Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Un-making of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America by Korey Garibaldi (review)

Reviewed by: Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Un-making of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America by Korey Garibaldi Maureen T. Reddy Korey Garibaldi. Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Un-making of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America. Princeton UP, 2023. 272 pp. As Korey Garibaldi notes in the opening sentence of this comprehensively researched and persuasive book, "few people remember the best-selling Black author of the twentieth century: Frank Yerby" (1). That is an understatement, as very few people—including students enrolled in Black American literature courses—have even heard of End Page 193 Yerby, never mind "remember" him. Probably more have heard of William Stanley Braithwaite, arguably one of the best-known and influential American poets of any race in the first decades of the twentieth century. Most of those who would recognize the name now would likely associate it not with poetry but rather a white-oriented variety of criticism of Black writers denounced by Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, among others, during the Harlem Renaissance. Before reading Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America, I was in that number. Garibaldi cogently demonstrates how mistaken such views are while carefully laying out how they came to dominate critical discourse, resulting in the near disappearance not only of Yerby and Braith-waite, but also of many other writers who participated in what the book's subtitle calls "interracial literary culture." Garibaldi employs that term in the way it was used by those engaged in "cross-racial collaborations and cultural influences" (2) in the period on which he focuses, with the book's central subjects the Black "writers, editors, and others" (4) who participated in "a long history of challenges to racist standards in the predominantly white publishing business" in the first half of the twentieth century. These writers, editors, and others pushed "the boundaries of what Black writing was and what counted as 'American' and 'African American' literature" but have since vanished from cultural consciousness. Each of the five main chapters of Impermanent Blackness examines a distinct facet of interracial literary culture, beginning with efforts by Braithwaite and others to get Black writers and Black literary themes into print in the decades leading up to the Harlem Renaissance and ending with initially promising but ultimately unsuccessful attempts at cultural interracialism in the 1950s and early 1960s. I intend no criticism of Garibaldi in saying that, by the second chapter, the pattern of the various attempts to create and sustain a truly inter-racial American literary culture is firmly established and therefore predictable. In outline, a Black writer or group of writers works with progressive whites who are also interested—sometimes mainly for financial reasons but often for philosophic ones—in making Black voices and Black stories available to readers of both races. They form a kind of loose coalition of interests that, across time, falls apart as their work is undermined both by external forces determined to prop up white supremacy and internal disagreements, as well as profound misunderstandings across the color line. As may already be clear, the book looks only at Black and white interracial collaborations, a limit that reflects historical realities of the period. End Page 194 One of the strongest chapters is the third, "Challenging Little Black Sambo," about children's literature, which offers particularly compelling variants on this pattern. Here, Garibaldi surveys the history of children's book publishing in the US from the 1920s to the 1960s, noting that white women soon came to dominate that area of corporate publishing. The Children's Book Council (CBC), for example, had forty members at its start, with thirty-eight of them white women. Some of those women were committed to bringing "racially progressive juvenile texts" (109) into print after the US entered World War II, seeing that work as related to the supposed national commitment to racial and religious "tolerance" (Mary Dudziak qtd. in Garibaldi 109) in contradistinction to those on the other side. At the same time, though, publishers—often the very same publishers selling those "racially progressive" books—reprinted some of the most appallingly stereotypical texts, including Little Black Sambo and Jamaica Johnny, and continued...