Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 439. 2. Ibid., p. 440. 3. Ibid., pp. 442–443. 4. Ibid., p. 441. 5. For examples of how this mode of analysis has been employed to contemplate other black literary movements, see Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (1967; reprint, New York: Quill, 1984); Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). For a recent analysis of the merits and limits of the prostitution metaphor to describe the complex power struggles at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, see Marlon Ross, Manning the Race (New York: NYU Press, 2004), pp. 257–267. 6. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22–27. 7. Jerry H. Bryant, Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Jonathan Munby, Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 8. In the realm of literary analysis, “vernacular criticism” has become one of the dominant modes of reading African American literature. As Kenneth Warren has argued in his book on Ralph Ellison, citing the work of Horace Porter, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, and Houston Baker, some African American literary critics have emphasized black vernacular culture as the source of artistic and political inspiration in the African American canon-building project. Kenneth Warren, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 25–26. 184 / notes 9. Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Carlo Rotella, October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 10. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 11. Twenty years ago, H. Bruce Franklin issued a plea, in the introduction to the expanded version of his important study Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), that literary scholars study Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, Nathan Heard, and other black writers of the 1960s and 1970s alongside—not instead of—Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, Chester Himes, and the criminal artists in the American literary tradition. Stephen Soitos, The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Erin Smith, Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); and Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 12. Some of the important scholarship in this category includes Robert Steptoe, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979); Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979); Jean Fagan Yellin, introduction to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. xiii–xxxv; Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); William Andrews, ed., African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993); Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue; Ross, Manning the Race; and Jodi Melamed, “The Killing Joke of Sympathy: Chester Himes’s End of a Primitive Sounds the Limits of Midcentury Racial Liberalism ,” American Literature 80.4 (2008): 769–797. 13. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation 23 June 1926: 692. 14. Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 268–272. 15. Ralph Ellison, Negro Quarterly Winter–Spring 1943: 301. 16. See, for instance, Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London: Methuen, 1984); Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Soitos, The Blues Detective; Smith...