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

Abstract

The dominant twenty-first-century critical trend in African American literary studies, perhaps most recognizable in Harlem Renaissance scholarship, has been redefining the meaning of the study and its historiography. The movement’s origins are found in the work of such scholars as Cheryl A. Wall and George Hutchinson, who argued for a deep dive into the archive to present a more nuanced view of the New Negro movement while challenging various critical assumptions about the role of publishing. Meanwhile, a related trend toward research in African American print culture and the history of the book arrived, characterized by the early scholarship of Carla L. Peterson and Todd Vogel, with more recent work by such scholars as Brooks E. Hefner and Kinohi Nishikawa expanding the print culture studies focus. Yet not enough work of this kind has been done on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century period. Like much of the research above, Elizabeth McHenry’s To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship combines the various trends, adding to print culture studies scholarship that seeks to unearth a more comprehensive turn-of-the-century African American literary historiography. To Make Negro Literature impressively illuminates a vast field of African American literary and educational history. McHenry concentrates on material publishing conditions, “authorship’s sustainability and literature’s form and function,” the bond “between Black writing and emerging audiences and agendas,” and “the frameworks that structure ways of organizing how to talk and think about literature and the literary” (14). Among the most intriguing aspects of the study, and likely to invite debate, is McHenry’s application of queer theory to the literary art of Mary Church Terrell.