Serial Undergrounds

Derrick Spires’s “Serial Undergrounds” uses seriality as a heuristic for historical interpretation and for thinking about how writers such as Harper, Mary Shadd Cary, William Steward, and William Still framed their work... [ view full abstract ]

Derrick Spires’s “Serial Undergrounds” uses seriality as a heuristic for historical interpretation and for thinking about how writers such as Harper, Mary Shadd Cary, William Steward, and William Still framed their work within an ongoing literary culture. He frames Reconstruction as a set of installments, individual moments significant in their own right, but also constituting an as-yet-completed whole. The notion of “installments” rises not just from my interest in seriality but from the texts themselves. Writers continually referred to their present moment as a “threshold,” as they sought interpretive purchase and political praxis, and as they drew connections within a temporality that felt at once serial (to the point of repetition) and fragmented as each year brought ostensibly epochal political shifts. The paper turns to Still’s Underground Railroad (1872, 1878) as a case study for serial blackness. Underground speaks to seriality as print practice, narrative model, and a theory of blackness, both in Still’s creative use of local networks to sell the text and in his choice to create a narrative framed as part of an ongoing movement.