Hutchinson George - Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850

Publishing Blackness has passed through several potential versions before settling in its current form. We have been grateful throughout to George Bornstein, for initiating this project for Michigan's Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism Series, and for helping to shepherd the book through the production process. We also thank the volume's contributors, for the depth and range of their insights and for their patience along the way. We have appreciated the questions and objections from the Press's three anonymous reviewers, each of whom helped to make the final product stronger. Finally, we have been lucky to work with Thomas Dwyer and other members of the University of Michigan Press staff, including Christopher Dreyer and Alexa Ducsay.

1. 
   
2. 
   
3. 
   
4. 
   
5. 
   
6. 
   
7. 
   
8. 
   Page viii
9. 
   
10. 
    

George Hutchinson and John K. Young

Ed Bullins's 1971 one-page play, Malcolm: 71, or Publishing Blackness, laments and excoriates the academic domestication of black radicalism, specifically with reference to a white graduate student's request that a black playwright recommend black poets for inclusion in her planned anthology of radical American literature. Whitegirl tells Blackman she was given Blackman's name by Professor Hack, the white professor who teaches black poetry and aesthetics, hired as a result of student protests for a Black Studies program at the Black Revolutionary Third World City University. You wouldn't imagine, she tells Blackman, how terribly, terribly radical and revolutionary this book is going to be!And I was hoping that, if you could collect a section for the BlacksI mean the Black poets, of course, well I could meet with you. Blackman cuts her off, asking who her dog Malcolm (barking in the background throughout) is named for. When she replies, Malcolm X, he gently hangs up the phone.

Central to this interchange is a concern about the cooptation and domestication of black radicalism and black literature, accompanied by implicit worries about textual reproduction and selection in academic scholarship. As Margo Crawford notes in her discussion of Bullins in this volume's closing essay, Malcolm: 71 dramatizes the problem of who frames whom and who collects whom. At the time of the play, textual scholarship was enjoying something of a revival that would last into the 1980s. Black literary study, on the other hand, was just taking off on its post-1960s expansion with a growing number of newly reprinted texts, often in hardback facsimile form out of Arno Press of the New York Times or in inexpensive paperback under the aegis of the African/American Library series edited by Charles R. Larson and published by Collier Books. Scholarly editions of African American literature were practically nonexistent.

With its philological roots in the Bible, medieval scrolls, and Shakespeare's folios and quartos, textual scholarship was slow to come to African American literature, no doubt in part because textual scholarship depended on an academic industry already built up around canonical, white male authors. Groundbreaking editions like the 1969 genetic text of Melville's Billy Budd (an Inside Narrative) edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr. could only be justified financially on the basis of a large array of courses in which it might be used in place of a cheaper, even if flawed, edition in a paperback collection of Melville's stories and novellas. The mammoth CEAA-approved editions of the complete works of Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Howellsnone of which was finally completedtook decades of work and plenty of money from soon-strapped university presses. They ended in midstream and went out of print as scholarly publishing lost financial support and viability in the course of the 1980s and after. Indeed, textual scholarship easily appeared out of sync with the French poststructuralist wave sweeping the American academy in the 1970s and 1980s, and generally lost prestige, not to mention market share, in the profession of literary studies as a whole over the last three decades of the twentieth century. African American literary studies, meanwhile, took an opposite trajectory.