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  • Chapter 15 - The Representation of the Caribbean in Nineteenth-Century African American Newspapers
  • from Part III - The Caribbean Region in Transition
  • Edited by Evelyn O'Callaghan, University of the West Indies, Tim Watson, University of Miami
  • Book: Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920
  • Published online: 16 December 2020
  • Print publication: 14 January 2021, pp 247-261
  • View extract

    Summary

    This essay examines the Caribbean as a conflicting node of representation in essays, editorials, stories, and poems in three newspapers owned by Fredrick Douglass and one part-owned by Jamaican John Russwurm that were published in the USA between 1827 and 1874. The shifting and contradictory nature of this representation, ranging from the emancipated Caribbean’s role as a beacon in a ‘discourse of humanity’, to endorsement of US annexation plans as empire solidified, are a direct function of the constriction or widening of African American material space during the period. The condition of being enslaved yielded a different Caribbean-ward affect from the condition of being freedpeople, and the condition of being freedpeople yielded yet a different affect as the dream of black citizenhood emerged in the US post-emancipation era. The trajectory was one of alienation which resonates in African American-Caribbean literary relations today. Reflections are invited on the rise of national imaginaries and literatures across the African diaspora.