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  • Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African-American Literature
  • Scarlett Higgins
Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African-American Literature. John K. Young . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Pp. ix + 230. $40.00 (cloth).

Black Writers, White Publishers presents an argument that initially appears to be so clearly true that it seems surprising that no one has made it before. This argument is, briefly, that the social category of "race" affects the social activity of book production, from both the author's and the publisher's perspective, and that to fail to take this construct into account when analyzing a book's publication history is necessarily to distort that history. More specifically, Young contends that, "The predominantly white publishing industry reflects and often reinforces the racial divide that has always defined American society, representing 'blackness' as a one-dimensional cultural experience" (4). Following up on the insights of textual studies—and influenced in particular by Jerome McGann and George Bornstein—Young adds race as a crucial component in the social practice of book production. This study is as much historical and sociological as it is aesthetic—though it makes limited use of historical or sociological jargon. Rather, by viewing the writing and publishing of books as a collaborative effort, it discloses this practice as one that is inherently social, and that reflects the racial history of its time.

The chapters of BWWP are a series of case studies on Nella Larsen's Passing, Gwendolyn Brooks's late career (after her move to Broadside and Third World Press), Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Toni Morrison's collaboration with the Oprah Book Club, and Ralph Ellison's last manuscript, which has been published only as the novel Juneteenth. These texts span nearly the entire twentieth century, and were produced under divergent historical and cultural contexts. In the most thoroughly persuasive chapter, Young argues that because it is impossible to know whether Larsen asked, or even agreed, to have the final paragraph of Passing, deleted editions of the novel that fail to acknowledge this indeterminacy explicitly produce a misleading edition of the text. With no extant Larsen archive to consult, scholars and critics are left to speculation [End Page 371] or, as Young prefers, editions that foreground this textual ambiguity: "To edit or teach Passing without acknowledging its incomplete history . . . forces the text to pass as stable, and thus erases the material and racial histories behind this textual mask" (38–39). The notion that, in a novel as important as Passing, such a central emendation as the content of the ending could be in flux, and moreover, that some Larsen scholars could view this change as inconsequential illustrates Young's central thesis forcefully.

In each chapter, Young reads closely the paratextual apparatuses, such as the front and back covers (images and text), author photos, blurbs, colophons, and even the ISBN codes, and imbues with remarkable layers of meaning these seemingly mundane and inconsequential aspects of the physical text. His chapter on Ishmael Reed focuses largely on one aspect of this paratextual apparatus—the white-on-black copyright page that was present in the first printing of Mumbo Jumbo but not in the reprints. Here, Young argues that, "[b]y blackening the page that identifies Mumbo Jumbo, first, through its ISBN number, second, through its Library of Congress catalog card number, and, third as Reed's property by virtue of his copyright, Reed adds race to the capitalist literary equation, using the color often associated with obscurity to illustrate ironically the operating assumptions of textual ownership on which the white page depends" (86). Perhaps even more impressively, as the example itself is less dramatic, Young contends that Passing's colophon envisions a white audience for the typeface that it purportedly describes. The colophon of Larsen's novel thus " . . . returns America to a history in which full citizenship and independence were racially and sexually determined" (41). This uncanny ability to find substantive meaning in the least studied aspects of a text expands Young's comparatively brief analyses of the literary texts outward toward the social world.

This study of authorship and book production as a social...

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