An accomplished editor in her own right, Toni Morrison made no secret of her dissatisfaction with the editing of Sula (1973), whose opening pages she critiqued as a regrettable concession to white publishers and white readers. Yet despite Morrison’s prominence in recent studies of African American book history, scholars have yet to fully explore how the contested revisions to Sula impact the novel and what they reveal about racially motivated editing practices in mainstream US publishing. This article situates Sula’s publication history as an exemplary archive of editorial conflict, one that illuminates shifting editorial approaches to race in American fiction amid the rise of US multiculturalism. Tracing Morrison’s responses to editorial disputes about Sula and Beloved (1987), this article argues that her career indexes the emergence of racial sensitivity as an editorial concern in contemporary publishing, anticipating contemporary conflicts over formal sensitivity editing as a specialized mode of manuscript review.
This chapter reviews a selection of new work in the field of feminist critical and cultural theory published in the year 2020. The chapter consists of five sections: 1. Introduction, which addresses the context of the Covid-19 pandemic for the reception and application of feminist thought; 2. Feminist Technologies, which reviews Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto and Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s Data Feminism; 3. Archival Bodies, which reviews Cait McKinney’s Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies and Samantha Pinto’s Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights; 4. From Resilience to Revolution, which reviews Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare and Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah; 5. Conclusion, which highlights three generative preoccupations within contemporary feminist thought.
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