Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures by Eurie Dahn (review)

Eurie Dahn's Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures offers rich details about familiar authors and their imbrication in early twentieth-century print cultures. Dahn situates her work in relation to various theoretical frameworks, but two concepts seem especially important. First, as her title indicates, she draws on the burgeoning field of network studies. Recognizing that this term can be overly capacious, Dahn demonstrates its utility by showing how periodicals can be read as both intratextual and intertextual networks that connect readers, editors, authors, and texts, remarking that "it is precisely this ambiguity and edgelessness that makes the concept of networks useful in discussing periodical intranets and internets, as it captures the weak connections within and without periodicals that spring from the contingency that marks the periodical's form" (13). Dahn's approach is perhaps most influenced by Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the rhizome, which, in their words, is an "acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states" (9). The rhizomatic nature of periodicals allows Dahn to read Ida B. Wells-Barnett, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and Jean Toomer as nodes within vibrant networks of competing interests and perspectives.

The second concept at the heart of Jim Crow Networks is affordance, "a relationship between an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used" (10). Every object has a range of possible actions, and these are determined in relation to particular users. Dahn argues that periodicals afford uses not available to the codex—especially, but not limited to, nonlinear forms of reading and a "dispersal of agency" (14). By thinking through the affordances of periodicals, Dahn reveals aspects of the rhizomatic activism of African American networks in the Jim Crow era.

Dahn begins by noting the demise of the print version of the Chicago Defender, and this Black newspaper figures prominently in her first two chapters. Illuminating the polymorphous nature of networks, Dahn shows how the same periodical can be positioned as both lowbrow and middlebrow. In Chapter One, Dahn attends to the Half-Century, an African American women's monthly that established a middle position between the popular Defender and the elite Crisis by recognizing its audience's "radial reading." Dahn applies this term, coined by Jerome McGann, to describe the complex, nonlinear reading practices afforded by periodicals generally. Appreciating the Half-Century's access to a middlebrow readership, James Weldon Johnson selected this venue when he serialized his once anonymously published novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Despite his affiliation with the Crisis (by virtue of his leading role in the NAACP), Johnson chose the Half-Century because he recognized "that his activism needed to reach a wider network" (64) than the Crisis might afford.

Because of the decentered, nonhierarchical nature of networks, the same periodical can serve different functions, thus demonstrating the "meaning-making power of relationality in networks" (79). Figured as lowbrow in relation to the Half-Century, the Defender can be read as middlebrow when one considers how its more established, Northern readers responded to recent Black arrivals from the rural South in their letters to the editor. In her second chapter, Dahn identifies the circulation and visual logic of shame in the newspaper, and she argues that this affect was an instrument for class aspiration and racial uplift. Nella Larsen's Quicksand, although it does not mention the Defender directly, participates in a weak but broadly shared affective network based on shame; at the same time, however, her novel poses a challenge to "the internalization of white hegemonic norms" (100) inherent in shame as it functions in the Defender. "This shift in perspective," Dahn argues, "asks the reader to engage in a potentially socially transformative way of looking that acknowledges the hypocrisy of racial uplift, elite coteries, and an aesthetics that...