How to become an antiracist newspaper in the 1890s Black Atlantic: The ethical imperative of recirculation in Celestine Edwards’s Fraternity

Abstract

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.