Publishing Blackness : Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850

John K. Young, George B. Hutchinson

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780472118632
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the white editorial authentication of slave narratives, to the cultural hybridity of the Harlem Renaissance, to the overtly independent publications of the Black Arts Movement, to the commercial power of Oprah's Book Club, African American textuality has been uniquely shaped by the contests for cultural power inherent in literary production and distribution. Always haunted by the commodification of blackness, African American literary production interfaces with the processes of publication and distribution in particularly charged ways. An energetic exploration of the struggles and complexities of African American print culture, this collection ranges across the history of African American literature, and the authors have much to contribute on such issues as editorial and archival preservation, canonization, and the "packaging" and repackaging of black-authored texts.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction, George Hutchinson and John K. Young
• The Brief Wondrous Life of the Anglo-African Magazine; or, Antebellum African American Editorial Practice and Its Afterlives, Ivy G. Wilson
• Representing African American Literature; or, Tradition against the Individual Talent, George Hutchinson
• “Quite as human as it is Negro”: Subpersons and Textual Property in Native Son and Black Boy, John K. Young
• The Colors of Modernism: Publishing African Americans, Jews, and Irish in the 1920s, George Bornstein
• More than McKay and Guillén: The Caribbean in Hughes and Bontemps’s The Poetry of the Negro (1949), Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo
• Editorial Federalism: The Hoover Raids, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Origins of FBI Literary Surveillance, William J. Maxwell
• Loosening the Straightjacket: Rethinking Racial Representation in African American Anthologies, Gene Andrew Jarrett
• “Let the World Be a Black Poem”: Some Problems of Recollecting and Editing Black Arts Texts, James W. Smethurst
• Textual Productions of Black Aesthetics Unbound, Margo Natalie Crawford
• Select Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index