Nineteenth-century mixed-race heroine fiction reflected and contributed to US racial constructions. In its antislavery iterations, it critiqued slavery by revealing the slipperiness of racial categories. Because children inherited the condition of their mothers – regardless of their fathers’ race – enslavers profited from the sexual assault of Black women. Enslavers targeted Black women for sexual violence and hypersexualized them, imagining them as always sexually available to white men. Depictions of mixed-race Black heroines in antislavery fiction addressed these problems. Scholars have discussed these concerns in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or the President’s Daughter, but less attention has been given to his three subsequent revisions of this text. This chapter reads Brown’s serialized novel, Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon as an revealing revision of Brown’s theorization of race in the USA. This revision makes important shifts in both audience and focus and anticipates further development in mixed-race heroine fiction, including writing by Black women whose work has been given less attention than Brown’s or white antislavery authors, skewing perceptions of this genre.

The Black periodical is important in its materiality, circulation, and the serial possibilities it affords. This chapter asks us to think about the periodical not only as where mid-century Black literature can be found but also as a media technology that uniquely facilitated a “transition from a transnationalism routed through a white transatlantic sensibility to one grounded in a Black hemispheric imaginary” through serialization. The political import of serializing novels in the Black press from the early 1850s to early 1860s is explored, including Dickens’s Bleak House in 1853 in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Martin Delany’s Blake in the Weekly Anglo-African from 1861 to 1862. This chapter argues that these papers used serialization “to teach their readers how to relate the fight for Black freedom in the United States to transnational liberation movements.” While Bleak House taught readers not to be distracted by distant suffering, Blake’s serialization taught them that the Civil War was but one front of a Black hemispheric revolution. Haiti is located in an African American literary and political imaginary that was also mobilizing the Hungarian Revolution through serialized publication, meaning the political struggles at these sites could not be readily divorced from those of African Americans.