The Black <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>: Nicholas Said and the Limits of Literary Citizenship

Abstract This article argues that Nicholas Said’s “A Native of Bornoo” exposes the limits of literary and political inclusion in the Atlantic Monthly, where it was published in 1867, and in the larger cultural milieu the magazine represents. Said arrived in the United States in 1860 as a freed person after a period of enslavement in Africa, Asia, and Europe, and with “A Native of Bornoo” he reached the seeming pinnacle of white literary culture. Although Said served in the US Civil War, he wrote nothing about his experience in the war. Instead of using his US bona fides as a war veteran to appeal for citizenship, he wrote about his homeland in today’s northeast Nigeria, a part of the world the he recognized as “so imperfectly known to the civilized nations of Europe and America.” Said uses the pages of the Atlantic to inscribe African intellectual, political, and military history onto a site of European/American ignorance, ultimately refusing incorporation into a US national project in a manner that is instructive for reading a wider tradition of Black writing in North America.