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ABSTRACT
This essay examines the print strategies of Britain’s first Black editor, S. J. Celestine Edwards (1857?–1894), during his tenure at the antiracist journal, Fraternity. I show how Edwards capitalized on “scissors-and-paste” methods to articulate connections between minoritizing processes in British colonies and the US, thus formulating a theory of Anglo-Saxonism as a power relation reproduced across empires. Via the pages of Fraternity, Edwards reassembled this inter-imperial formation as an antiracist one, relying on reprints from the African American and British colonial press. Building on Caroline Bressey, I argue that Edwards extended the journal’s function as a “relay station” for the colonial and African American press to his readers, whom he charged with memorizing and ventriloquizing Fraternity, and hailed as walking, talking issues of his paper. His directives to recirculate already reprinted texts inducted readers into an imagined community whose membership refracted across multiple publications rather than centered on one.
Acknowledgments
For feedback on early drafts, I would like to thank Lisa Lowe, Brent Edwards, and all the participants of “The Atlantic Geographies” workshop organized at the University of Miami by Tim Watson.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I use the term “provincial” papers in contradistinction to “metropolitan,” London-based ones. I borrow this terminology from Andrew Hobb's essay, “Provincial Periodicals”.
2 “Obituary,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Friday, August 17, 1894, 5.
3 The Sheffield Daily Telegraph observed that he was “well known in the large towns of England, where he attracted great audiences by his addresses” (“Obituary”). Moreover, the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette insisted that Edwards was known “throughout the whole country” (“Death of Mr. Celestine Edwards,” Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, Saturday, August 18, 1894, 3).
4 Until the early 2000s, studies of Edwards’s legacy were limited to short biographical entries in encyclopedias and surveys of Pan-Africanism, or brief mentions in scholarship on Ida B. Wells’s antilynching tours of England and Scotland. See: Adi and Sherwood; Pan-African History; Fryer Staying Power.
5 See Bressey, Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste; Lorimer, “Legacies of Slavery for Race, Religion, and Empire”; Schneer, London 1900.
6 Edwards, “The Angel of History,” Fraternity, October 1893, 4.
7 I borrow the term “inter-imperial” from Laura Doyle, who has theorized it in the following publications: “Inter-imperiality: Dialectics in a Postcolonial World History”; “Inter-imperiality and Literary Studies in the Longer Durée”; and the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on “Inter-imperiality” that she edited in 2018. Doyle defines inter-imperiality as the “political and historical set of conditions created by the violent histories of plural interacting empires and by interacting persons moving between and against empires,” 160. I apply the concept of the inter-imperial in order to map the internally differentiated yet coherent formation of the British and US empires. However, it is important to note that I do not take this political formation as a given but rather as an anxiously produced and reproduced geopolitical formation that Black political actors such as Celestine Edwards improvised with and attempted to reconfigure when trying to narrate their own position vis-à-vis the US and Britain. For a more detailed discussion of the uses of and improvisations with this inter-imperial bloc in 1920 African American writing, see Bilbija, “Whose Global Anglophone.”
8 For a discussion of the term Anglosphere and its genealogies, see Kenny and Pearce, Shadows of Empire; Vucetic, The Anglosphere; and Wellings, and Mycock, The Anglosphere. In this collection, see especially Duncan Bell’s essay “Anglospheres: Empire Redivivus?,” 38–55.
9 See Bressey, “Reporting Oppression” and Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste.
10 Bressey, “Reporting Oppression,” 404.
11 Even Impey’s correspondence with Joaquim Nabuco, the Brazilian abolitionist, was mediated through Anglophone networks, as Nabuco would go on to become Brazil’s ambassador to the United States in 1905.
12 Agathocleus and Neary, “Before Bandung,” 3.
13 Bressey, Empire, 206–207 and Agathocleus and Neary, “Before Bandung,” 15.
14 He first used this term in the “The Angel of History” column published in the October 1893 issue.
15 Bressey, Empire, 103.
16 See Garvey, Writing with Scissors.
17 See Dinius “Look!! Look!!! at This!!!!”; Fagan, The Black Newspaper; Fraser, “Distributed Agency”; Sommers, “Harriet Jacobs and the Recirculation of Print Culture.”
18 McHenry, Forgotten Readers.
19 Impey and Edwards stopped short of Lowe’s critique of a liberal narrative of rights in her germinal Intimacies of Four Continents, but both nevertheless understood that they and their collectives must read across different archives of colonialism and across different imperial contexts to arrive at an account of the grammar of caste prejudice. Bressey points to Impey’s correspondence about racial taxonomies with the Brazilian abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco as an example of her interest in developing vocabularies for defining descent-based prejudice across different empires and spaces. In this respect, Impey was more focused on formulating a circum-Atlantic account of caste that extended beyond Anglophone contexts than Edwards, whose focalizing of Anglo-Saxon forms of white supremacy explicitly implicated English metropolitan readers in violence committed in the US.
20 Edwards, “Unity Our Aim,” Fraternity, July 1893, 1.
21 Ibid.
22 Bressey’s Race, Empire, and Anti-Caste offers a nuanced analysis of the anticaste movement’s racial taxonomies. See also Agathocleus and Neary, “Before Bandung.”
23 Ibid.
24 See Lake and Reynolds, Drawing, 49–74.
25 Ibid., 71.
26 Edwards, “The Angel of History,” Fraternity, October 1893, 5.
27 Edwards, “The Angel of History,” Fraternity, November 1893, 7.
28 Lorimer, “Legacies,” 748.
29 Ibid.
30 See Bressey, “Reporting Oppression,” 402.
31 See Miller, Slow Print; Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press.
32 Fielder and Senchyne, “Introduction,” Against a Sharp White Background, 6.
33 Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 22.
34 Edwards, “Fraternity,” Fraternity, September 1893, 1.
35 Ibid.
36 Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 20.
37 Ibid.
38 Edwards, “Fraternity,” Fraternity, September 1893, 1.
39 Ibid.
40 Bressey, Empire, Race, and Anti-Caste, 96.
41 The figure of the refracted community that I invoke here is not to be confused with the concept of diasporic refraction carefully developed by Dixa Ramírez in Colonial Phantoms (153–180). Ramirez is describing intra-diasporic processes of recognition, misrecognition, and mediation while I am examining the formation of an inter-racial community constituted primarily through print. I use the metaphor of refraction to signal the redirection from one racialized addressee to another, and by extension, one newspaper’s public to another, through the acts of reprinting and recirculation.
42 “Launched, Full Steam Ahead,” Fraternity, August 1893, 1.
43 Quoted in Bressey, “Reporting Oppression,” 408.
44 See Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire.
45 Edwards, “Fraternity,” Fraternity, September 1893, 1.
46 “Letter Box,” Fraternity, September 1893, 12–13.
47 Ibid. 12.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 13.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.; emphasis mine.
53 Fagan, The Black Newspaper, 14.
54 See Gardner, Unexpected Places.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marina Bilbija
Marina Bilbija is Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is writing a book on the print cultures of Black internationalism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century entitled Worlds of Color: Black Print Networks and the Making of the Anglophone World.