Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth- Century African American Literature

INTRODUCTION: Real Fictions of Race and Textuality

[ 3 ] INTRODUCTION Real Fictions of Race and Textuality Boni and Liveright advertised Cane (1923) as “a book about Negroes by a Negro,” despite Jean Toomer’s express request not to promote the book along such racial lines (Larson 25; Toomer 157). Nella Larsen agreed to switch the title of her second novel from Nig to Passing (1929) because an editor at Knopf felt the original title“might be too inflammatory for a novel by an unproven writer, while ‘Passing,’ and the phenomenon’s connection to miscegenation, would incite interest without giving offense” (T. Davis 306–7). Richard Wright revised and deleted several scenes in Native Son (1940) depicting Bigger Thomas masturbating, as well as those showing Mary Dalton’s desire for Bigger, in order to publish his first novel as a Bookof -the-Month Club main selection. Zora Neale Hurston criticized American racial policy in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), noting that “President Roosevelt could extend his four freedoms to people right here in America.”But she cut this passage and others like it after an editor at Lippincott wrote, “Suggest eliminating international opinions as irrelevant to autobiography” (Hemenway 287, 288, emphasis added). Toni Morrison revised the last “racially charged but figuratively coherent” word of Beloved (1987) at her editor’s request (“Home” 8), and changed the title of Paradise (1998) from War to allay Knopf’s marketing concerns (see Mulrine 22). These examples share a marked power imbalance between white editors and publishers and African American authors. To some extent this is, of course, a normal publisher-writer relationship: Theodore Dreiser muted several of his novels’ passages deemed to be too sexually explicit; the British [ 4 ] INTRODUCTION editions of Moby Dick were similarly softened, without Melville’s consent; and literary history provides numerous other such cases. And there are certainly instances of productive interracial literary relationships; Ralph Ellison, for example, followed editor Albert Erskine to Random House in 1947. As Lawrence Jackson reports, Ellison “liked the atmosphere at [Random House], which had braved litigation to bring out James Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as the fact that they were impressed enough with his work to offer to buy out his old contract and pay him an additional $500 advance” (360). Additionally, the “range of [Erskine’s] travels and experiences, his familiarity with the South and broad ease with differing literary approaches, and ultimately his saturation in the New Criticism made him an apt match for Ellison’s projects” (426). But generally what sets the white publisher–black author relationship apart is the underlying social structure that transforms the usual unequal relationship into an extension of a much deeper cultural dynamic. 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. Minority texts are edited, produced, and advertised as representing the “particular” black experience to a“universal,”implicitly white (although itself ethnically constructed) audience.1 The American publishing industry, that is, has historically inscribed a mythologized version of the“black experience”onto all works marked by race, in much the same way that, for much of the twentieth century, American jurists ascribed an innate blackness to all bodies marked as such, even if at the invisible and seemingly unknowable level of a drop of blood. The 1896 Supreme Court ruling instituting the “one-drop-of-blood rule,” Plessy v. Ferguson, “was a landmark case,” Eric Sundquist writes, “not because it drastically altered the direction of legislation and judicial thought but because it concluded the process of transfiguring dual constitutional citizenship into dual racial citizenship which had unfolded since the end of Reconstruction” (241, original emphasis). The cultural analogue of this legal shift is a similar duality for African American authors, who are marked in advertisements, prefaces, and other paratextual material as black, even when their texts themselves might belie such a strict classification. (I refer here to Gérard Genette’s definition of paratexts as “verbal or other productions , such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations,”which“ensure the text’s presence in the world, its‘reception’ and consumption in the form (nowadays at least) of a book”[Paratexts 1].) It is this cultural anxiety about racial classification that motivates advertisements marking Cane as a “Negro” text, marking the book’s ambiguous “inside” with a clear external indication of racial identity—even while Toomer’s...