Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black periodical editors roved across oceans and between empires, bearing newspaper texts, formats, and genres with them. As they migrated, they also exported and adapted broader ideas about the distinctive role of the Black journal from one part of the Black world to another.
The Black Sojourner Press traces the travels of multiple generations of itinerant Black editors, demonstrating how they transformed Black political and literary culture in the United States, West Africa, and Britain. Reading Nigerian, African American, Ghanaian, and Black British newspapers side by side, Marina Bilbija reconstructs how wandering journalists connected print cultures across what she calls the Black Anglosphere. Wherever they traveled, these sojourners founded experimental journals that addressed Black readers as members of new global communities. Over and over again, they mobilized periodicals to critique the violent and coordinated spread of two “Anglo-Saxon” empires and, likewise, to speculate about the entwined political destinies of these “Anglo” overlords and their Black imperial subjects.
Bilbija explores cases including a Jamaican editor in 1860s Lagos who reprinted US writers, journals in 1880s Britain that disseminated texts from the African American press, editors in 1920s New York who reframed Ghanaian literature for American readerships, and a pan-African news magazine in 1930s Lagos that serialized a speculative novel set in the United States. Revealing the links between seemingly disparate histories across the Black diaspora, this groundbreaking book offers a new understanding of the Black periodical as a world literary genre.
— Isabel Hofmeyr, author of Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading
Drawing on meticulous transnational archival research, Bilbija traces the intertwined histories of Black intellectuals in Africa and North America, revealing how a century of independent Black periodicals helped to forge powerful intellectual and political responses to the crises of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
— Stephanie Newell, author of Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s-1960s
The Black Sojourner Press is a necessary and timely expansion of our understanding of an intentionally transnational and transgenerational Black press that will sit well next to field-defining scholarship by Brent Hayes Edwards, Tanya Agathocleous, Eric Gardner, and others. The figure of the sojourner editor brings a new world of Black reading and editorial practices to life.
— Derrick R. Spires, author of The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The “Anglo-African” Goes to Lagos: On the Black Journal’s Mobile Templates and Mottos
2. British Satellite Journals for the Black Press: Anti-Caste and Fraternity, 1888–1894
3. Enter the Satellite Newspaperman: Duse Mohamed Ali and the African Times and Orient Review’s Race Unification Project, 1912–1920
4. When the Sojourner Came to Harlem: Reprinting Kobina Sekyi’s “Philosophical Poems” in the Negro World, 1922
5. When Roosevelt Came to Lagos: Novelizing African America in the Lagos Press
Conclusion: Bracing for Americanization, Then and Now
Notes
Bibliography
Index