Sidonia Serafini

This project is the first longitudinal study and literary history of the “Southern Workman,” a periodical published between 1872-1939 by the Black industrial school and American Indian boarding school, Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia. This project analyzes literary writings about citizenship published in the “Southern Workman” to examine how and why Hampton’s central organ became a rich site of multicultural American literature between 1890 and 1920, just before the turn of the century and after the end of World War I. It explores how Black, White, and Native writers negotiated, and often eschewed, United States citizenship by instead placing value on “coalition citizenship,” characterized by the cultivation of an alternative “citizenship” through the formation and strengthening of social, cultural, racial, and familial coalitions within, but often separate from, the larger U.S.