The Crisis in Afro-American Letters

Abstract

BEREFT OF THE ENERGY of the 60s, many black studies departments and programs have fallen on hard times in recent years. Some commentators have attributed the difficulties to internal conflicts and mismanagement. Others have pointed to the widespread lack of support black studies receives from college administrations, established departments, and often students. With the fiscal belt-tightening which most schools will undergo in the 80s, prospects for the future of black studies are hardly bright. Add to that another serious problem which has only begun to receive attention: recent trends in the publishing industry toward conglomeration. While these trends on the surface may seem to have little to do with higher education, much less with black studies, they could have disastrous effects on the academic viability of black studies, particularly Afro-American literature. My experience as a teacher and scholar in the field is a case in point. I have frequently been frustrated by the manner in which works by black authors are handled by many publishing houses. For a course in the spring of 1980 on AfroAmerican literature in the nadir, I was informed that Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Complete Poems and his The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories were out of print in paperback. For my Harlem Renaissance class that same term, I found it impossible to obtain Arthur P. Davis and Michael W. Peplow's The New Negro Renaissance, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Claude McKay's Home to Harlem and Gingertown, and Rudolph Fisher's The Walls of Jericho, all of which had at one time been in print in paperback. For my undergraduate seminar on Richard Wright the following fall, the bookstore sent me familiar out-of-print or indefinitely out of stock notices for paperback editions of William Attaway's Blood on the Forge and five of Wright's books: The Long Dream; White Man, Listen!; Lawd Today; Savage Holiday; and Eight Men. Most of these works had been available in 1974 when I took a graduate seminar on Wright. After these experiences, I hardly relished the prospect of going through Books in Print in preparation for a recent course on contemporary Afro-American fiction. Still, I did not anticipate the difficulty I encountered in compiling a representative, balanced reading list. The works I found to be no longer available in paperback