What White Publishers Won’t Print

Hurston, Zora Neale

doi:10.2307/j.ctv1134fjj.15

Cited by 6 publications

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“…That they are very human and internally, according to natural endowment, are just like everybody else." 70 Thus while Jean Toomer sought to transcend the binary of "black and white" in the creation of a "new race," Ellington and Hurston believed that the universal resided within the particular and its achievement did not entail a homogenizing assimilationism. They attempted to construct a distinctive pot for African America that would contain the black, brown, and beige; its own diversity of unassimilable voices.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cultural Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Harlem Renaissance

Williams¹

2021

A History of the Harlem Renaissance

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Ishmael Reed, whose fascination with the Harlem Renaissance informed his celebrated novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), claims that "multiculturalism in the United States has come to mean everybody but blacks." 1 While "white" America is subdivided into various hyphenated identities -Italian-American, Irish-American, and so on -"black" or "African American" functions to homogenize that which Reed describes as the most multiethnic group of all. 2 This chapter attempts to explore the relationship between cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism during the Harlem Renaissance in the light of Reed's claim.Two common metaphors have been deployed in order to illustrate the opposing positions within the debate on multiculturalism. The first is the "melting pot," a metaphor for the assimilationist ideal in which peoples jettison their particularities and blend into one culture. The second is the "salad bowl." This is preferred by contemporary multiculturalists for it is not based on assimilation, but rather on the co-existence of different cultures. 3 The ingredients within the salad can cohabit within the same space, but can also retain their distinctiveness. Both symbols speak to significant strains within liberal and progressive cultural thought, and both are threatened by exclusionary forms of racism. Yet Reed's comment forces us to ask a more fundamental question: what constitutes the "pot" or the "bowl" itself?Werner Sollors has noted that the "very language used to create national unity and a sense of coherence" via the assimilationist "melting pot" can also serve "to support the ethnogenesis of regional and ethnic groups that could challenge national unity." 4 Minorities may resist assimilation by claiming a distinctive pot or bowl of their own, thus emphasizing their own internal diversity and ability to integrate others. Indeed, the desire to foreground their hybrid, multicultural credentials has been a characteristic of minority literatures. Alain Locke, for example, described Harlem as "the

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hurston lamented "the white majority's indifference, not to say skepticism" to the "internal lives" of minorities. 68 Her works foreground the internal diversity of those lives.…”

Section: In Solution: Jean Toomermentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Harlem Renaissance

Williams¹

2021

A History of the Harlem Renaissance

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“…She challenged the racism of White publishers and White culture overall in her article, "What White Publishers Won't Print." 166 Whites, she wrote, approach social differences with apathy or hostility: "I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor." The fearful White public preferred stereotypes: "mere difference is apt to connote something malign."…”

Section: Lost and Found; Forgotten Or Erased?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Marginal People in Deviant Places

Irvine¹

2022

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We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. 1 Joan DidionIn mid-twentieth-century publishing, "the outsider" arrived. Four booksall similarly entitled "outsider"-highlighted a robust cultural visibility of, and curiosity about, those who defied social convention. During the McCarthy-era Red Scare, the Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Wright explored themes of racism, segregation, and the American Communist Party in his 1953 novel The Outsider. The 1956 book by working-class English writer Colin Wilson, The Outsider, surprised everyone, including the author, by becoming an instant bestseller. Heralded as capturing "a representative theme of our time . . . of our deepest predicament," the book explored writers who fled a "cow-like" herd mentality to seek a deeper existential truth. 2 S. E. Hinton's novel a decade later, The Outsiders, about marginalized, working-class teenage "greasers," inspired a film adaption by Francis Ford Coppola. Recently, actor and writer Lena Dunham wrote that "over 50 years later" The Outsiders "has never felt more relevant-or true." 3 Finally, sociologist Howard Becker's 1963 essays featuring dance musicians, Outsiders, helped turn the social science of difference on its head. 4 It was the century of the outsider. These authors wrote against the grain of Cold War, midcentury conformity. They all described themselves as outsiders, and their characters struck similar chords in their critique of social conventionality. Richard xxiv Preface Wright's outsider, Cross Damon, represented "a black man's attempted escape from stable, essentialist forms of identity, including race." 5 Colin Wilson celebrated the alienation of his artistic outsiders, Hinton's gentle juvenile delinquents overcame the stigma of poverty to become heroes, and Becker indicted those who made and enforced social rules, thereby creating "outsiders" of his then-edgy marijuana-smoking musicians. And yet, as suggested by the almost simultaneous publication of these books, the outsider theme already had an enduring cultural presence. From the turn of the twentieth century, social marginality had been growing increasingly visible, whether through hierarchies of racial, national, gender, or economic inequality, or as the margins chosen by bohemians and political radicals. Paradoxically, outsiders were also, well, popular! At least, some of them were. And discovering which outsiders could be marketed and sold would become central to what I call "outsider capitalism."Together, sociology, popular culture, political activism, and even the process of commodification all reflected and produced this zeitgeist of the outsider. As literary critic Carla Cappetti has argued, urban sociologists Howard Becker, piano, performing at the 504 Club in Chicago, circa 1950. Courtesy of Howard Becker.Preface xxxiii method and epistemology. Since this book focuses on the epistemology of social difference, I use "ethnography" as an umbrella term to denote new ways of knowing,...

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“…indispensable book Alien Ink: The FBI's War on Freedom of Expression (New York: William Morrow, 1992), as well as in Herbert Mitgang's Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors (New York: Ballantine, 1989); Claire A. Culleton's Joyce and the G-Men: J. Edgar Hoover's Manipulation of Modernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and the Claire A. Culleton and Karen Leick-edited anthology Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920-1950(New York: Palgrave, 2008, which explores the FBI's prying into Continental European film and art culture as well as Anglo-American literature. Erin G. Carlston includes an illuminating review of this last title, complete with reflections on the burgeoning academic genre of "the criticism of FBI files, " in "Modernism under Surveillance: American Writers, State Espionage, and the Cultural Cold War" (American Literary History 22, no.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Publishing Blackness

Hutchinson¹,

Young²

2013

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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.

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What White Publishers Won’t Print

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Cultural Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Harlem Renaissance

Cultural Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Harlem Renaissance

Marginal People in Deviant Places

Publishing Blackness

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