In 1901, Baptist minister and writer Sutton E. Griggs published Overshadowed through his recently established Orion Publishing Company in Nashville, Tennessee. Perhaps the least well-known of his five novels, Overshadowed launched Griggs’s early efforts to develop a viable Black literary print culture in the post-Reconstruction South; it anticipated the subsequent endeavors of J. Max Barber’s Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–7) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s short-lived, Memphis-based Moon Illustrated Weekly (1905–6). As we reconsider the meaning and methods of work on citizenship, Griggs’s novel helps us think beyond birthright, territoriality, and political rights at the very moment when these concepts became widely accepted as fundamental to the definition of US citizenship. Described as the “most claustrophobic” of all his novels, Overshadowed features a bewildering array of intersecting subplots that end in the deaths of multiple characters, including the mixed-race heroine, Erma Wysong, and her half brother John (Fabi...

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