Reviewed by: Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press by Kim Gallon Bernie Lombardi Kim Gallon. Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2020. 216 pp. $26.00. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, a period characterized by loosening sexual mores, one could find images of markedly attractive Black women in bathing suits (“bathing beauties,” as they were called) throughout the pages of Black American newspapers—the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and New York Amsterdam News, among others. These images were part of the Black press’s coverage of beauty pageants and were representative of what the press imagined readers wanted to see. In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press, Kim Gallon draws on an archive of Black newspaper content published between the World Wars to situate the Black press as a public sphere of sexuality that fostered transformative discourses on sexual agency, pleasure, and respectability. The mass migration of Southern Blacks to Northern metropolitan areas diversified the Black press’s readership, encouraging a level of ambivalence toward issues of sexuality and racial uplift. With the ultimate goal of selling newspapers, the Black press featured sensationalist content that appealed to (and fed on) the conflicting values of newly arrived working-class migrants, middle-class African Americans, and the locally established urban elite. Such content brought into question fundamental issues around the nature of sexual agency and its relationship to racial progress. For example, its coverage of high-profile divorce and sex scandals created an opportunity for the masses to pass moral judgment on the more “respectable” classes. As Gallon writes, Black newspapers and their readers “upset elite black and middle-class morality and respectability by exposing and consuming news about their private sexual lives” (73). In addition, readers achieved a level of sexual agency by voicing their opinions in letters to editors as well as a more fundamental “sensual pleasure that is imbricated in the act of reading and viewing” (7). Not only did migration bring a diverse new readership to Northern cities, but it also facilitated the movement of newspapers throughout the country, thus expanding the parameters of this Black public sexual sphere. Cities like Pittsburgh were temporary stopping-points for young migrants moving between the South and the larger cities of the North. Migrants moving through Pittsburgh purchased copies of the Courier and after reading, shared them with others along their journey, extending the Courier’s reach. “I read it with care and then send it between 200 and 300 miles for others to read,” said one reader in a letter to the editor (22). The Courier also sent columnists on tours of the South so that it could learn to speak adequately to the cultures and concerns of its expanding readership. The circulation of Black newspapers throughout the country also exposed Southern readers to the North’s changing attitude toward sexuality. Coverage of homosexuality and female impersonation in Northeastern newspapers like the New York Amsterdam News and Baltimore’s Afro-American revealed to men with same-sex desires in the South the potential for sexual refuge in cities like New York. [End Page 348] Even when content was not positive, “[r]eferences to other cities’ black gay communities . . . functioned as a narrative network in the black press that contained potential nodes of interaction between different communities of African American gay men and female impersonators across northern black urbanscapes” (138). Although such examples of how newspapers increased the spread of transformative sexual content with nationwide circulation are fascinating, very few appear in Pleasure in the News. The book’s marginal consideration of Southern Black engagement with Northern Black newspapers’ sexual content inadvertently limits the depth through which one can perceive a Black public sexual sphere in the United States during the interwar period. This appears less as an oversight than as a limit of the project’s disciplinary methodology; Gallon focuses her analysis primarily on the world as it appears on the pages of Black newspapers. Central to Gallon’s argument is the idea that editors and journalists produced meaning by imagining...

Reviewed by: Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists, and Intellectuals, 1893–1930 ed. by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed Caroline Gebhard Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed, eds. Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists, and Intellectuals, 1893–1930. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2020. 296 pp. $28.00. Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists, and Intellectuals, 1893–1930 is a remarkable book for many reasons. Who knew that Frederick Douglass was stranded atop the Ferris Wheel at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 for six hours? Or that there was a “Manasseh Society” composed of Black men married to white women in Chicago at the turn of the century? Or that Fenton Johnson published a magazine with the support of his Uncle John “Mushmouth” Johnson, who had made a fortune in gambling? Such details breathe life into the [End Page 355] picture of Chicago as a surprising, heterogeneous, bustling, and magnetic metropolis where African Americans had begun to powerfully assert themselves in a whole range of endeavors, including business, politics, publishing, and civic and artistic enterprises ranging from the creation of an all-Black National Guard regiment to a “National Music University.” The vibrant detail that makes this scholarly collection a pleasure to read is only part of what makes it an important book, however; its overarching purpose is to rethink what makes a cultural renaissance. In its first essay, Christopher Robert Reed sets the stage: Chicago, from the time of the Columbian Exposition through the 1920s, became a critical site for the emergence of a Black intelligentsia and Black creative arts because the city had developed the necessary “infrastructure”—Black patronage by highly successful entrepreneurs and professionals as well as a growing audience of African Americans which would swell even more with the Great Migration. Earlier assessments by Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier of Chicago’s lack of an intellectual class or the conditions to produce one, Reed argues, though influential, were wrong, perhaps because of “a preoccupation with the rising celebrity of Harlem” (18). Yet, as Courage writes in the introduction, the intention is not to trumpet Chicago as simply “a midwestern counterstatement” to the Harlem Renaissance’s claim to preeminence. Instead, the book aims for a broader understanding of the cultural, social, and commercial currents in Black Chicago that shaped the distinctive achievements of its writers and visual and performing artists. In other words, the book is devoted to what Darlene Clark Hine characterizes in her Foreword as “the recovery of a meaningful understanding of the black urban renaissance of the early twentieth century” that occurred in multiple places and often involved cross-fertilization as artists and writers traveled and moved. For example, in “Becoming Barthé: The Chicago Years, 1924–1930,” Margaret Rose Vendryes shows how the Art Institute of Chicago and African American artists in Chicago like Archibald Motley, Jr., enabled a young man from the deep South to find his métier as a sculptor. Yet James Richmond Barthé, later mostly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, omitted all mention of studying with Motley, Vendryes tell us in her meticulously researched and wonderfully illustrated essay. The collection’s starting point is the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. John McCluskey, Jr. frames the issues of culturally Black artistic production with how Frederick Douglass and others sought to use the only day granted to African Americans to highlight their accomplishments. Most performed European classical music—only Paul Laurence Dunbar recited an original poem—because they wished to stress the dignity and sophistication of Black performers. Yet the meeting of so many future Black artists there augured well. This essay, like others, draws on a wide range of sources to place the reader at the scene. The collection also looks at cultural production through a multidisciplinary lens that emphasizes, as Courage puts it, “cultural institutional history” and the study of creative artists as well as patrons within the contexts of their social networks and class stratification in Chicago. The contributors represent diverse disciplines, including anthropology, history, art history, literature, and African American studies, but the fine arts are showcased...

Barry Jenkins, Meet D. W. Griffith, and: Portrait of a Lynched Boy Murleve Roberts (bio) Barry Jenkins, Meet D. W. Griffith after Tyehimba Jess I am a man, I am a man, Yet and as the Loved One, as the Chosen One of God, I can never drop the phrase at that. I am bruised. I am black; But as the righteous do, I have risen: I am a man, reborn to spread Word, to spread Truth, a Black man, “Stained by the wretched mark of Cain,” Not that I’m unjustly proud of my achievements. as you would like to say. I am but passionate, But I refuse to drip with blood; and my passion is worth your millions— My life is dyed with love, my Passion is worth your Dreams. with a prism of kisses crowning my skin, And I’m sweet on the Cinema, on the screen with a summer of promise sewn to my soul, on what I have made Great, towering over you and your smallness— with Love, I love the power and the place; overwhelming love for my life I love the excitement, the entertainment; and her life I love the game of loss and gain; and their life I love the way and everything we’ve lost— I can express the Right thing: Every love story reigning marigold and rouge, how I right the human race in Every forget-me-not searing, sea breeze dream— how others follow, As a person supported by those, Dreams, how I have inspired. I’m uprooted and bolstered at once. And I love not giving up. Pioneering both my thriving and My Plight— though it’s hard—it can be crippling: It’s easy to hate you, the way things disappear, the way I disappear, sand between But I dye myself with Love. the webs of your fingers, I slip my thinking hands into my pockets which have never tried to hold on. and I tie myself with humility and blank pages, Still, I must remember, I have been successful. the blank pages I Blacken til they’re Red with awards, til they’re Me, a master of each subtle art— me, humbled again with the thinking in my hands and the hopes that I love knowing, in my heart, I have been successful. So if you forget me, it’s enough if you remember To bury me. My ideas: Bury me in negatives, the faces I made gentle in the shadow-stained theatre, Bury me in my life’s work the tears I wrung to cello-sweet sonatas, Never forget what I have left for you, the Masculinity I softened into the acceptance of Life. You Hollywood Dream. If you forget me, Black and white pages Remember to wipe away my ink tears That’s us: Black and White. and tell me, I see you’re angry, In moonlight, you look Blue. but that’s us. In moonlight, your tears do, too. Remember to Let me sleep, peaceful, with my Father. Let me sleep knowing I’ve undone one knot. [End Page 336] Portrait of a Lynched Boy The thin, cotton shirt slips down his shoulder,Baring ebony-sheet skin, thick and knottedLike the tan, jute rope tight around his neck.I can see the line engraved to the left of his spine,A seam sewn by a sloping bodyRun out of air.But on blackness, blue and bruised don’t show.Instead, he looks asleep:Thick-lashed eyes and Tuscan-red lipsCalmly suspended in the center of space. The cold, autumn air brushes my cheeks,Tries to muss my hair,And succeeds in shifting his limp body,Spinning him just slightly,Making him jive and twist and dance—Neck relaxed against its prison,Feet pointed for pirouette,Hands empty and innocentLike a baby born to a white wedlock:A thing that they value. His name has faded like the indigo denim at his knee,Fallen and crumpled andLost in the leaves between us,And the buzz slipping past my ear is a reminder:It was flies that led me. [End Page 337] Murleve Roberts Murleve Roberts is a writer from...

Utilizing the concept of the Plantationocene, which articulates how racial capitalism created and continues to shape the climate crisis, this essay connects the slave narrative to the contemporary neo-slave narrative to show how the plantation serves as the “ugly blueprint” (McKittrick) of the climate crisis. It also traces the alternative ecologies of resistance and repair that this literature encodes. By reading African American literature as climate literature, I seek to expand climate fiction’s canon, thus transforming how the genre is most often configured around white writers and recentering it on race. White supremacy, African American literature argues, has long fueled and continues to drive the climate crisis.

This essay explores the function of Africa in William Demby's novels The Catacombs and Love Story Black, particularly the commercialization of an African blackness in 1930s Italy and 1970s America. Against the view that blackness is depoliticized in his works, I reveal the author's anticolonial critique in Europe and satire of Afrocentrism in the United States through their intersection with gender politics.

Reviewed by: Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography by Shawn Michelle Smith Lisa Gail Collins Shawn Michelle Smith. Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography. Durham: Duke UP, 2020. 248 pp. $29.95. Shawn Michelle Smith's new book is right on time. Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography helps us better understand our current cascade of crises, especially the lethal epidemic of police brutality and anti-Black violence in the United States. With a text centered on contemporary photography and theory, Shawn Michelle Smith, professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, brings together the history of photography, the history of race and racism in the United States, and a clear-eyed commitment to social justice. Her aim is to shine light on how the medium of photography can enable viewers to confront the life-threatening—and life-ending—structural racism of the past and the present while also holding space for viewers to envision and work toward a safe, healthy, and just antiracist future. Like the artists whose work she engages, the talented interdisciplinary scholar is interested in photographs and photographic projects that, as she explains, draw "into view historical moments of racial crisis and transformation in the United States that have also figured prominently in the history of photography" (1). In other words, these are pictures that capture watershed moments and events in American history—major turning points that have also been catalytic to the medium's trajectory. Both historically grounded and theoretically immersed, Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography investigates twin concerns of time and meaning. Smith is interested in exploring what she sees as the "temporal disruption" inherent in photography (24)—the way the medium "brings a past and also a future into the present" (31). At the same time, Smith is also interested in exploring what she calls "photographic mutability" (17), which she defines as the ways photographs allow for varied and varying meanings, including iconic images that "have become stand-ins for expansive, mobile, and sometimes contradictory meanings" (4). Organized both chronologically and thematically, each chapter explores a photographic project or projects by a contemporary artist that invites contemplation on, or conversation about, the potent nexus of photography, race, and social justice across time. With focus on the era of slavery and abolition, chapter one, "Looking Forward and Looking Back," focuses in part on Rashid Johnson's Self Portrait with My Hair Parted Like Frederick Douglass (2003), a photograph based on a well-known daguerreotype of abolitionist Frederick Douglass produced around 1850 soon after the fugitive's legal emancipation. Smith first considers Douglass's Civil War era essays and lectures regarding photography, representation, personhood, and social progress, as well as the famous activist's own "repeated photographic performances." Smith argues that Douglass—"the most photographed American of the nineteenth century" (27)—understood incisively how the medium could slide between the [End Page 248] tenses—how it could, she explains, "create forward momentum with a retrospective pull" (17). In this context, Smith then examines Johnson's contemporary photographic project, which dialogues directly with Douglass's historic portraits and proclamations while both experimenting with nineteenth-century photographic techniques and participating in twenty-first-century conversations regarding race, racism, the presentation of self, and the photographed subject. With a focus on the Civil War, chapter two, "Photographic Remains," centers Sally Mann's photographs begun in 2001 of Civil War battlefields—specifically, Antietam—in conjunction with Alexander Gardner's famous photographs of death and destruction made at the bloody battle site in 1862. Smith considers how Mann's Antietam photographs engage both the history and the images of the pivotal battle that happened here on September 17, 1862, which killed or wounded 23,000 soldiers, and that led President Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Smith considers how Mann's photographs and their titles conjure the potency of Gardner's well-known eyewitness photographs of the dead and nod to Gardner's process. At the same time, Smith shows how Mann's misty, uninhabited photographs, which dramatically reveal the living hand of the contemporary artist, prompt viewers to...

In 1962, James Baldwin became the second Black contributor to The New Yorker, appearing at a crossroads in his career and the magazine’s history. This article reconstructs the editorial development and critical afterlife of “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” arguing that the essay’s reception by white readers is already present in its gestation. A conversion tale, “Letter” attempts to extricate its audience from the American tradition of willful white innocence. Baldwin’s readers, from William Shawn to the author’s recent revival, set in motion the essay’s machinery of reciprocal reflection—its chiasmus of style and substance—with imperfect but enduring results.

This article discusses a collaboration between scholars and staff of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to identify the books and pamphlets purchased in 1926 by the New York Public Library from Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg. With no extant inventory of that acquisition, the question of what Schomburg's famous library contained has long puzzled scholars. This article details the archival research, bibliographic work, and cataloging undertaken as part of the Center's "Home to Harlem" initiative to reconstruct Schomburg's library, which has resulted in an unprecedented picture of a collection foundational to the field of Black studies.

Reviewed by: Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s by Jonathan Fenderson Kinohi Nishikawa Jonathan Fenderson. Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2019. 282 pp. $99.00. At first glance, the caption to a photograph reproduced on page 89 of Building the Black Arts Movement seems unusual: "Hoyt Fuller caught in the [End Page 264] spotlight at an OBAC event." The black-and-white picture shows Fuller, cofounder of the Chicago arts collective known as the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), standing at a podium and staring out into the audience. The spotlight does indeed shine on him, but there's nothing in his visage to betray shock or surprise. Indeed, the rounded glow of the light lends a visual complement to the circular OBAC logo that appears behind the podium, just over his right shoulder. Fuller looks like he's meant to be there, so the question is: Why "caught"? Upon a moment's reflection, the reader discovers an answer in the resonant language Jonathan Fenderson uses to describe a man who quite deliberately "occupied the background" during a momentous period in African American political and cultural expression (2). As a magazine editor, writing mentor, workshop facilitator, and unofficial advisor, Fuller advanced the Black Arts movement from positions that were quiet rather than outspoken, out of sight rather than visible. In this sense, Fuller would appear "caught" in the spotlight in the sense that it's a rare moment where he is the focus of attention. Fenderson deftly negotiates what it means to bring such a man to light. To be sure, Fuller is deserving of the attention, and Building the Black Arts Movement more than gives him his due. In five chapters and a coda, Fenderson traces the many ways Fuller shaped the Black Arts movement at the local, national, and even international levels. The picture that emerges is of a man who seemed to be everywhere during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and yet nowhere at the same time. Until Fenderson followed the archival paper trail of Fuller's activities, no one had quite put the full arc, or reach, of his career into bold relief. Chapter one considers the publication for which Fuller is best known: the monthly magazine Negro Digest, later renamed Black World. Fenderson reveals how Fuller navigated the bottom line of publisher John H. Johnson to turn the magazine into a mouthpiece not just for Black Arts but for arts across the African diaspora. With Johnson's attention focused on his lucrative lifestyle publications, Ebony and Jet, Fuller exercised his editorial prerogative to make Negro Digest more radical, not less, as the 1960s wore on. He also proved that serious arts coverage could attract a wide readership, as the magazine averaged over 80,000 issues in print through 1971 (44). However, since Fuller never could rely on Johnson for practical support, he resorted to further behind-the-scenes work to keep the magazine true to its commitments. For example, he "recruited established writers to underwrite" awards that would recognize new and upcoming voices in Black literature (43). More subversively, Fuller coordinated a staged protest in front of Johnson's headquarters in December 1969—the fallout from which led to the magazine's renaming as Black World, beginning with the May 1970 issue (1–2). These and other examples from his time at the Johnson Publishing Company ground the metaphor Fenderson applies to Fuller throughout the book: that of a "movement architect." Chapters two through four follow the architect at work, executing blueprints at varying scales. The second chapter highlights Fuller's running arts initiatives through OBAC, most notably its writers' workshop through which many of the era's major poets, such as Don L. Lee (later Haki R. Madhubuti) and Gwendolyn Brooks, passed. While most of Fenderson's findings are of a piece with recent scholarship on Chicago's vibrant Black Arts scene, his research into the records of the Chicago Police Department discloses how its Red Squad—its infiltration and countermeasure division—"frequented OBAC events, opening files on members, guests...

Oscar Micheaux's The Masquerade: An Historical Novel (1947) is a verbatim reproduction of Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900). Situating The Masquerade in a genealogy of plagiarism in Black letters, I approach it as an important record of Micheaux's reading, one that positions its author among the real readers often missing from Black book history. As Elizabeth McHenry has urged, we would do well to "shift our attention away from the records of the institutions traditionally associated with the dissemination of print . . . to the records of less familiar, less formal institutions," which can turn up in the unlikeliest of places.