Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (review)

Most readers are probably not accustomed to thinking, in any prolonged way, about the circumstances under which books are produced. It is all too easy to succumb to the notion that, in reading, we simply and rather mysteriously commune with the mind of an author: to forget that the making of the book itself, as a material object, was itself a thoroughly human and, therefore, a political process. Black Writers, White Publishers investigates the political consequences of this process, describing in detail how the pressures of the publishing industry have caused African-American authors’ works to be compromised, distorted, and in some cases rendered usefully—if unintentionally—ambiguous. As John K. Young demonstrates, the acceptance, the editing, the design, the production, and the marketing of books are inherently interpretive acts (45). And, despite the many gains associated with the emergence of an African-American canon written by figures such as Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison in the past century, Young reminds us that these writers’ ability to push back against racist and racialist assumptions is limited, dependent as they are on a predominantly white publishing industry, and in many cases on a mass readership that may only seek confirmation of its pre-existing attitudes.

Black Writers, White Publishers examines each of these writers’ works from the standpoint of editorial theory, focusing on paratexts, the various emanations (titles, dust jackets, marketing campaigns, etc.) that mediate between the “inner” text and the reading experience it may come to produce. In Young’s account, elements of a book’s “presence in the world” (Gérard Genette, quoted in Young 4) that readers might not consciously acknowledge can be as meaningful as the book’s sequence of sentences and paragraphs. He is adept at analyzing books at both the macro-and micro-levels, working through specific, seemingly minor paratextual elements so patiently that they end up appearing to be, as he claims, evidence of a much larger, and more troublesome, phenomenon: “The American publishing industry . . . has historically inscribed a mythologized ‘black experience’ onto all works marked by race, in much the same way that, for much of the twentieth century, American jurists ascribed an innate blackness to all bodies marked as such, even if at the invisible and seemingly unknowable level of a drop of blood” (4). Although this conclusion may not be especially surprising, Young provides an eye-opening account of how such a problematic view of race has worked its way into the published work of African-American writers, in each case flouting the writer’s own apparent purposes.

Chapter One, for example, begins with the premise that the publishers of the seminal Harlem Renaissance novels Quicksand and Passing were (predictably enough) less comfortable than their author, Nella Larsen, with a critique of the nation’s “ideological dependence on a strict racial separation” (44). Young’s discussion of the two published endings of Passing is particularly intriguing: the final paragraph of the novel’s first two printings disappeared from the third and subsequent printings. His description of the “interpretive effects” of the inclusion or exclusion of this paragraph is important because it is one of relatively few points at which he synthesizes a discussion of a book’s plot and themes in a conventional sense and the material circumstances of its production; unfortunately, this account is not as clear or as persuasive as it might be (51). On the other hand, the author’s description of his strategy for teaching Passing, in which he assigns half his students the variant with the final paragraph restored and the other half an edition in which it is omitted, is smart and enlightening: here, Young makes a strong case for his claim that to make such a text “pass as stable” by obscuring its “material and racial histories” is to render it complicit with the reductive views on race that Larsen attempted to combat (39). Young points out [End...