"West African Writings and Pan-African Networks: Black Periodicals and Print Culture in the Late- Victorian British Empire"

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This project will examine Black perspecjavascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$oSaveBar$btnNext','')tives in periodical and newspaper networks in Great Britain and theBritish colonies during the late Victorian era (1880-1910). While the project will consider other forms ofliterature and writings, the focus will remain on periodicals and newspapers amidst the "golden age" of journalism and a technologically advancing, globalizing media. My research will locate, analyze, and prioritizeBlack contributions and writings in order to understand early networks and advocacy for-and against-Pan-Africanism in an expanding empire. While the attempt is to understand Black newspapers and periodicalnetworks across the empire, this study will focus primarily on West Africa, with a particular focus on SierraLeone and Lagos, two cosmopolitan colonies particularly significant for the Pan-African movement. This thesiswill contribute to the scholarly imperative to decolonize periodical studies by analyzing popular and lesser-known Great Britain publications alongside West African Anglophone newspapers and periodicals. Myresearch will incorporate perspectives of Blackness and African-ness in British culture with lesser-known andmore widely known Black British intellectuals like Edward Blyden, Africanus Beale Horton, and OrishatukehFaduma. Accessibility beyond the institution is imperative for this project, so my dissertation will incorporate awebsite that maps and includes writings by these West Africans and Black Britons in order to understand anoften-overlooked Pan-African community in the Victorian era. As many of these periodicals and newspapersexist only in databases or archives, particularly those from West Africa, the website will aim to provideexcerpts to these writings in order to improve accessibility to people beyond academia. I will show thatperiodicals, so key to the imposition of colonial power, were themselves already being 'undisciplined', deconstructed, and reconstructed, as Black writers used them to generate new networks and new ways ofunderstanding race in the closing years of the Victorian era.