Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow by Brooks Hefner (review)

Abstract

Brooks Hefner’s pioneering book deals with popular fiction written by, for, and about African American people between the 1920s and the 1950s. Seen from another angle, it is also about what the Black workingand middle class were reading during that period and how their reading may have offered “utopian solutions to the contradictions of the present” (140), particularly in the face of rampant Jim Crow racism. On these subjects, it delivers fascinating new insights, inviting readers to revise their assumptions about popular fiction and to rethink the fraught relationship between race and genre in American culture. Black Pulp grows out of Hefner’s acute consciousness of the exclusion of Black lives from the predominantly white pulp magazines, at a time when a variety of genres, from romance and hard-boiled detective fiction to fantasy, weird menace, SF, western and hero fiction, were elaborated in and by these periodicals. Although an unknown number of Black writers did write for the pulps, they were not identified as such by the magazines and had to deal with white characters in their stories. As a consequence, Black readers “who were reading the pulps were [. . .] trapped in a genre system that valorized whiteness above all else” (5-6) and was often underpinned by racist prejudice. But, as Hefner shows, a counter, African American, genre fiction developed in the “alternative pulp space” (46) of newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and Baltimore Afro-American, which had the largest circulation of all Black newspapers in the country. From the 1920s to the early 1950s (a period which coincides with the pulps’ heyday and decline), these two publications published over 2,500 stories and serial installments written by African American authors, featuring the exploits of African American characters. In Black Pulp, Hefner resurrects this vast body of fiction, which has so far been inexplicably and unjustifiably ignored by literary historians, although its readership was much greater among the Black community than that of what is now known as canonical African American fiction. Revisiting Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s concept of “signifiyin(g)” and Stuart Hall’s theory of cultural articulation, he inscribes Black genre fiction within “the competing literary systems of the early twentieth century” (13), demonstrating that it did not develop in a vacuum but was always characterized by a double articulation: while it dismantled the white pulp generic formulas and reconfigured them “in the service of racial justice” (7), it also offered Black readers the utopian “pleasures of seriality