P.S. A coda

On December 6, 1856, the Provincial Freeman and Weekly Advertiser published an advertisement from one James Monroe Whitfield. Whitfield, an important figure in the mid-nineteenth century debates aboutemigrationism but little known now, was calling for a dual-language periodical to be published in English and French. Imagined as a “preeminent Literary work, for circulation both at home and abroad,” Whitfield intended the Afric-American Quarterly Repository to feature both U.S. and Haitian authors as an attempt to conceptualize blackness in transnational if not hemispheric terms.