Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893-1933

5. A Black Culture Industry: Public Relations and the "New Negro" at Boni and Liveright

5 A Black Culture Industry public relations and the “new negro” at boni and liveright We are witnessing the beginning of a new era in the treatment of colored writers. —Floyd Calvin, editor, Pittsburgh Courier (1924) What you all doin’, white folks? What’s all dis? What you all lookin’ at me fo’? What you doin’ wid me, anyhow? . . . Is dis a auction? Is you sellin’ me like dey uster befo’ de war? —Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones (1920) The same year that Boni and Liveright published Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), which many took as a signal of the maturation of a new generation of black writers, a book entitled Publicity appeared, outlining the subtle new tactics of promotion that were bolstering the new industry of public relations. This chapter examines how the transformation of the book business after World War I through advertising and public relations cultivated demand for African American ‹ction and informed its reception. My argument is that the commercial and visual discourses of advertising and public relations were not necessarily consonant with— and were sometimes dramatically at odds with—the intentions of the authors and the implicit arguments of their books. The ‹rm Boni and Liveright focuses this discussion for two reasons: its life span (1917–33) was roughly coextensive with this transformation in the publishing industry and with the Harlem Renaissance, and it was a vital institution in both of these developments.1 Book historian John Tebbel writes of changes in publishing between World War I and the Great Depression 169 that were so dramatic as to constitute a “revolution,” and he calls B&L “the epitome of the period” (136). Tebbel is correct in that the ‹rm exempli‹ed the period’s dramatic push toward advertising and publicity and its effort to challenge the genteel Victorianism that had characterized book publishing before World War I.2 But B&L was unusual in the risks it took, including in the investment it made in African American authors. There is a major discrepancy in the scholarship about this ‹rm—a symptom, I think, of the continuing relegation of African American literature to special-interest status. On one hand, scholars of African American literature routinely invoke B&L as a principal agent of the Harlem Renaissance. George Hutchinson goes so far as to call Horace Liveright one of “the most important and fearless publishers of the Harlem Renaissance” (372). On the other hand, book historians have without exception overlooked this aspect of B&L’s role in literary history.3 Ultimately, however, my interest is not in setting the historical record straight about one ‹rm but, rather, in using this ‹rm’s peculiar situation at the crossroads of the Harlem Renaissance and the commercialization of the book to examine consumer culture’s agency in racial-formation projects of the period. Focusing on one ‹rm, as I do here, is not to suggest that it was more important in an absolute sense than its contemporaries. In fact, such questions about the priority and in›uence of individuals or speci‹c organizations have limited the discussion of African American ‹ction during this period. They should be integrated with an inquiry into the broader network of capitalist social relations that Bourdieu calls the “‹eld of cultural production.” Bourdieu notes, [W]hat “makes reputations” is not . . . this or that “in›uential” person, this or that institution, review, magazine, academy, coterie, dealer or publisher; it is not even the whole set of what are sometimes called “personalities of the world of arts and letters”; it is the ‹eld of production , understood as the system of objective relations between these agents or institutions and as the site of the struggles for the monopoly of the power to consecrate, in which the value of works of art and belief in that value are continuously generated. (78) Thus, I have here tried to consider two broad questions: what were the existing institutions and discourses that conditioned book publication, 170 C0mmerce in Color distribution, and reception; and what translations of racial meaning were required to mediate among them and perform the cultural work of reproducing race? Much of the scholarship on this period has obscured these questions by focusing instead on individual authors, patrons, and texts. These accounts have told us a great deal about how such writers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Walter White negotiated the asymmetries of racialized social power, forging con›icted and, at times...