Reprinting the Past/Re-Ordering Black Social Life

This essay recovers the cultural and political history of Arno Press's landmark republication project, The American Negro: His History and Literature. Within the context of the "reprint revolution," the period when large publishing houses clamored to publish African American texts, many of which had long been out of print, and with the backing of The New York Times, Arno Press reissued hundreds of titles by and about Black life. While these titles have come to shape the contours of African American literary scholarship, the project was immediately ensnared within debates about the future of Black political life. Knitting together personal correspondence, advertisements, and reviews, this essay situates the Arno Press endeavor with a longer history of Black print culture in which the past was harnessed in the name of imagining new political futures. Yet, within the context of the late 1960s "reprint revolution," I show how the Black past was summoned in the service of a liberal fantasy of assimilation, social management, and racial reform. Drawing a line of connection between the technology of reprinting and its ideological workings, this essay calls for a critical consideration of the labor that we invite Black texts to undertake in the service of particular, and often limited, political visions.