For centuries, periodical culture transported literary and political texts outside of their national contexts and delivered them to new publics. It is surprising, then, that the composite medium of the periodical does not feature very prominently in conversations about world literature or comparative literary studies. The Postcolonial Studies Print Culture Network is one of the few notable forums dedicated to bridging this gap. This panel seeks to place recent work on colonial and postcolonial periodicals into conversation with new scholarship on African American newspapers, and minority US periodical culture more broadly in order to gauge both the overlaps between these different fields and their impasses. Are our objects of analysis comparable? To what extent do our methodologies diverge? Together we will consider how nationally-bound modes of inquiry have shaped our research and discuss the limitations that mono-national and mono-linguistic frameworks have placed on our collaborations. We will delineate both the challenges to comparative approaches to periodical studies and the new avenues of inquiry that cross-linguistic and cross-national collaborations might open up for theoretical, genre, and historical studies of the periodical.