Introduction

When chapters 28, 29, and 30 of Martin Delany’s novel Blake appeared in the first issue of the Anglo-African Magazine in January 1859, editor Thomas Hamilton called it “a new work of thrilling interest” that “differs essentially from all others heretofore published.”¹ Hamilton, who promised that “all articles in the Magazine, not otherwise designated, will be the products of the pens of colored men and women” and emphasized that the magazine’s content would similarly focus on black stories, told readers, “The scene is laid in Mississippi, the plot extending into Cuba; the Hero being an educated West India black, who deprived of his liberty by fraud when young, and brought to the United States, in maturer age, at the instance of his wife being sold from him, sought revenge through the medium of a deep laid secret organization.”²

Hamilton both mourned that he could only share these chapters—“they were the only ones the author would permit us to copy”—and prayed that Delany’s full novel would soon be published.³ Although Blake did not become a bound book, Delaney did allow the Anglo-African Magazine to publish two dozen more chapters. The Hamilton family continued to have faith in Blake, and they undertook to publish the full novel in their Weekly Anglo-African newspaper in 1861–62. But modern readers will be frustrated even there: select issues of the paper—including those that should hold the novel’s final chapters—remain missing.

After that second serialization, Blake languished, rarely mentioned for almost a century, even though Delany continued to be an important figure in African America and even though Hamilton was correct about how fascinating this novel of black revolution that crisscrosses national borders is. It wasn’t until the growing wave of recovery of early African American literature in the second half of the twentieth century—including the 1968 publication of the first volume of the Anglo-African Magazine as part of Arno Press’s American Negro: His History and Literature Series—that Blake garnered critical notice. Initially, Floyd J. Miller probably did as much as anyone to push consideration: two generations of scholars in African American studies know his 1970 Beacon Press edition of the novel, with its striking cover illustration drawn from Aaron Douglas’s Defiance (c. 1926).

Scholars exploring Pan-African thought were especially attracted to the novel, and discussions of African American literary history began to regularly include Blake. Treatments in Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race and the Making of America Literature (1993) and Robert Levine’s Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997) were key in moving it into broader frames of nineteenth-century American culture. Recent efforts in black Atlantic and transnational studies, print culture studies, and periodical studies—central in this last, work by Patricia Okker and Jean Lee Cole—have continued to suggest that, per the back cover of the new edition, Blake “is one of the most important African American—and indeed American—works of fiction of the nineteenth century.”

The editors of American Periodicals recognized that a new edition of Delany’s novel—especially, given the flaws in the 1970 volume, one marked as “a corrected edition” and one edited by Jerome McGann, a skilled editor and groundbreaking theorist of editorial praxis, textual studies, and interpretation—is a major event not only in American periodical studies but also the broader study of literary history. In moving to diversify the review offerings in American Periodicals, we wanted to explore how we might have a number of folks consider a single book, in dialogue, from different points of view and institutional locations. The new edition of Blake seemed especially well suited for such treatment.

What follows, a new occasional feature to American Periodicals, thus offers a roundtable of...