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

Abstract

Reviewed by: To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry Sara Rutkowski To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship. By Elizabeth McHenry. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 295. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4780-1451-5; cloth, $104.95, ISBN 978-1-4780-1539-4.) Each of the four chapters of Elizabeth McHenry’s new book, To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship, offers a luminous venture into a little-known corner of African American literary history at the turn of the twentieth century. In her first chapter, McHenry introduces readers to a body of history and criticism she calls “racial school books”—works sold by subscription that charted racial history and effectively provided an alternative curriculum in classrooms for Black students in the Midwest and the South. McHenry delves into how volumes like William Krogman and Henry Kletzing’s Progress of a Race (Atlanta, 1896), which have long been excluded from consideration as “literature,” became sites of “the advancement of literacy and literary education” (p. 15). The next chapter focuses on the proliferation of bibliographies that cataloged Black print culture. As McHenry explains, these lists became a way of [End Page 372] establishing parameters of and giving “purpose and legitimacy to Black literature” (p. 79). Daniel Murray’s bibliographies for the 1900 Paris Exposition and the bibliographies W. E. B. Du Bois published in the early years of the twentieth century “have much to tell us about how the subjects of Blackness were being mapped, aesthetically imagined, and politically mobilized” (p. 128). McHenry then shifts to T. Thomas Fortune, the writer largely responsible for Booker T. Washington’s literary career. She describes Fortune’s efforts to make Washington “literary”—and by extension to give authority to Black literary production (p. 131). But Fortune sacrificed his own writerly ambitions, and his fiction fared poorly in the literary marketplace while he constructed Washington’s authorship. Finally, McHenry explores the life and work of Mary Church Terrell, a notable journalist and activist whose aspirations as a fiction writer were met with nothing but letters of rejection from white publishers. Yet as McHenry maintains, Terrell’s continued insistence on submitting her short stories in the face of certain refusal, as well as her careful archiving of her correspondence with publishers, formed part of “a furious and systematic assault on a segment of a publishing institution intent on denying the complexity of racial identity” (p. 234). On its surface then, To Make Negro Literature is a composite of long essays linked by somewhat hidden subjects that occupy the same historical period, a period that McHenry argues has been largely ignored or conveniently treated as an extension of Reconstruction or a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance. But McHenry’s goal in this volume is not about—or not simply about— correcting this critical oversight and isolating a new period of Black literary history. Instead, she sets her sights on something much larger: reframing how scholars perform literary studies. By expanding critical attention to texts that have been dismissed as insufficiently literary, to devalued readerships, to Black print culture, and to the labors of writers who failed to find success, McHenry is attempting to “rejigger both our understanding of turn-of-the-century African American literary culture and our conception of the appropriate objects of African Americanist literary inquiry” (p. 11). Indeed, the concept of failure is the thread that runs through these chapters, as McHenry invites us to consider how failure—in contrast to the accomplishments of widely studied writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt—operates as a “rich site of theorization” (p. 5). Drawing on concepts from queer studies, she shows how failing can be conceived as “a rejection of what is” if we look at how Black literary practitioners found ways to “audaciously reject and refuse the place assigned to them and the disrespect shown to their intellectual lives as segregation and disenfranchisement were formalized and codified” (p. 6). What McHenry has done is valuable, then, not only for the wealth of material she has unearthed, but also for...