Subversive editing: Rebellious reprints in Freedom’s Journal

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the literary reprints found in New York’s Freedom’s Journal (1827–1829), the first newspaper owned and operated exclusively by African Americans. It demonstrates that the Journal’s editors strategically used seemingly apolitical, nonracial, and often European reprints as subtle vehicles for engagement with the racial politics of the 1820s United States. In doing so, the essay provides a new perspective in the scholarly discourse of race and the gothic (a prominent genre of reprint in the Journal), and it contributes a new perspective of Freedom’s Journal role as a Black medium within a larger, circum-Atlantic network.