The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays Margaret T. Gunderson The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Todd Vogel. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 257 pp. Illus. Index. $59.00 cloth; $22.00 paper. Most scholars who study the diverse black press as an aggregate entity apply a narrowly framed methodology well suited to the size of the subject. Such studies as Armistead S. Pride and Clint C. Wilson's A History of the Black Press (1997) and Roland E. Wolseley's standard in the field, The Black Press, U.S.A. (1971 and 1990), use a chronological framework to interrogate the purpose of the black press. These studies reveal a twofold editorial policy of racial politics that seeks either to inform and instigate the masses or to promote the advancement of the middle class. However, a recent collection of essays breaks the traditional focus on the role of the black press. In The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays, editor Todd Vogel proclaims the contributors' findings are steeped in cultural, theoretical, and historical contexts. Though the collection anchors itself to tradition in its chronological organization, an historical framework is not the central focus of the text. Rather, several essays in the collection break new ground with a methodology that examines the black press as a "cultural production" (2) that moves within and outside the binary of white mainstream and the black margin. This new approach should prove helpful to scholars interested in examining race from an intercultural perspective. The strongest essays examine various ways in which the black press engaged in intercultural discourse with other marginalized communities rather than mainstream white culture exclusively. The chronology of the collection's four parts makes it particularly useful to historians and literary and mass media scholars seeking a period-based view of the black press. The four essays in Part I focus upon the racial agenda of major periodicals during the antebellum period. Robert S. Levine's opening essay about David Walker's Appeal immediately sets the cultural context of the collection. It emphasizes Walker's conscious creation of a link between his theory of black nationalism (if not Pan Africanism) to the circulation of his serial through "Authorized Agents." Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Carla L. Peterson embark on a similar theoretical task as they explore ways in which Frederick Douglass's rhetoric appropriated, then subverted, terms of the mainstream discourse, thus entering a conversation with it. Although they do not develop an intercultural perspective, the remaining two essays about black labor's insistence on equality in the workplace and Douglass's conflict with William Lloyd Garrison, by Vogel and Robert Fanuzzi, respectively, offer significant historical insights. [End Page 282] The two essays in Part II, the post bellum section, are not as clearly marked by subject and time period as those in the first section. Wendy Wagner's subject is Mrs. A. E. Johnson, an author known for her Sunday school novels, but less known for her articles about racial issues in the black press. Wagner discusses Johnson's choice to isolate herself from intercultural interchange by espousing black separatism. Returning to the collection's featured intercultural task, Hannah Gourgey examines the shifting relationship between the black press and Native Americans beginning in 1870. Part III contains the two most salient essays in the collection, ones that emphasize the polyphonic cultural discourse of the black press that this collection privileges. With a focus on the Harlem Renaissance era, Adam McKible studies a series in The Messenger covering each U.S. state and featuring a discursive "African-American experience in terms of community, state, and citizenship" (127). Instead of a focus upon domestic discourse, Michael Thurston examines Langston Hughes's Spanish Civil War reporting, illustrating the transnational connection between Spanish Republicans and black Americans. In her discussion of how The Chicago Defender addresses Japanese internment camps in the U.S., C. K. Doreski's essay opens Part IV, echoing the intercultural discourse examined by Gourgey and McKible. These final six essays begin in the World War II era and move to the present day. James C. Hall and Maren Stange focus on the...