To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship

Elizabeth McHenry’s To Make Negro Literature is an archivally rich, lucidly written, substantial, and award-winning contribution to our ever-deepening understanding of African American literary history.1 In its title, archive, and argument, To Make Negro Literature also presents a concrete alternative to Kenneth W. Warren’s (2011) provocative and influential book What Was African American Literature?, based on his 2007 W. E. B. Du Bois lectures at Harvard. McHenry explicitly engages with Warren’s book briefly, if necessarily, as one node of many in an extensive network of scholarship on African American literature. This networked approach delivers an intellectually rich, layered understanding of the infrastructure and work that went into making African American literary and intellectual culture, and of the lived experiences of African American writers, editors, publishers, and readers at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet the approach largely leaves to reviewers the work of positioning What Was African American Literature? and To Make Negro Literature in relation to each other and the field.Both McHenry and Warren take a restricted historical view to understand how African American writing came into its own as a body of literature, sharing the Jim Crow era as their frame, with McHenry focusing even more tightly on the period between 1900 and 1919. Both scholars insist on the inextricability of the works produced during this period from their legal, social, and cultural contexts. From there the two projects diverge sharply, as the designations African American versus Negro in their titles suggest. Warren (2011: 3) acknowledges that his book might have been more appropriately titled What Was Negro Literature?, because “most, if perhaps not all, of the writers who published work during the Jim Crow era understood themselves to be Negro writers—publishing, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, Negro literature.” But he is less concerned with these writers than with the scholars and cultural critics who came after them and incorporated them and their works into the preferred designation African American. Against the political agenda of rendering African American literature transhistorical and transnational—taking a long view, in other words, of the ongoing experiences of discrimination against people of African descent in the Americas—Warren deliberately (and confusingly) rebrands Negro literature specific to the Jim Crow era as African American literature and places it in the past tense. He argues that African American literature was “a representational and rhetorical strategy within the domain of a literary practice responsive to conditions that, by and large, no longer obtain”—that is, to Jim Crow (9).McHenry chooses the more historically specific designation Negro literature. She explains, “To use the word ‘Negro,’ as I deliberately do in this study, is to evoke a particular moment in which African Americans embraced the word, insisting that its first letter be capitalized as a means of both controlling its meaning and signifying the recognition and respect due to people of African descent” (7). In this focus on the writers and how they designated themselves at the time, I see McHenry signaling that Warren should have heeded his own recognition of the mistitling of his book. By doing so, he might have spared scholars in the field the sense that they needed to justify its existence and their work yet again. More important, I see McHenry’s focus on the writers, critics, and readers who understood and emphatically embraced themselves as Negro as cutting through the critical, theoretical, and political thickets into which we have tended to think and write ourselves in our even more complicated sociopolitical times, to recover a version of what was happening on the ground under the lived conditions of the early twentieth century. To put it simply, McHenry is more interested than Warren is in how African American writers—not Jim Crow or literary historians but book authors, editors, sellers, bibliographers, and readers—theorized and produced literature both individually and collectively then. In restricting her focus to the turn of the twentieth century, she exposes something more that we have overlooked: a moment in which Negro writers tried and frequently failed in their literary endeavors as they met and pushed against the structural limitations of studying, writing, publishing, and living. To Make Negro Literature thus brings to light the valuable work that less successful and unsuccessful efforts contributed in the making of Negro literature during a critical phase in its formation.McHenry dedicates the first half of her book to examining aspects of the necessary infrastructure of a literary tradition. Chapter 1 starts with the genre that she designates “racial schoolbooks” (27)—the “compilations, anthologies, histories, biographies” and other texts (26) sold by subscription throughout the US South at the turn of the twentieth century. She examines how this genre “captures the fundamentally educational quality of these massive volumes and their movement through various subject matters that . . . simultaneously gave shape and meaning to both Black identity and to literary study” (26). By taking this pedagogical point of view, McHenry discerns “a coherent curriculum for a new logic of Black education” when just such a coherence was lacking in Black Americans’ formal educational opportunities under Jim Crow (26). Her archive grants a greater degree of access to “the literary experiences of the less highly educated and less highly privileged” (26), expanding our understanding of histories of African American reading beyond the easier-to-recover elite Northeast readers who were the focus of her valuable first book, Forgotten Readers (McHenry 2002).Chapter 2 illuminates another key aspect of book culture infrastructure: bibliographies. McHenry argues that lists of authors and publications worked, “for the generation that created them, as the framework that gave purpose and legitimacy to Black literature.” They asked “important questions about African American literature and its parameters: What should it include? What should be excluded? How should it be categorized and conceptualized, and for what purposes?” (79). McHenry focuses on bibliographies made and maintained by Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Daniel Murray, and Du Bois as case studies of individual, curatorial authorship and as an archive that coheres to reveal bibliography as a mode of “practical, collective criticism” and “a practice of knowledge production” (81). By prioritizing practices over end products, McHenry captures both the advances and the frustrations in these bibliographic efforts. Many of her observations and conclusions in this chapter extend beyond her case studies and the field of African American literature to all human knowledge- and culture-making projects, but for the most part McHenry modestly leaves that recognition to readers.Chapters 3 and 4 turn to case studies of Black authorship that are implicitly motivated by one of the central questions of book history and literary theory: “What is an author?” (Foucault 1984). In these chapters McHenry takes what we might see as a nonbinary approach by working from a significantly modified version of the question: What is the relationship of the author to others? Both the theoretical and the practical stakes of this modified question become apparent as early as the introduction when she identifies T. Thomas Fortune and Mary Church Terrell as examples of authors “who ‘author’ not themselves, but others” (17). Fortune was Booker T. Washington’s ghostwriter, and McHenry recovers and analyzes the complex “labor of writing that went into the fiction of Washington’s authorship” (17). In doing so, she sheds new light on how important authorship and writing were in Washington’s agenda for racial uplift, subtly correcting the too easy opposition of Washington as the practical anti-intellectual and Du Bois as the elitist intellectual. McHenry’s focus in these pages is squarely on Fortune and Washington. Chapter 3 reveals Fortune’s ambition in working largely behind the scenes both for and as Washington and shows how Washington worked for Fortune to project, as the introduction explains, “the centrality of literature to Negro leadership” and thereby generate “a public with an interest in the kinds of racial authority, information, and insight literature could convey” (17). I particularly appreciate chapter 3 for modeling an increasing critical recognition of how African American authors substantively wrestled with key theoretical questions about their role, both after White/European theorists raised and answered such questions to the detriment of people of African descent in the late eighteenth century, and before such questions come into focus again for White/European theorists during the social movements of the late 1960s.2 McHenry proposes Fortune as a major yet neglected critical theorist of authorship for how he perceived the value of working under and through another author’s name and standing. By carefully unpacking how “Fortune undertook a calculated, painstaking effort to steer Washington into the space of authorship” (130), chapter 3 both constructs and manages that space of generative originality and proprietary identity for Washington and the Black writers who followed his example. Here again McHenry attends to the friction in such efforts and concludes with Fortune’s growing frustrations with Washington’s work, considering how his case reveals the limits of even the most ambitious and successful attempts to establish African American authority in US culture.Chapter 4, the book’s most sustained analysis of frustration and failure, takes up the case of Mary Church Terrell. McHenry makes clear that her “aim in this chapter is not to ‘rediscover’ Terrell as an accomplished writer of short fiction, or to establish a place for her in the canon of early twentieth-century African American literature,” but “to think critically about the terms and conditions of her ‘failure’” (190). Doing so opens up space for literary history to “account for writers that ‘opted out’ or otherwise refused to make the sort of compromises in their writing that were expected of them” (190). In Terrell’s literary and critical writing, McHenry discerns a form of “private authorship” cultivated in relation to “a limited and relatively private reading public” and as an alternative to a literary infrastructure that refused to incorporate Terrell and writers like her (191). Once more McHenry recognizes authorial theory in literary practice, exploring how Terrell responded to rejection by the publishers of her time and how her protests against the material and ideological conditions of publishing extended beyond her to “open up these avenues of publication for future generations of African American writers” (193).McHenry’s project vividly exemplifies how reconsidering instances of failure according to the dominant terms of their time makes visible multiple undervalued forms of effort and accomplishment without downplaying the lived frustrations of structural limitations. It is no overstatement to conclude that if literature scholars in all fields apply McHenry’s generous example to other authors, works, and times, we stand to gain an immeasurably more inclusive understanding of literary history and theory, with the potential to do much greater justice to people and literatures of the past, present, and future.