To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship by Elizabeth Mchenry (review)

Reviewed by: To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship by Elizabeth Mchenry Rachel Farebrother To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship. By Elizabeth Mchenry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2021. xv+ 295 pp. $27.95. ISBN 978–1–4780–1451–5. To Make Negro Literature provides an original, meticulously researched account of concepts of Black authorship and efforts to define (and debate) the terms of an [End Page 620] African American literary tradition from the legalization of segregation in 1896 to 1910. Laura Helton, Barbara McCaskill, Caroline Gebhard, and James Smethurst, among others, have rectified the critical neglect of Black expressive culture during the period that Rayford Logan called the 'nadir' of race relations. However, Elizabeth McHenry contends that a tendency to group the years from 1877 to 1919 has obscured the 'unsettledness of the category of Black literature at the turn of the century' (p. 9). African Americans were excluded from social, political, and cultural institutions to such an extent that it is necessary to explore 'an aspect of literary culture that is all too rarely the subject of study: failure' (p. 5). Shifting critical attention from the crossover success of Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar towards unpublished texts, unfinished projects, and uncelebrated authors and genres transforms understanding of Black literature at the turn of the century. It emerges as a period when writers and intellectuals laboured behind the scenes to establish the infrastructure for the appreciation and serious study of African American literature (p. 11). Four case studies examine aspects of Black literary culture that could be dismissed as marginal or insignificant (subscription bookselling, bibliographies, ghostwriting, and cover letters to publishers) to highlight the extensive labour involved in establishing 'Negro literature' during the era of Jim Crow. First, McHenry interprets subscription bookselling as part of a tradition of Black self-education through which readers across the South and the Midwest could 'both revalue their Blackness and see themselves as a literary, which is to say, an intellectual, people' (p. 62). The second chapter explores how bibliographies of 'Negro' literature compiled by Daniel Murray (for the Library of Congress and 1900 Paris Exposition) and W. E. B. Du Bois made Black literature visible and accessible, establishing 'the scope and parameters of Negro authorship and writing about race' (p. 81). The second half of the book pivots from curatorial practices to concepts of authorship that have gone unexamined in Black literary history. Booker T. Washington's reliance upon a team of ghost-writers is well known, but McHenry's meticulous reconstruction of T. Thomas Fortune's creation of Washington's public authority as an author is revelatory. Fortune was motivated by an awareness of Washington's potential as a public figurehead who would give African American letters 'a coherence, a visibility, and a degree of power', but he worked in poor conditions for inadequate pay and sacrificed his own literary ambitions (p. 130). Finally, McHenry considers Mary Church Terrell's assiduous documentation of her failed endeavours to publish short fiction in respected US literary magazines. Terrell's careful preservation of her manuscripts alongside rejection letters and correspondence with editors (now held in her archive at the Library of Congress) prompts reflection upon what counts as literary success in the context of a racialized and gendered publishing industry that produced a 'never-ending stream of negative, racist depictions of African Americans' (p. 190). McHenry's first book, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), transformed understanding of African American readership by unearthing a rich [End Page 621] archival history of literary societies that helped 'disseminate literacy and literary sensibility (2002, p. 251). To Make a Negro Literature theorizes failure as a generative topic for literary enquiry, challenging assumptions about who and what should feature in literary history in ways that resonate beyond McHenry's meticulous historicization of a specific period. Drawing inspiration from José Esteban Muñoz's theorization of queer failure as a 'brilliant offness' that is 'not so much a failure to succeed as it is a failure to participate in a system of valuation that is predicated on...