Fragmentation

The metaphor of fragmentation encapsulates not only that periodicals turn into simple rubbish to be disposed of when their time-sensitive content no longer has a practical purpose. It also reveals the productive aspect of being fragmented because remnants of periodicals help us picture “periodic/al” life before and after their initial breakage. “Fragmentation” refers to a breaking or separation into fragments and the loss of an original wholeness. The word “fragment” comes from Latin fragmentum, which signifies “to break.” It came into common use in sixteenth-century France, referring to “a broken piece” or “a detached, isolated, or incomplete part,” a residual “when the whole is lost or destroyed,” or “a part of any unfinished whole or uncompleted design.”¹ Yet the periodical fragment, the piece “broken off” from a periodical, which itself was simply a collection of fragments, could realize a more coherent vision than a single issue or even an entire run of a publication. The metaphor of fragmentation leads us to imagine the fragment’s “unfinished” or “lost” quality, as it appears conducive to creating a wholeness of a never-finished narrative. This metaphor is especially relevant in the case of the black press and African American literary history.

Periodicals are defined by fragmentation rather than wholeness. Even if a physical sheet holds multiple articles together, the fragmentary nature of periodicals remains apparent. In a footnote of Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson acknowledges this incongruence by comparing a newspaper to “a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot.”² In addition to their contents, the distribution and consumption of periodicals can also be read through the metaphor of fragmentation. Upon publication, periodicals, like any printed matter, are immediately scattered to readers. The fragmentation of periodicals, however, occurs more rapidly than that of other forms of print, such as a novel with a solid narrative structure controlled by one authorial voice. Since periodicals are loosely congregated to serve various interests at once,³ readers are encouraged to value periodicals in fragments, according to their own interests. And when one issue is superseded by a subsequent issue, it turns into mere wastepaper, something Anderson calls the “ephemeral popularity” of periodicals.⁴ Because of the complex process of distribution and disposition, fragmental remnants of periodicals may quickly disappear after a brief state of being “broken” and “scattered.” As a result, comprehensive collections of many historic periodicals are difficult to locate. Further, as Benjamin Fagan has noted, “the racially discriminatory nature of the archives and databases” has precipitated the fragmentation and eventual loss of ethnic periodicals because institutions failed to see the value of preserving them.⁵ For example, in 1937, only nine institutions reported holding copies of the ante-bellum African American periodical Freedom’s Journal, while thousands of other titles known to have been published have not been located.⁶ In addition to the haphazard preservation of physical copies, the lack of attention to ethnic periodicals generally has resulted in a significant disparity between white and ethnic digital archives, as Fagan has shown in his examination of the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America Project.⁷

If any part of an issue survives, it is cut out from a periodical’s locality and temporality and creates an independent narrative, different from the original—a fragment’s fragment. John Ernest defines the “fragmented text” as “not simply a puzzle waiting to be pieced together” but “a series of overlapping pieces that together form no single picture but indicate pictures that must be envisioned.”⁸ Fragmented texts are visionary because broken periodicals can tell stories that may not be printed on sheets. For example, fragmented parts can demonstrate periodicals’ germinal mobility through reports, subscriptions, distributions, and circulations, while these movements after periodicals’ initial publication barely appear apparent in print. Black editors and journalists in nineteenth-century America undertook a perilous journey in determining their subject matter and audience. The fragments of their issues reveal that they were on the move in the slave South and in the West, seemingly unstoppable when “such mobility was specifically denied not only to many of their free brethren (through economic as well as legal...