Frederick Douglass’s correspondence emerges in the wake of his self-emancipation and occupies a singular place in nineteenth-century American letters. It is a body of work unprecedented in its scope and its capacity to provide an anchor to the networks of activism in which Douglass wielded such influence. It marks a turn in African American letters in which the epistolary is repurposed as a tool of emancipation and of radical archival practice. His correspondence mobilizes the letter as an instrument of emancipation, able to establish political community and map cartographies of freedom that challenged the limitations placed by the United States on African American autonomy. At the same time, his letters provide a glimpse behind the scenes of a life lived to a great extent in the public eye, confirming the importance of family and home as concrete realities, and of domains of intimacy normally kept out of historical sight.

Paul Robeson, Negro sits uneasily alongside recent reconsiderations of the Harlem Renaissance as a localized if significant instance of wider afromodernist currents in play in the early decades of the twentieth century, and has received little attention in scholarship.

The chattel record

In 1853, in the opening frame of his novella The Heroic Slave, Frederick Douglass pointed to the failures of historical consciousness produced by Southern cultures of enslavement. Fusing, as William Andrews shows, fictional and factual discourse in order to generate a platform from which the African American narrative voice could self-authorise, the story of Madison Washington, the heroic slave of the title, also exemplifies that ‘special case in literature’ that is historical fiction: a ‘mode of writing’, José de Piérola argues, that ‘creates and sustains an unresolved tension between history and fiction’. Like the hero of the work – enslaved in Virginia, escaped, recaptured and eventually finding freedom in the British Caribbean following a rebellion led by Washington on board the brigantine Creole in 1841 – the novella operates on ‘the edge of history’, producing a double-edged critique that lays as much emphasis on history as a mechanism of exclusion as on the specific historical distortions and absences that lend the work its thematic force.

What kind of world does the black interwar artist, writer and intellectual see? How do black artists, writers and intellectuals configure this world? A contemporary example of the ways in which one intellectual imagined the interrelated geographies of black experience is useful perhaps. In May of 1932, Eslanda Goode Robeson, then resident in London, wrote to George Horace Lorimer, editor of Philadelphia's Sunday Evening Post, of her plans ‘to write a series of articles on the Negro’. Signalling her intention ‘to approach the subject from an entirely new angle’, Goode claimed that she knew ‘personally nearly every Negro of interest and importance both at home and abroad’, and that she had always enjoyed ‘such access as perhaps would never be gained by any other person, white or black’. Her idea, she explained, was to undertake ‘a leisurely world tour, stopping for an indefinite period in various Negro centers, collecting interesting general and intimate information, absorbing local color and interviewing the most important and significant personalities, and collecting photographs, – writing articles as I go’.