A network is a capacious but critical figure for periodical studies, as Eurie Dahn establishes in this superb study of the Black press during the Jim Crow period. Jim Crow Networks brings together careful archival research with methodological provocations and transformative readings of important literary texts, such as Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Quicksand, and Cane. The lucidity and precision of Dahn’s prose style supports this impressive and revealing combination of breadth and depth. As Dahn points out, “A periodical is both a kind of a network (in which its parts, including the features, advertisements, editorials, letters to the editor, and images interact and produce the emergence of meanings) and a node within a sprawling network comprised of nodes that may include readers, advertisers, other periodicals, and literary texts (which themselves are nodes in other networks)” (12). In her brilliant attunement to and movement between nodes and networks large and small, Dahn demonstrates the multivalent reading strategies that periodicals make available to us both in their internal heterogeneity and in their circulation in the wider world.Dahn engages theoretical texts that privilege the network (Deleuze and Guattari, Latour), yet her own account of networks and their operations emerge from her readings of Black writers, readers, and (implicitly) editors. By treating the archive as a conceptual generator, Dahn charts a methodological path for modern periodical studies that privileges dialogism, activism, and diasporic thought. The introduction to her book highlights Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching campaign as a precursor to the networks featured in Dahn’s study. Dahn notes that Wells instructs her readers to be critical of periodical rhetorics and audiences, as she cites the white press to demonstrate their complicity in the dehumanization of Black victims of lynching. This canny Black reading of periodical culture and its dialogism decenters white supremacy and advocates for Black lives, a two-fold goal that animates the chapters that follow.In each chapter, Dahn models a different use of the network as an interpretive tool for understanding periodicals: middlebrow networks, affective networks, readerly networks, and global networks. In the first chapter, Dahn traces the themes of social distinction, domestic respectability, and individual attainment, and their friction and sometimes continuity with racial politics. In the second, Dahn juxtaposes the affect circulating within and between racialized subjects with the mobilization of negative affect (shame) in an uplift-oriented Black press newspaper. In the third, she subjects the self-image of a white celebrity author to the critical Black reader responses in letters to the editor. In the fourth, she follows the publication history of a modernist masterpiece across interracial and transnational periodicals and identifies the work’s circulating tropes that invite diasporic readings and activist ends. The sheer variety of these approaches—not to mention their rich interpretive rewards—makes a case for the network as a flexible methodological tool for the periodical scholar.In her first chapter on the middlebrow, Dahn explores the tension between bourgeois self-making and racial violence. In an often overlooked appearance, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man was serialized in the Half-Century Magazine (Nov. 1919–Dec. 1920) in between its more famous publications in book form in 1912 and 1927. Dahn’s analysis amplifies the “ambivalences and contradictions” of the middlebrow (58). Dahn identifies the racist phrenological roots of the term “middlebrow” and the ideological shortcomings of the fantasy of consumer individualism, yet she also observes that the juxtaposition of domestic aspiration and racial violence in the Half-Century Magazine is not a bug but a feature of the Black middlebrow: “The implicit overall argument of the magazine is that domestic concerns and individual self-improvement on the one hand, and political engagement with the racial issues of the day on the other hand are not contradictory. Consumerism and homemaking are part of fighting against [racism’s] ‘brutalisms’” (43). To read the lynching scene that cements Johnson’s protagonist’s decision to pass for white in the Half-Century Magazine makes the periodical’s political investments more apparent. Dahn also unpacks other fiction and features from the magazine that either pursue these questions of passing and racial violence or valorize the preservation of domestic pleasures in the face of racism. Finally, the serialization of this novel in a middlebrow Black press magazine heightens the ironies that undermine Johnson’s narrator and his choice to live out his life as a white man: “the characteristic juxtaposition of the magazine form provides an implicit rebuke of the narrator’s path” (63).In her second chapter, Dahn turns to the affective circuits of the racializing gaze and internalized shame. Her primary exhibit in this chapter is the Chicago Defender, a Black press newspaper that attempted to educate new migrants from the South in the more urbane ways of the North. Both the magazine’s contents and the letters to the editors page emphasize Black Chicagoans’ embarrassment at the migrants’ hick behavior, which in turn reflects poorly on the race. Though this shaming discourse would seem unabashedly (or, I suppose, abashedly) negative, disciplining Black bodies to correspond with respectability politics and class ambitions, Dahn makes an unexpected and ultimately convincing argument that the perspectival play that generates shame also provides its potential antidote. Double consciousness then becomes a tool that can de-naturalize, not only the current (and temporary) version of the self but also the disciplinary admonishment of the white or intraracial gaze. Dahn understands the drive for respectability through Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, the internalized dedication to a destructive ideal. Dahn connects this chorus of voices criticizing newcomers in the Chicago Defender with the perspectival shifts and ironic distance of Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand. Her heroine, Helga Crane, is famously riddled with self-doubt and racialized shame. Because this novel moves between how others see and judge her and Helga Crane’s own alienated view of herself, Dahn argues that it opens up unrealized opportunities for living otherwise: “For Larsen, both art and shame are varieties of imaginative looking that can compel social change because they articulate optimism about how the world could be” (70). The intimate public of the letters to the editor page in the Chicago Defender cuts both ways, dramatizing constant surveillance but also creating hard-won community and imagined Black futures. Dahn’s juxtaposition of a novel that represents the Black bourgeoisie in Chicago and New York with a newspaper that hails a similar readership demonstrates both how periodical studies can enrich the literature-based syllabus—still often novel-driven by convenience and convention—and also how novelistic reading practices can allow us to limn the “characters” in a periodical, its implied editors and readers as well as the voices and bylines or signatures of columnists and letter-writers.Such communities offer a resounding rebuke to William Faulkner when he brings his espousal of gradualism in desegregation to the pages of Ebony, the subject of chapter 3. Dahn explores Faulkner’s insistence on individual subjectivity, both through his modernist experimentation and his quoted remarks, and then she exposes his assumption that the white author can imagine Blackness, while Black people cannot fully partake in the individualism, privacy, and imaginative capacity that he claims for himself. In Ebony, he urged gradualism through the embarrassing and repeated formulation “if I were a Negro.” Faulkner thought this periodical would reach (and presumably convince) the most important audience for this message, but instead Ebony readers echoed and mocked his presumptuous title in their rebuttals, published in the letters to the editor page. The magazine gives space and voice to a Black counterpublic. Their dialogue dismantles and repurposes the monologue of the white celebrity-author. A letters to the editor page need not carry that political charge, Dahn reminds us. After Faulkner published a similar essay in Life, that magazine strove for an appearance of even-handedness, printing both plaudits and critiques. Life’s format, including appending Faulkner’s signature to the essay, endorses the monologic authority of the modernist celebrity. By contrast, Ebony undermines Faulkner’s imaginative experiment (“If I Were a Negro”), both through the ironic voices of critical readers, and also through the autobiographical details they supply in their letters. These backgrounds and experiences grant them superseding authority on Jim Crow and Black activism, in spite of their lack of celebrity and a Nobel Prize. By entering this particular network, Faulkner hoped to reach Black readers whom he would convince of his sound reasoning, but instead, his words lost their authority in this recirculation. Ebony’s letter writers reject his claim to the white privilege of universal identification and racial ventriloquism.In Chapter 4 of the monograph, an earlier version of which appeared in this journal, Dahn considers the “periodical family tree that produced [Jean Toomer’s] Cane” (135).i She follows stories and poems from Cane as they first appeared in the Double Dealer, an avowedly Southern literary magazine; Broom, an avant-garde little magazine; and the Crisis, a Black press magazine and herald of the Harlem Renaissance. Each venue highlights a facet of Jean Toomer’s Cane—its dramatization of region as a node of diaspora (Double Dealer), its formal experimentation and transnational tropes (Broom), and its unshrinking depiction of lynching and racial violence (Crisis). Dahn maps the intersecting networks of Black press periodicals and (white) avant-garde periodicals, tracing Toomer’s heterogeneous artistic output and participation in multiple modernist communities. She also attends to the resonance of Cane within particular periodical issues, productively reading the friction between the rural timelessness of a story like “Fern” that appeared flanked by Futurist aesthetics in an issue of the Little Review. In Broom, by contrast, “Karintha” appears in an issue that features Mayan art and history This visual field underscores “Toomer’s overall project of pushing beyond limited definitions of racial categories” (149). The magazine issue “allows for the reintegration of the African American past into the world history to which the Mayans also belong” (149). This globalism reframes our understanding of Cane’s contribution to world as well as U.S. literature.Dahn’s eloquent and erudite study exemplifies the analytical elasticity that can make periodical studies not simply an archival trove but also an associative mode. It is only through following these links, Dahn proposes, that we can adduce the significance of the Black press in the twentieth century and beyond, as her conclusion addresses Black Twitter and its activist communities. The possibility for collective feeling reflected in the imagined community of the periodical public both affirms shared experience and rejects the gaslighting of white supremacy. Dahn has given her readers—and, one imagines, the students lucky enough to work with her—the tools to take up this project themselves, and by attending to one node in the network and following it to another, make unexpected connections that are both out in the open and occluded by traditional habits of cloistered reading (single author, single issue, single publication). Dahn takes up Jerome McGann’s call for radial reading, which he identifies as an inherent affordance of periodicals, and demonstrates what an adventurous reader can do when willing to make the leaps made available by these sprawling yet demonstrably enmeshed networks.Though she doesn’t emphasize the digital humanities in her monograph, Dahn is the codirector (with Brian Sweeney) of the Colored American Magazine digital archive. Her book implicitly models approaches to scholarship and pedagogy that might be facilitated by a digital periodical archive. As a fellow scholar of the middlebrow, I was particularly drawn to Dahn’s tactics in her first chapter, thinking through the fictional representation of social class within the racially coded pages of the Chicago Defender and James Weldon Johnson’s fiction of self-making and racial passing. But this idea of mapping an affective archive within and across magazines could also be a rewarding project for a digital humanist who could use a keyword like “shame” to move between fiction, editorials, and advertisements in the magazines, or could even juxtapose (as Dahn does) contemporaneous novels with this periodical discourse. Dahn has given the scholar of periodical studies so much to work with, not simply in these brilliant finds about serialization, distribution, and dialogism, but also in her imaginative yet concrete approach to networks as a theory and a practice.