Empire, Race, and Print Culture in the Black Pacific

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This Element centers the 'Black Pacific' as a generative site for comparative and intersectional methodologies and transnational frameworks for thinking about racial formations, post-national literary forms, and cultural histories. At the end of the nineteenth century, US overseas expansion into the Pacific brought white supremacy and colonial rule into alignment. It also threw into greater relief the contradictions of US citizenship and national identity as legalized segregation and rising anti-Black violence foreclosed Reconstruction's possibilities. Race accrued dynamic new meanings in the age of new imperialism. Focusing on the earliest of African American literary magazines, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1900–09) and its southern rival, the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–7), this Element examines the formative role of magazine and periodical writings in the development of early Black transpacific internationalism.