Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850

Young, John; Hutchinson, George

doi:10.1353/book.21936

Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850

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Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850
Book
George Hutchinson and John K. Young, Editors
2016
Published by: University of Michigan Press
Series: Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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From the white editorial authentication of slave narratives, to the cultural hybridity of the Harlem Renaissance, to the overtly independent publications of the Black Arts Movement, to the commercial power of Oprah's Book Club, African American textuality has been uniquely shaped by the contests for cultural power inherent in literary production and distribution. Always haunted by the commodification of blackness, African American literary production interfaces with the processes of publication and distribution in particularly charged ways. An energetic exploration of the struggles and complexities of African American print culture, this collection ranges across the history of African American literature, and the authors have much to contribute on such issues as editorial and archival preservation, canonization, and the "packaging" and repackaging of black-authored texts. Publishing Blackness aims to project African Americanist scholarship into the discourse of textual scholarship, provoking further work in a vital area of literary study.