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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December 2024
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Research Article|
December 01 2024
Afterword: A “Citizen of the Ocean” in an Empire of Small Islands
Edlie Wong
Edlie Wong is professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (2015) and Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (2009).
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American Literature (2024) 96 (4): 745–756.
Citation
Edlie Wong; Afterword: A “Citizen of the Ocean” in an Empire of Small Islands. American Literature 1 December 2024; 96 (4): 745–756. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11611088
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