Memory, Illustration, and Black Periodicals: Recasting the Disappearing Act of the Fugitive Slave in the “New Negro” Woman

Recent assessments of periodical studies after the digital turn have called for attention to methodology in ways that imply the field is itself in need of remediation through the “conceptual language of information technology,” such as “thinking of periodicals as systems or networks,”¹ in order to arrive at an “elusive” common methodology.² I would suggest that these calls risk moving past the field’s incomplete grappling with the media’s historical past, a past I will argue is necessarily carried with it in remediations that articulate the “new.” I am interested in the mutually dependent relation between slavery and the periodical and its consequences, not only for how we understand the emergence of American and African American periodicals, particularly, but also for future-oriented thinking in the field of periodical studies, generally. Robert Desrochers has argued that the advent of “print capitalism” or the “commercial press” and slavery in the Atlantic world were inextricable,³ yet as David Waldstreicher observes, “slave advertisements” are not studied “themselves as a print genre . . . [and] an essential part of the newspaper they . . . subsidize[d],” but rather for their content as historical record.⁴ Human unfreedom was fundamental to this media form, yet this goes unacknowledged in periodical studies, even as many of us think carefully about the ways in which the periodical can be used to articulate, shape, and mobilize liberatory politics in varied locations and time periods.

This article will first trace the slave ad’s⁵ textual and visual logics financially underwriting the American periodical, before turning to an African American remediation of those racializing commodity logics. Such a “media ecology” is useful for considering illustration in black periodicals, where the complexities of representing black subjectivities continued to be bound up with those of representing the black body well after slavery ended.⁶ Pauline Hopkins’s work at the Colored American Magazine provides us with a case study of remediation in the black periodical that deliberately questions the politics of claiming to have arrived at the new by occluding the persistence and force of older logics. Moreover, Hopkins’s Colored American Magazine work helps us consider what may be at stake in the appeal to new media metaphors as the generalizable “future” of periodical studies. Calls for a methodology or theorization of periodical study that will move us beyond its “dominat[ion] by discrete analyses of individual case studies” risk dismissing the disruptive particularities they can present.⁷ Asking how press genres script social understandings that facilitate projects of domination can, in turn, help us better appreciate remediation’s possibilities, complexities, and stakes, showing us that much work remains to grapple with the periodical as object within a particular moment and set of conditions. Attention to the particularities of that past as informing our understanding and theorizations of this media form and its capacities should be part of what “future” we might imagine for periodical studies.

Disappearing Acts: Advertising, Enslaved People, and Racialization

In “The Matter with Media,” James Mussell urges an attention to “the way media mediate,” and particularly to the disappearing act of the repetitive and generic structures and print forms that “reading sorts . . . from content . . . and then marks as supplementary.”⁸ Even as the repeated structures, genres, and forms within periodicals are designed “to be forgotten,” they work constitutively, Mussell contends, “mediating between a specific utterance and the social situation in which it occurs,” so that both writers and readers are able to connect the new to the “already known” or “existing social formations.”⁹ For American periodical studies at large and black periodical studies particularly, the stakes are high for “following the genre” or confronting the amnesiac effect of advertising related to enslaved people.¹⁰ Repositioning the “supplementary” as constitutive helps us to understand how the American periodical worked as a racializing medium. Repositioning advertising as constitutive also helps us to see that using illustration to resist such racialization, as African American periodicals undertook to do, necessarily carries with it this disappearing act foundational to the media itself.

American periodicals were subtended...