Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow by Brooks E. Hefner (review)

In this powerhouse study of popular genres in Black newspapers from the 1920s through the 1950s, Brooks E. Hefner achieves two interrelated goals. The first is to adumbrate a history of these writers and their serials, an important expansion of African American literary history beyond the usual Harlem Renaissance suspects. The second is to offer a theory of genre play as necessarily political and racial. Drawing on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s term “signifyin(g)” as well as Stuart Hall’s term “articulation,” Hefner animates the historical archive’s anti-racist politics in its citing and rewriting of tropes, characters, and plot conventions from contemporaneous white genre fiction. In the early twentieth century, Hefner demonstrates, Black writers of newspaper fiction reinvented genres like romance, science fiction, and adventure stories for middle and working-class Black readers. Hefner offers a compelling case for the importance of this understudied print cultural archive, as “a place where desire and fantasy could be acted out . . . . This kind of pleasure, too, is vital to survival and selfhood, and the radical transformation of popular genres—the recoding, the articulation, the signifyin(g)—by a host of long-forgotten writers made this possible” (164).

Black Pulp’s archival breadth and theoretical depth make this study a crucial contribution to the fields of modern print culture, African American literature, and popular genres. Hefner’s thorough and laborious work in the archive is everywhere evident in Black Pulp, as he contextualizes character and plot conventions both within the (ostensibly) white pulps (which, he points out, published genre stories by Black writers as long as they featured white characters and avoided explicitly racial themes) and within Black newspapers. To interpret genre fiction and periodical serials requires such capacious references because the story’s contributions can only be understood within that network of generic conventions, other stories with which the newspaper readers (and certainly the serial writers) would be familiar. This doubtless heavy lifting appears enviably light thanks to Hefner’s engaging and brisk prose and pedagogical approach both to his theoretical framework and to his archival discoveries. Like the writers whose anti-racist contributions he recovers in this monograph, Hefner tells a lively story, and this political and imaginative energy is everywhere evident in the study. It is appropriate that Black Pulp is such fun to read, not only because it describes fascinating fiction but also because pleasure is central to Hefner’s argument about the importance of this generic play. These serials offered immediate pleasures—erotic, suspenseful, retributive—to their Black readership and through those pleasures implicitly and explicitly posited the utopian possibilities for Black thriving. This tone, Hefner also observes, marks a major departure from the racial realism and tragic mode of most canonical African American fiction from the 1910s through the 1950s.

Black Pulp’s first chapter sets up the milieu of Black serial fiction in the newspapers by focusing on the Illustrated Feature Section, an insert syndicated in Black newspapers starting in 1928. Though Hefner acknowledges that this insert was controversial because of the unscrupulousness of the “white-owned advertising agency” (30) that sold it, it also marked the consistent introduction of genre fiction into the news, and for a time, George S. Schuyler, who plays a major role in Hefner’s study, edited its contents. Hefner speaks to the wide impact of this short-lived serial: “because readership of Black newspapers had a much higher middle- and working-class African American readership than books or intellectual and literary journals like the Crisis or Opportunity, this fiction likely had more Black readers than virtually all of the African American canon through at least the middle of the twentieth century” (33). Because Gates cites the IFS contributor instructions in The Signifying Monkey to demonstrate the constraints placed on Black writers during Zora Neale Hurston’s career, thereby establishing her canonical importance, it is typically remembered (if at all) as the...