This essay reveals the surprising ties within an African American print franchise: the Anglo-African Magazine, the Weekly Anglo-African, and their various iterations between 1859 and 1865 and a Lagos journal also titled The Anglo-African (1863–65). The link was Robert Campbell, the West Indian editor of the Lagos paper and former contributor to the New York ones. I show how Campbell not only borrowed his title from his African American colleagues but also adapted their editorial models for hailing abolitionist publics and constituting interpretative communities. As these Anglo-African journals proliferated from New York to Lagos, “Anglo-African” became a racialized title associated with a particular kind of journal, rather than just a racial term. A salient feature of an “Anglo-African” type of journal was its scrambling of its titular term and its prefix Anglo. Thus, in the US papers, Anglo became a shorthand for a black publication, while their Nigerian counterpart inserted the US and African-America into the “Anglo” world of the Lagos Anglo-African. By decoupling “Anglo” from whiteness in one context, and from Britishness in the other, these editors forged a black Atlantic counterculture that worked at what Paul Gilroy has called the “hidden internal fissures” of modernity.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1935/1998) Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 is commonly regarded as the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography. But Black Reconstruction did more than correct the historical record, it also interrogated the very limits of historiography—what it can communicate, and what and who its “appropriate” subjects should be. Drawing on Susan Gillman’s concept of race melodrama as the dominant framework for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century racial thinking, this article posits Black Reconstruction as a race melodrama par excellence, with special emphasis on the text’s strategic invocations of music in emotionally and spiritually charged moments. To this end, it traces Du Bois’s use of song, scenes of singing, librettos, and lyrics as both an affective and de-familiarizing device through which he is able to yoke the former slaves’ messianic/religious experience of freedom and their understanding of democracy.
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