Black Victorians and Anti-Caste: Mapping the Geographies of ‘Missing’ Readers

Abstract

This chapter focuses upon the known and unknown readers of Anti-Caste, an early anti-racist periodical first published in Britain in 1888. Founded, produced and edited by a woman it was not a monthly concerned with ‘women’s issues’, but the forms of racial discrimination women and men faced within countries of the British Empire and the United States in the late nineteenth century. Anti-Caste’s articles reported on a range of international and local debates, from the increasing speed of European colonization in Africa, to everyday racism at restaurants, on trains and in employment. During my research on Anti-Caste I mapped its community of readers; they were a multi-ethnic and international collective, though mostly based in Britain. However, tracing British based readers who were black proved to be particularly difficult. This chapter explores why an anti-racist periodical in Britain might have failed to attract locally based black readers. It also argues that such an absence of real or implied readers can still raise important and productive questions, not only about reading communities and their experiences, but also about the broader communities among whom they lived and worked.