Thinking Bibliographically about Periodical Networks in the “Harlem” Renaissance

Abstract As much as any other modernist movement, the “Harlem” Renaissance circulated through the pages of magazines, from established titles with thousands of readers to short-lived and ephemeral efforts that often struggled to find an audience. While scholars have largely focused on periodicals produced by Black editors, such as The Crisis, Opportunity, or Fire!!, Black writers also appeared in predominantly white magazines. Thinking bibliographically, in Elizabeth McHenry’s terms, about the texts distributed through these periodical networks requires both situating them materially—taking account of their physical arrangement within the page(s) of a particular magazine issue—and orienting them historically, by attending to the larger sweep of authors and texts circulating in surrounding issues of that magazine. This essay demonstrates these claims through the examples of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in The Crisis, the wide range of magazines in which several of Jean Toomer’s texts came out before Cane was published, and Angelina Weld Grimké’s story “The Closing Door” in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review.