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John K. Young. Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2006. ix + 230 pp.
John K. Young's book opens compellingly with a litany of African American writers who altered their texts dramatically or succumbed to distasteful advertising campaigns to appease white editors and publishers. His chapters take up the careers of five authors in more detail: Nella Larsen, Ishmael Reed, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Ralph Ellison. In particular, Young asserts that in the twentiethcentury African American texts were often made to conform to a one-dimensional and monolithic blackness expressed through a discrete entity called "black literature"-a form in which this "blackness" "could be produced and consumed" (33). While Young concedes that the power imbalance between white editors/publishers and African American authors is a "normal publisher-writer relationship" "to some extent" (3), he insists that these relationships enact "a much deeper cultural dynamic" with immediate consequences (i.e. violence) (4).
Young's greatest innovation is his coupling of editorial theory and African American literary theory; he concludes, we cannot "gloss over" these texts "production histories" for they are just as important as the "cultural and social context generated therein" (185). Borrowing heavily from Jerome McGann, Young sets out to study the "bibliographic code" of African American texts: "first editions, colophons, book jackets, title and copying pages, drafts and manuscripts, and advertisements" (23). Introducing both the material and immaterial aspects of racial and textual interpretive strategies, Young contends that "Reading texts, like reading races . . . [is] an attempt to understand the soul or identity beneath the skin, or the text inside the covers" (21). In short, Young fruitfully juxtaposes two hermeneutics: one that has too often forsaken material forms in efforts to capture the real essence of stories, and the other that has determined that material forms have proven unable to hold a real racial essence. That said, crucial distinctions between African American bodies and texts are sometimes elided in Young's efforts to yoke their common instabilities, and, oddly, the eponymous racial divide between...