Editing Practices
The book history and archival “turn” in African American literary studies has stimulated interest in the history of reprinting and the communal production of knowledge via print networks. This heightened awareness of the traffic between journals and their overlapping web of contributors and readers has had an impact on more recent archival recovery projects such as Lorang and Weir 2013, the online edition of poems from the Anglo-African and National Anti-Slavery Standard (also cited under 20th- and 21st-Century Reprints from the Anglo-African). The introduction to this remarkable edition sheds light on both the contemporary practices of reprinting African American literature and the editorial policies of newspapers that published African American poetry during the Civil War. This collection thus demonstrates the key role of reprinting in both eras. The need for a more rigorous study of African American editing practices—both past and present—is the main focus of Wilson 2013, an essay that takes the Anglo-African as the entry point into a larger conversation about race, editing, and canon-building across three centuries. McKivigan 2008, a biography of James Redpath, the white abolitionist who bought the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861 and renamed it The Palm and Pine, before Robert Hamilton resuscitated the original name, foregrounds the overlapping histories of the Palm and Pine and the Weekly Anglo-African. By documenting the interventions of white abolitionists in African American publications, this biography provides crucial insight into the precarious position of these publications and their editors.
Lorang, Elizabeth, and R. J. Weir. “Introduction, Will Not These Days Be by Thy Poets Sung”; Poems of the Anglo-African and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1863–1864.” Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing 34 (2013).
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The introduction to this remarkable edited collection of Civil War poetry emphasizes the importance of attending to the newspaper contexts of the poems. The authors’ discussion of the newspaper editors’ decision to reprint poems from other sources reveals reprinting as an integral part of the Weekly Anglo-African and the Anti-Slavery Standard’s literary production.
Find this resource:
McKivigan, John R. Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Biography of the abolitionist and one-time publisher of the Weekly Anglo-African and the Palm and Pine. Chapters 3 and 4 examine Redpath’s short-lived takeover of the Weekly Anglo-African and his transformation of an anti-emigration journal into the official organ of the Haitian Emigration Society supplement existing accounts of the newspaper’s history.
Find this resource:
Wilson, Ivy G. “The Brief Wondrous Life of the Anglo-African Magazine; or, Antebellum African American Editorial Practice and Its Afterlives.” In Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850. Edited by George Hutchinson and John K. Young, 18–38. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Methodologically innovative essay on the Anglo-African’s publication history and afterlives in subsequent reprints of its fiction, essays, and poetry. Takes the archive of the Anglo-African Magazine as an entry point into a discussion of the history and theory of African American editing practices.
Find this resource:
The Rhetoric of the Anglo-African
One of the most studied aspects of both the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African are the rhetorical strategies through which these journals challenged slavery on the one hand and cultivated a positive communal identity on the other. Ball 2012 analyzes the journals’ strategic evocation of historical figures and the typological uses of the black past. Ernest 2004 views the Anglo-African Magazine as a “multivocal forum” in which its contributors and reading public could debate and challenge the ideological inconsistencies of white America. Kinshasa 1988 parses the contradictions that pervaded debates about emigration and assimilation. Stancliff 2011 and Block 2002 examine the rhetorical strategies by which the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African yoked character building to revolutionary politics. Chapter 1 in Stancliff 2011 on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s didactic essays and fiction published in the Anglo-African Magazine positions her writing within the journal’s sustained project of collective character building. Block’s article discusses the radicalization of temperance rhetoric in Delany’s Blake and Harper’s “The Two Offers” (Delany 1970 and Harper 1990, both cited under 20th- and 21st-Century Reprints from the Anglo-African). Shortell 2004 brings a quantitative approach to the archives of the Weekly Anglo-African, assigning defining key words to different black papers.
Ball, Erica L. “Transnationalism, Revolution, and the Anglo-African Magazine on the Eve of the Civil War.” In To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politicsand the Antebellum Black Middle Class. By Erica Ball, 109–131. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Chapter 5 of Ball’s study of the individual and collective self-fashioning of antebellum black elites analyzes the militarized rhetoric in the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African. Ball shows how readers were hailed in the journal’s print community as descendants of a pan-African revolutionary tradition culminating in the Civil War.
Find this resource:
Block, Shelley. “A Revolutionary Aim: The Rhetoric of Temperance in the Anglo-African Magazine.” American Periodicals 12 (2002): 9–24.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Examines how two of the Anglo-African Magazine’s contributors, Martin Delany and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, revolutionized temperance rhetoric in Blake and “The Two Offers,” respectively, by transforming temperance into a means for promoting black communal interests and aligning it with rationality and antislavery.
Find this resource:
Clavin, Matthew. “American Toussaints: Symbol, Subversion, and the Black Atlantic Tradition in the American Civil War.” In African Americans and the Haitian Revolution. Edited by Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, 107–123. New York and London: Routledge, 2013.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Highlights the preponderance of “Haitian” items—both contemporary and historical—in the pages of the Weekly Anglo-African. Demonstrates how the journal contributed to the cult of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution by publishing more items on the Haitian Revolution than any other wartime newspaper.
Find this resource:
Ernest, John. Liberation Historiography African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Chapter 5 posits the black press as “collective agents of history.” Argues that the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African honed their reading communities by reframing narratives of the past and representing a diversity of voices. Reads Ethiop’s (William J. Wilson’s pen name) “Afric-American Picture Gallery” series published in the Anglo-African Magazine as “meta-historiography.”
Find this resource:
Kinshasa, Kwando M. Emigration vs. Assimilation: The Debate in the African American Press, 1827–1861. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Argues that the debates about emigration and assimilation in the African American press were plagued with inconsistencies. His case studies include James T. Holly’s essays serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African and the pro-emigration articles published during James Redpath’s management of the journal.
Find this resource:
Shortell, Timothy. “The Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: An Exploratory Analysis of Antislavery Newspapers in New York State.” Social Science History 28.1 (2004): 75–109.
DOI: 10.1215/01455532-28-1-75Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Quantitative analysis of the rhetorical styles of five New York–based antislavery newspapers. Argues that keywords or “theme words” specific to each archive highlight the differences between their ideologies and investments.
Find this resource:
Stancliff, Michael. “Composing Character: Cultural Sources of African American Rhetorical. Pedagogy.” In Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State. By Michael Stancliff, 25–50. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Analyzes Harper contributions to the Anglo-African’s collective didactic project of character training, describing her particular form of didactic writing as “the pedagogy of race womanhood” (p. 27). Cites Harper’s “The Two Offers” as the culmination of this rhetoric.
Find this resource:
Article
- “Acting White” and Oppositional Culture in Education
- African American Deathways
- African American Doctors
- African American Humor
- African American Language
- African American Masculinity
- African American Sculpture and Sculptors
- African American Writers and Communism
- African Americans in Cincinnati
- African Americans in Europe
- African Americans in Los Angeles
- Afro-Latinos
- Afro-Pessimism
- Agriculture and Agricultural Labor
- Alice Walker
- Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
- AME Church
- American Military, Blacks in the
- American Negro Theatre, The
- Anglo-African Newspaper, The
- Animal and African American History, The
- Antislavery Movement
- Apollo Theater
- Assimilation
- Atheism and Agnosticism
- Baldwin, James
- Baraka, Amiri
- Basketball
- Bearden, Romare
- Bible
- Black Baptists
- Black Classicism in the United States
- Black Codes and Slave Codes
- Black Disability Studies
- Black Press in the United States, The
- Black Radicalism in 20th-Century United States
- Black Theology
- Black Women Writers in the United States
- Blackface Minstrelsy
- Blacks in American Electoral Politics
- Blues
- Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
- Bureau Of Refugees, Freedmen, And Abandoned Lands (BRFAL)
- Butler, Octavia
- Chesnutt, Charles W.
- Chicago, African Americans in
- Chicago Renaissance
- Civil Rights Movement
- Delany, Martin R.
- Dominican Republic, Annexation of
- Dorothy Dandridge
- Douglass, Frederick
- Equiano, Olaudah
- Eugenics
- Federal Government, Segregation in
- Federal Writers’ Project
- Fiction, Urban
- Fisk Jubilee Singers
- Fitzgerald, Ella
- Folklore
- Food and African American Culture
- Forman, James
- Francophone Writing
- Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, The
- Gates, Jr., Henry Louis
- Gospel Music
- Harriet Ann Jacobs
- Health and Medicine
- Higher Education, Black Women in
- Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United...
- HIV/AIDS from an African American Studies Perspective
- Holiday, Billie
- Hopkins, Pauline
- Incarceration
- Interracial Marriage
- Jesse Jackson
- Johnson, James Weldon
- Liberation Theology
- Literacy
- Lynching
- Meredith March against Fear
- Middle Class, Black
- Moore, Audley
- Morrision, Toni
- Mourning and African American Ritual
- Muhammad Ali
- Muslims, Black
- Nat Turner’s Rebellion
- National Urban League
- Native Americans and African Americans
- Negro League Baseball
- New African Diaspora
- New Negro
- Newton, Huey P.
- No Child Left Behind
- Pan-Africanism
- Parks, Rosa
- Peters Wheatley, Phillis
- Policing
- Political Resistance
- Print Culture
- Queer Practices and African American Culture
- Rape
- Reconstruction in Literature and Intellectual Culture
- Reparations and the African Diaspora
- Revolutionary War and African Americans, The
- Robeson, Paul
- Rodney King and the Los Angeles Uprising of 1992
- Scottsboro Trials
- Settler Colonialism and African Americans
- Simone, Nina
- Slavery, Visual Representations of
- Smith, Bessie
- Social Science and Civil Rights
- “Soul!” (Famous!) TV Program with Ellis Haizlip
- Speculative Fiction
- Suburbanization
- The Black Aesthetic
- Theater and Performance in the 19th Century
- Theater in the 20th Century
- Till, Emmett, The Lynching of
- Tricksters in African, African American, and Caribbean Fol...
- Underground Railroad
- United States House of Representatives, African Americans ...
- Urbanization
- Vietnam War
- Visual Arts
- Voodoo, Its Roots, and Its Relatives
- Wells, Ida B.
- Whitehead, Colson
- Whiteness
- Woodrow Wilson, Administration of
- World War II
- Wright, Richard