Editing the Harlem Renaissance ed. by Joshua M. Murray and Ross K. Tangedal (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Editing the Harlem Renaissance ed. by Joshua M. Murray and Ross K. Tangedal
• Mark Whalan

Joshua M. Murray and Ross K. Tangedal, eds. Editing the Harlem Renaissance. Clemson: Clemson UP, 2021. 312 pp. $143.00.

In 1951, in The Crisis ’ fortieth anniversary number, W. E. B. Du Bois reminisced, in an essay titled “Editing the Crisis,” on his experience of editing the magazine between 1910 and 1934. He recalled that “[w]e condensed more news about Negroes and their problems in a month than most colored papers before this had published in a year. Then we had four pages of editorials, which talked turkey. The articles were at first short and negligible but gradually increased in number, length, and importance; but we were never able to pay contributors. Pictures of colored people were an innovation.” Du Bois’s swagger here in part reflected how The Crisis had led the way for a golden age of African American periodicals (and editing) in the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance. The Messenger, Opportunity, The Negro World, The Crusader, and Fire!! (among others) would follow in the next sixteen years, all equally keen to “talk turkey” and some to pursue The Crisis ’ goal of leveraging Black literary achievement into national cultural politics. Anthologies like Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927) and James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry (1922, rev. ed. 1931) did the work of Black canon consolidation in unprecedented ways, and figures in the public library system (especially in New York) and at HBCUs (especially Howard) did invaluable work in building the archives that still constitute the backbone of Black collections in the US. Editing the Harlem Renaissance takes a bracingly capacious definition of editing to account for such multiplicity—a definition that ranges from the self-editing that informed Langston Hughes’s work on his three autobiographies to the labor of librarians—to explore how editorial work shaped and mediated African American culture at this pivotal moment. The collection often recurs to the issues Du Bois flags here—the frequent precariousness of the Harlem Renaissance’s cultural economy; how the movement looks if we privilege how it “happened in (some of) the magazines,” as John K. Young puts it; and the constraints imposed by a Jim Crow media ecology. Equally important in Editing the Harlem Renaissance, however, is its exploration of how the Harlem Renaissance is reproduced for contemporary audiences through modern editorial practices—ranging from the racial imbalances stratifying the digital humanities (DH) to how trade editions have shaped understandings of the era’s most popular teaching texts.

Economics is central to both these agendas. As Arnold Rampersad has pointed out elsewhere, Hughes held a truly radical goal of living as a fully professional Black author, a goal continually hamstrung by his failure to have an unqualified hit—in fiction, poetry, or drama. Joshua M. Murray’s essay [End Page 241] here examines how Hughes, in his two published autobiographies, sought to position himself primarily as a cosmopolitan, worldly traveler rather than as a radical Black author in the hope that such global picaresque would attract a wide readership. To that end Murray looks at archival drafts of blurbs and other publicity material Hughes prepared for I Wonder as I Wander, as well as Hughes’s own musing about how editing one’s own life in the process of autobiography is disorienting—with the “intense condensation” involved in life writing, which distilled “pure essence without pulp, waste matter, and rind” preventing it from being “entirely true,” as he wrote Arna Bontemps (145). Adam Nemmers offers a revisionary essay on white patronage in the Harlem Renaissance, which does useful work in two directions—both of which push against the idée fixe that white patrons made unreasonable demands on their cash-strapped protégés in ways that hedged writerly autonomy and corrupted their work. One is to clarify that many patrons in the Harlem Renaissance operated by sponsoring prizes, grants, and scholarships, and usually had no strings attached to the writers they supported; the second is to note how skillfully many authors of the Renaissance evaded, finessed, and...