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Edlie Wong, "Empire, Race, and Print Culture in the Black Pacific" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Edley Wong about her book titled Empire, Race and Print Culture in the Black Pacific, published by Cambridge University Press as one of their elements in 2026, focusing, as the title suggests, on. On the Black Pacific. We might talk a bit about what that means, and all sorts of things that are intertwined, are crossing, are networked in this sort of area. So, yes, we're going to be talking about race, we're going to be talking about Empire, we're going to be talking about kind of how these things are discussed in different sorts of publications by different sorts of people on different topics. It turns out by kind of putting our focus on the Black Pacific, there's a lot for us to talk about. So, Edley, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [00:55]
A
I'm so pleased to be here. Thank you.
- [00:57]
B
Well, I'm pleased that you agreed to do this. Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [01:05]
A
Certainly. I'm a professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. I've authored two other books. The first one is Neither Fugitive nor Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Travel. And the other book is Racial Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion and the Fictions of Citizenship. Both books are published by NYU Press. My most recent book, Empire, Race and Print Culture in the Black Pacific, as you mentioned, is a book in the New Element series by Cambridge University Press. And as some of your readers may know, or listeners, excuse me, may know, Element books are intended to be short books, so roughly 30,000 words with a potentially broader audience than the typical scholarly monograph. And in fact, the shorter word count was one of the challenges that I struggled with most while writing this book. And this book is part of the Element series on race in American literature and culture. It's a new series. So to answer your question, this book actually began as something else. I had originally set out to do a research project on an African American writer by the name of Pauline E. Hopkins. She was best known for her serialized genre fiction and nonfiction in the Colored American magazine, which is featured prominently in the book. Hopkins served as the de facto editor of the magazine until she was let go in 1904 after the magazine was acquired silently by Booker T. Washington. I had come across the possibility that Hopkins had published under an as yet unattributed Pen name in the Colored American magazine. And the pen name was a Professor Hamado. Hopkins was well known to have used other pen names. One of them was Shirley Shadrach. Another one was Sarah Allen. But as I researched, I discovered no records for this Professor Hamadow. And Hopkins had reported communicating with Hamadow, who was commissioned and paid for his many publications in the magazine. He wrote a number of very popular series. And it's well known that Hopkins was unhappy by how underpaid she was and underappreciated for her work at the magazine. Hamadow disappears from the magazine when Hopkins was fired. And my suspicion, and this was the project that I had initially hoped to complete, was to track down the links and relationships between Hopkins and Hamadow. However, I began that project in 2020, and as we well know, COVID 19 lockdowns took place across the world. And it prevented me from doing the archival research that I had planned, which included a trip to the Fisk University Special Collections, which held the remains of Hopkins's archive. For those of you not familiar with Hopkins, she actually died in a tragic house fire, so her archive is relatively small. While in Locked Out, I turned my attention to reading all the available issues of the Colored American magazine and its rival, the Voice of the Negro, another magazine, which in fact hired Hopkins as a writer after she was dismissed from her position at the Colored American magazine. And you can actually find, easily find, both runs of the magazine on Hathitrust, which during the COVID era, was easily accessible and a way for me to kind of while away my time while I couldn't actually go into a physical archive. And the idea for the book began there. It was loosely based on my readings of these two rival magazines. They were both pioneering and ambitious in both form and scope. They were black illustrated literary magazines. And the publication like runs, they span this really fascinating era of US overseas expansion, especially into the Pacific. The Colored American magazine ran from 1900 to 1909. The Voice of the Negro ran from 1904 to 1907. So the element series was kind of nicely offered, a nice opportunity for me to kind of write a more pared down and focused book. And as I said before, it was also kind of a fun challenge for someone like me who was more accustomed to writing lengthier books.
- [06:08]
B
Well, I'm glad it was a fun challenge. It certainly sounds like a wealth of material that drew you in. But speaking of scope, in fact, I wonder if we can talk about, obviously, a really key idea in the book, which is the concept of The Black Pacific. How can we understand that?
- [06:25]
A
Well, the Black Pacific is a keyword in this project, and it's a term that was really first put into scholarly discussion and discourse by a cultural historian, Gary Okihiro. For those of you less familiar with Okihiro, he's a pioneering figure in Asian American studies and a major scholar of Hawaii. The Black Pacific is a way of really expanding, complicating the notion, an earlier notion of the Black Atlantic, which may be more familiar. The Black Atlantic was a heuristic term first coined by Paul Gilroy in 1993, and it was a way of centering the transatlantic slave trade and black diaspora and the making of modernity in the Western world from the American Studies perspective. My book the Black Pacific provides a framework that kind of opens up and triangulates an exploration of African American, Asian American, and indigenous Pacific Islander cartographies of the US Empire that's beyond the Eastern seaboard, beyond the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean, where much work on the African Diaspora has been centered. So two broad strokes. The Black Pacific is a way of exploring in my book, the Black American engagements with and imaginations of the Asia Pacific region, which became increasingly important to the US at the turn of the century during this kind of era of overseas empire. And secondly, it really asks us to think more carefully about the archipelagos that really dot the Pacific, to think about their peoples, cultures, and histories that are too often, you know, elided or overlooked and constitute, you know, a forgotten American history, especially in the case of Hawaii, and even more so with the Philippines, which was the US territory until the end of World War II. So I really imagine my book in dialogue with and kind of joining an interdisciplinary group of works, literary studies, anthropology, cultural history, that's really focused on this emerging idea of the Black Pacific. You know, figures like Atsuko Takatani, Robbie Schilliam, Vince Schletweiler, Natisha Tamar Sharma are all kind of, you know, scholars from different disciplines and fields that are really kind of working on this concept of the Black Pacific.
- [09:05]
B
All right, thank you for that introduction and especially sort of situating it within discourses, as you said, we might already be more familiar with, like, the Black Atlantic. Thinking, though, of the Black Pacific and kind of the ways in which you said it allows us to kind of open up ways of thinking and maybe stop ignoring some bits of history that otherwise might get overlooked. Is there anything further we want to discuss in terms of the particular questions you're asking in the book within this context and concept of the Black Pacific?
- [09:35]
A
The book asks us to grapple with the question of American empire and specifically its overseas empire, Pacific, which became so pivotal in the later 20th century. It's what allowed the US to become a major naval and military power. And the very idea of the 20th century as the American century is founded on this overseas expansion. I wanted readers to really consider how this empire also became a pathway for the global expansion of American racialized ideas and practices, namely Jim Crow and shinophobia, but also to explore how the circulation and expansion not only of empire, but of American racism along these routes of the Pacific Empire also gave rise to unexpected new racial identifications, affinities, coalitions, solidarities, and imaginaries of a different world or a different world order. Finally, I hope this book asks us to really reconsider the meaning of race in a far more global context, particularly how black writers and thinkers began to experiment with different and often affirming understandings of race through encounters, be them physical or literary engagements with specific peoples and writings and ideas. And all of this taking place during a time that historian Rayford Logan has called the nadir of American race relations, that moment when the promises of Reconstruction became redefined by segregation, lynchings, the rise of white supremacy, and anti black violence in the US and it's this final point that I really want readers to kind of linger on, which is how this global consciousness was facilitated in part by US overseas empire, how it led to new ideas and possibilities about racial justice, interracial solidarities, what I discuss in the book as black trans Pacific internationalism, how all of this was kind of forged during a period that scholars often view as hopeless and dark as the nadir, the lowest point in U.S. race relations.
- [12:21]
B
Okay, so there's a lot of intriguing things there for us to discuss, but I do want to make sure we talk a little bit more about the specific sources, the texts you're using to investigate these questions. You gave us a few examples earlier, kind of things that drew you into the project, but can you tell us more about the texts that you're investigating?
- [12:39]
A
Certainly. So I'll break it down in terms of kind of scholarly texts and my primary texts as a kind of easier way to grapple with the kind of mean groupings. So in terms of the scholarly texts, I draw from two large bodies of works, one of which is an existing body of literary criticism that explores turn of the century kind of black writers, a period that some have called the post bellum pre Harlem period of literary and cultural production. And a lot of the scholarship engages with more canonical fiction figures, figures that are more familiar probably to many of us, like W.E.B. du Bois, Charles Chestnut, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells. The other group of scholarly texts is Empire and Settler colonialism studies, some of it coming out of Native American or Indigenous studies. So figures like Jody Byrd, Audra Simpson, as well as Hawaiian school like Noe Noe Silva and others. So that constitutes the kind of scholarly body of texts that I engage with in the book. In terms of the primary text, as I've mentioned, I work primarily with two turn of the century black illustrated literary magazines that were rivals for a period of time, which actually kind of creates a kind of interesting dynamic relationship between the two, which is the Colored American Magazine and the Voice of the Negro. I also engage with a selection of black newspapers from the era. Calvin Chase's Washington Bee, based in Washington, D.C. and William Monroe Trotter's Boston Guardian, to name a few. And these black periodicals, beyond the two magazines from the era, offer additional context and materials that I draw from. I also engage and discuss in depth Queen Lila Kulani's memoir, Hawaii Story by Hawaii's Queen, which is considered the first kind of story or history of Hawaii by a Hawaiian written in English, and the earliest American English translations of Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal's novel no Le Me Tangere, Latin Touch Me not, which was originally written in Spanish. And for those of you less familiar with Rizal's novel, it's considered one of the most consequential Filipino novels ever published in 1956. Yeah, the Rizal law mandated the teaching and study of his works in all public and private schools in the Philippines, especially this novel, Noli Me Tangere, which is one of two. The sequel is Il Filibusterismo, and the book really explores the response of these two really landmark, major, I'd call them Asia Pacific texts in black print culture.
- [15:51]
B
Okay, so bunches of things there for us, and obviously we're not going to be able to get into the texts in as much detail as you do in the book, but I think we now have a pretty good foundation of the different pieces you're putting together here to get into some of the topics in more detail. And obviously you mentioned Hawaii. I definitely want to talk more about that, the US's annexation of Hawaii specifically. Specifically, given that we're talking about Empire. So can you tell us some, perhaps examples of how these sources, amongst others, of course, in the black press, thought about and critiqued the US taking this step?
- [16:28]
A
Most certainly. The first chapter is an exploration of black print reception to Hawaiian annexation. And I have to admit that I was very surprised to find that the vast majority of the black magazines and journals that I surveyed were very critical of US annexation of Hawaii. And I was surprised in part because this is a period where there seemed to be little consensus when it came to the issue of the direction of black American politics at the time. And for those familiar with the era, it's often discussed as being pulled in two directions loosely, or one direction is Booker T. Washington's kind of uplift philosophy, accommodationism. And the second would be the kind of more radical alternatives of something like the Niagara movement associated with W.E.B. du Bois and the Niagara movement as a movement that would later coalesce as the naacp. However, when it came to the question of Hawaii, there seemed to be consensus within the black press. And the consensus was that the US should not annex Hawaii. And the black press was also like equally critical of the US backed overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy which took place in 1893 with Lilu Kulani as the sovereign at the time, as the monarch at the time. So what I found really interesting was there was a long standing interest in the black press with Hawaii. And it goes as far back, you know, at least in, in the, in my research that I did initially was that it went back to King, excuse me, King Kalakaua's 1874 visit to the U.S. capitol. And some of the articles that I read in the black press took a measure of refracted pride instead seeing a non white sovereign hosted by the US President. And this would hold true also for his sister, Lilu Kulani, who would visit the US Capitol many years later after she had succeeded him to the throne and had also been ousted by then by the US backed missionary party in Hawaii. And then a lot of these black newspapers claimed Lila Kulani as a black queen, specifically as a black queen, and identified her, identified with her plight not only as an unlawfully deposed queen, but also as a woman of color navigating the kind of racism in the US So black print was very receptive to the queen and her efforts in 1897 to preserve Hawaiian independence and sovereignty. And it really paid detailed attention to all aspects of her American visit, all
- [19:37]
B
aspects of her American visit, and also all aspects of some of the other things she's doing. It's not just kind of her going places and having negotiations or even being portrayed in the press. You also specifically talk about her use of photographs as being influential too. Can we discuss that?
- [19:53]
A
I am happy to. I mean, Lila Kulani was acutely aware that U.S. racialization was a visual power. She was the first non white female head of state recognized by world leaders. And her memoir included 21 photographic images. And these images are rarely discussed in discussions of her memoir. The images span the Hawaiian royalty, portraits of the Hawaiian royalty, governmental buildings, institutions, and the images really emphasize Hawaiian modernity, progress and self governance. That was part of the argument that she makes in her memoir against annexation. And the images really kind of constitute what I see as kind of a tactic to counter representation, one that really challenged denigrating racialized caricatures and stereotypes that abounded in the mainstream American press at the time, especially those newspapers that advocated U.S. annexation. And as one can imagine, the Colored American Magazine and the Voice of the Negro as illustrated magazines were especially receptive to the Queen's visual strategies. They reprinted and recirculated the royal portraits that Lili Kulani had included in her memoir. And it really became an aspect, the republication, the recirculation of these royal Hawaiian images became an aspect of how these magazines promoted a more complex and global sense of racial politics. The Colored American magazine in particular, was known for its frequent inclusion of black portraits. And it would often solicit images from its readership, especially in its early days, while it was under the kind of editorship of Colleen Hopkins, before its acquisition by Booker T. Washington. The magazine really leaned into the visual technology of the illustrated magazine. And in part in the 1880s, Halftone Printing Technologies became readily available and affordable, which made it possible for magazines like the Colored American Magazine and the Voice of the Negro to include really vast array of photographic images relatively cheaply. And this really was one of the main reasons I was drawn to the Colored American magazine initially. Its beautiful covers, its wide use of images, and this is something that you can see in all their glory on a free, publicly accessible digital platform called the Digital Colored American Magazine Project, a project that was started by Yuri Dahn and Brian Sweeney. It offers high quality digital signature scans of many issues of the Colored American magazine. So you can really see the colors, the sharpness of the kind of, you know, images. And this is something that HathiTrust does not provide because its digitization, I believe, was made from either microfilm or bound copies of the magazine. So sometimes it's blurry, but there's no color. It's, you know, black and white or, you know, gray tones. And this Digital Colored American Magazine project really allows you to kind of see the beauty of these images and how they used kind of the visual aspect of the Illustrated Magazine as one of the kind of fascinating, pioneering, kind of ambitious kind of experiments in literary production at the time.
- [23:55]
B
Let's now move along. I think from talking about Hawaii, I mean, obviously there's so much there I think we could discuss. But of course, in the book you do talk about the Philippines too. So I wonder if we can turn to how the black press grappled with US Empire building there. Especially because it was very actively a place of colonization and especially there was pretty explicit racial colonization, racialized colonization of the Philippines. So how does the black press kind of deal with that?
- [24:28]
A
Yes, this was really interesting. As I did my research, I found that unlike the US Annexation of Hawaii, the black press had extremely mixed opinions about U.S. military war and annexation of the Philippines. And in part because, as you mentioned, black American participation in the Philippine American War and annexation was much more involved than in Hawaiian annexation. There was no consensus in the black press, as I discovered. I would characterize the responses as kind of three broad strokes. There was the anti war and anti annexation group. And as, as some of your auditors may know, prominent American writers like Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were also prominent members of the American Anti Imperial League. And they were staunchly against US Annexation of the Philippines, in part because it was hypocritical in their opinion. The origins of America as a British colony that had fought for independence and now America was to become its own empire with its own colonies. That was a contradiction and a paradox that many couldn't live with. And black Americans like Du Bois, Atta B. Wells, Bishop Henry McNeill Turner, figures that come in and out of the book project also recognized that anti black racialized logics and discourses were used against the Filipinos to justify this American war and conquest of another island nation struggling to assert its own independence and sovereignty. You have the pro war stance. There were those who saw in the Philippine American War an opportunity, an opportunity for black Americans, especially soldiers, to show their patriotism, their ability and loyalty to the American flag. Although some of these attitudes began to shift as letters and reports came back from black soldiers in the field as they reported on the racism and poor treatment that they experienced from white officers. And it really kind of showed that this hope that military service and engagement would be an equalizer was not the case in the end. And I really actually benefited enormously from the work of a historian, Willard Gatewood Jr. He has collected many of these published correspondences by black soldiers who had engaged in the Philippine American War. It was an incredible resource to my project and finally, the kind of third broad category were the more pragmatic figures who may not have endorsed the war initially, but came to terms once the US annexed the Philippines as a colony and saw the Philippines as a different kind of opportunity. And this was the case of T. Thomas Fortune, whom I discuss at length in my second chapter. Some of you may know him because he's been made famous recently by Julian Fellows Gilded Age TV series. He plays a bit of the lothario newspaper man in that TV series. But Fortune was among those who saw the Annex Philippines as an economic and social opportunity for black Americans who were not given a fair shake or a fair chance in the US he felt that black Americans were also more attuned to Filipino needs and conditions, given their shared experience, experience of American racism. And in short, for for someone like Fortune, Philippines colonization was a win win for black Americans and Filipinos, who would likely fare better under black American leadership rather than white American leadership, given their racial affinity and shared experiences of racial oppression and violence. In my book, I talk about how Roosevelt sent Fortune, as a special immigrant agent of the Treasury Department, to study race, labor and economic conditions in the Philippines. He would spend about five months in the Philippines on this study and would publish a series based on his work in the Voice after his return. So these are kind of, in broad strokes, the three different types of responses to the Philippine American War that I identify in the black press.
- [29:38]
B
That's really interesting to see the range of responses there and kind of the reasons behind them. So thank you for giving us the sort of broad sense of the different sorts of reactions, I have to admit. Then, turning to the next question, I want to ask you that when I saw the title and blurb of the book, I wasn't hugely surprised then to read it and go, okay, we're talking about Hawaii.
- [29:58]
A
That makes sense.
- [29:59]
B
We're talking about the Philippines. That makes sense. I was then kind of surprised and intrigued that you also talk about the 1904 Russo Japanese War. I was honestly not really expecting that to come up. And yet black newspapers are talking about it and in fact, intriguingly talking about it as a race war. So what's going on here?
- [30:22]
A
I too shared your surprise at how fascinated the black press, especially the Voice of the Negro, was in the developments of the Russo Japanese War. It's a war that I knew very little about before I started this project because it's not part of the kind of discussion really of US Overseas empire. It's not really seen as a significant aspect of American history, let alone Literary history But the Russo Japanese War began just as the US was wrapping up its formal military campaign in the Philippines in 1904. So there's a slight overlap in terms of the timeline. And in a way, US overseas empire had really created the conditions for increased American and black American interest in the east and the Pacific. And they picked up on this war in part because it pitted a non white Asian nation against what many Americans perceived at the time as a quote unquote white nation. Even though at the time in the 19th century, Slavs and Russians were not necessarily seen as white initially. And in many way it parallels what Nolik Natiev has discussed in terms of how the Irish became white during this war. The kind of mainstream American news coverage turned Russia or Slavs into whites in comparison or in relationship to the non whiteness of the Japanese. Many assumed that Russia would easily win the war. And this was of course, a thought that was viewed through the lens of kind of white supremacy that was honest. That was really part of the kind of warp and weft of the US at the time. I discovered in my readings of the Voice of the Negro that it really was a pioneer amongst black periodicals during this period for its international news coverage. And that editorialized world news coverage centered on the Russo Japanese War. And it might be related to the timing issue because the magazine launched around the time that the Russo Japanese War began, 1904. And it's the younger of the two main editors, Jesse Max Barber, and he wrote as J. Max Barber. This editor was just fascinated by the war and really brought what some scholars talk about as a race to lens to bear on its coverage of the Russo Japanese War. And that this particular kind of race lens was picked up and echoed in a lot of the other publications, especially the Colored American magazine, in its discussions of the Russo Japanese War. What was most fascinating to me was that Japan's victory over Russia, it shocked the world. And it really came to serve as an alarmist warning for white supremacists 15 years later. Fifteen years later, after the Russo Japanese War, American eugenicists Lothrop Stoddard's rising tide of color against white world supremacy would make continual reference to the Russo Japanese War and the Russian loss to Japan. What was even more important, especially for my project, was that the Russo Japanese War became a touchstone for black writers and thinkers who would project a range of possibilities, ambitions and desires upon Japan. Japan was often viewed in the black press as a natural ally to the black cause for racially equal equality and justice. It became A powerful source for the development of black trans Pacific internationalism. A lot of writers derived emotional sustenance and encouragement from the Japanese victory. I mean, to the point that astute critics of US Empire like Du Bois would then overlook and begin to apologize for Japanese imperial aggression in Asia against China and Korea because he saw Japan as what one publication called the quote unquote, champion of the colored race. So it was really one of the most surprising discoveries that I made over the course of my research.
- [35:15]
B
Yeah, I was certainly surprised and intrigued reading it. Were there any other surprises that jumped out at you in the course of figuring all of this out?
- [35:23]
A
There were so many. I mean, in the context of the Philippine American War, which I think is the lengthiest section of the book, I was really surprised by historical accounts of how Filipino nationalists successfully would use propaganda pointing to US racism and racial violence, the lynching of black men in America, to try to dissuade black soldiers from fighting for the US and to fight for the Filipino nationals independent cause. And in fact, there's a small number of black defectors who changed sides and fought for the Filipinos. And this isn't in the book, but it was part of the kind of background research. And there's a few scholars who have actually, you know, written books on figures like David Fagan, who was a private in the 24 4th infantry, which was part of the kind of Buffalo soldiers that we talk about in US History. He would become like a captain in the Filipino Revolutionary Army. Really interesting ways in which that question of race and the kind of way in which US kind of expansion of its racial ideologies along the routes of empire in interesting ways kind of backfires in these instances, in fact, becomes a kind of site for interracial affinity, identification and collaboration. And my book really talks about a lot of these strange encounters, these really interesting moments that really speak to the kind of capaciousness and complexity, the mobility even of race and racialization as we move from the US to kind of the edges of this Pacific empire. You know, there's instances of, you know, Filipino students in a really rural school district that perform a minstrel act for Theophilus Steward, who was, you know, director of schools under the military government of the Philippines. He's shocked as a black American to kind of encounter black people face minstrelsy in this particular kind of rural setting. And the students had worked really hard thinking, well, this is American music. It was a kind of gesture of hospitality. And, you know, Theophilus Stewart is just kind of taken aback. And then there's another moment where he actually witnesses this ritual, this Catholic ritual, an annual ritual, which is the ritual of the Black Nazarene. It's a Catholic, Catholic ritual that involves the kind of processional of a 400 year old plus wooden statue of Jesus Christ that's been darkened, that was darkened by a fire in the past, that's still performed today, and is absolutely moved by the sight of the worship, what he calls and sees as a black Jesus figure, even though he's an ordained minister of the AME Church and not Catholic. So there's these really interesting moments and encounters that I kind of discuss and engage with in the book that kind of offer us these really odd, strange, fascinating kind of understandings of how race and racism and racialization as a Kind of US project was being kind of manipulated, changed, twisted, twisted, warped by these really interesting encounters. It really speaks to kind of race as something that's not static, but that's very much in on the move, that's dynamic and that's changing as these encounters, you know, both material and literal, are taking place.
- [39:30]
B
Yeah, that definitely is evidenced in those encounters and of course, others in the book. And also sounds like a good kind of overall takeaway as well. Is there anything else you're really hoping readers or listeners to this conversation get from the book?
- [39:44]
A
Well, I might be just kind of repeating myself at this point, but I really wanted to convey to readers a different sense of American history and American literary history. And of course, this is the aim of this New Element series. And I really wanted to emphasize that this period after Reconstruction, during the rise of US Jim Crow, which we refer to as the Nader, right, the lowest point in American race relations, that this was also an era in which, you know, US Empire is really starting to kind of, you know, take over the kind of Pacific, that these impacts also gave rise to kind of really interesting innovations and thought, creativity, imaginations, forging different notions of black political thought that really spoke to the struggles, domestic struggles at home during the Nadir. So in this vein, I just really wanted to underscore, right, this really interesting cosmopolitan worldliness of black political thought on race thinking at this time and how, you know, reading Lilu Kulani and Rizal and the coverage of the Russo Japanese War led to something like the development of black internationalism, Black Pacific internationalism. And simply put, I really wanted to just expand our sense of the compass of black politics at this time, that as much as it was focused on domestic considerations and significant and serious domestic considerations at this time, it was also very much invested in international considerations. There was a hunger, a real hunger for world news and engagement that developed during this period. And we really see it in the Voice of the Negro and its development of what would become an international or world news column that the crisis and other magazines would mimic and pick up even, you know, well, after the demise of this journal, of this magazine. And I think finally I just wanted to offer a small glimpse inside what I find and I hope, you know, my readers find to be really the fascinating world of black print at this time. You know, you have figures like Booker T. Washington, W.E. dubois, they're often studied as key figures in this literary and print history. But I really want to turn the light to lesser known figures like J. Max Barber of the Voice, like Pauline Hopkins, like the many amateur writers, the one off writers that I discuss in the book, or to kind of recontextualize figures that we are perhaps now more familiar with, like T. Thomas Fortune. You know, in this other context, there's so much work to be done still. There's just so many black newspapers, small magazines that lived and died in this era that really deserve more attention and more work. And they just really tell a fascinating story about American history and American literary history and particular. Particular.
- [43:14]
B
And is this the kind of work you're going to continue to do? I don't know if you have any current projects related or not you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [43:22]
A
Well, it looks likely that I'm going to do a slight transition in terms of my research. I am contemplating a new project that will become more heavily involved in editing. So in a way, maybe I am taking a lesson from studying all these newspaper and magazine editors works and becoming an editor in my own right. I may join an ongoing project that's out of Oxford University Press and spearheaded by Stephanie Browner, which is to issue authoritative scholarly editions of all of Charles Chestnut's known and surviving writings. And Chestnut, as many of you may know, is a major writer, a major black American writer from this period and just someone who I just mentioned in passing in the book. And so I would take on the work of editing two of his unpublished novels. They're Paul Marchand, FMC which is Free man of Color. It's a fascinating historical novel that's set in Antebel, New Orleans, and it's one of my favorite Chestnut novels of all times. And the Query. So both novels were completed towards the end of Chestnut's life. He was unable to find a publisher to publish them. There are, for each book, one reading copy available that you can buy. But this project that I'm going to become involved with would be going through Chestnut's typeset manuscripts, and thankfully they're typeset and not in longhand, and annotate the two novels, everything in the novel, stylistic changes he made and historical details. And lo and behold, the manuscripts are held in the Special Collection at Fisk University. And in many ways, this next project would close the loop of the original research project that I had imagined in 2020 but had not been able to complete due to Covid. So I'd finally make my way to Fisk University Special Collections, and along the way I might have a peek at Pauline Hopkins's, you know, archive there, which I wasn't able to consult as I started working on this project that became, you know, this Cambridge University Elements book. You know, Empire, Race and Print Culture in the Black Pacific. So, you know, in many ways this next project would be a continuation in a slightly different direction of the work that I had originally undertaken when I began this project way back when.
- [46:04]
B
That sounds lovely. Lots to look forward to, clearly. And as you helpfully reminded listeners, the book we've been discussing that listeners can of course go read while you're working on those projects is titled Empire, Race and Print Culture in the Black Pacific and is published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. Edley, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [46:24]
A
Oh, thank you so much, Miranda, for having me. I absolutely loved our conversation. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and Bluesky with the handle EW Books Network, and subscribe to our weekly substack newsletter@newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.