The Fragmented Fictions of Black Reconstruction

Benjamin Fagan’s, “The Fragmented Fictions of Black Reconstruction,” explores the relationship between serial fiction published in black newspapers and the genre of the fragment. Black newspapers represented the primary... [ view full abstract ]

Benjamin Fagan’s, “The Fragmented Fictions of Black Reconstruction,” explores the relationship between serial fiction published in black newspapers and the genre of the fragment. Black newspapers represented the primary venue for the publication of black novels during the century in general. But, because of the newspapers’ ephemerality and racist practices of collecting and archiving American print, sections of many of these novels remain missing, leaving us with a body of fragmented fictions. Fagan focuses on this fragmentary nature to analyze how the fragment and the serial mutually constitute one another. He does so through a reading of Hearts and Homes, a previously unrecovered novel published anonymously in two black newspapers during the summer of 1865. Set before the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, the novel focuses on white slaveholders’ conspiracies against each other on Barbadian plantations. Hearts shows how a novel could be published serially not only within a single newspaper, but also across publications. It initially appeared in the Tri-Weekly Anglo-African, an unlocated black newspaper that ran for one week. Eight more chapters were then published in the Anglo-African, before that newspaper abruptly ceased publishing the novel. At the same time, Heart exemplifies how seriality can result in a fragmentary work. The novel’s first three chapters and an unknown number of concluding chapters remain unrecovered. Looking closely at a novel that is both serial and fragment allows us, then, to explore the interplay between two forms central to 19^th-century black fiction.