“Dear Anglo”: Scrambling the Signs of Anglo-Modernity from New York to Lagos

Abstract

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.