Impermanent Blackness

"Unlike many other professional sectors in the United States, the publishing business had dozens of Black authors and literary professionals at its vanguard during the early- to mid-twentieth century. As authors, and sometimes executives, they forged innumerable now-forgotten cross-racial partnerships. This book examines the lives and contributions of those intellectuals, artists, and cultural professionals who regularly worked and fraternized across the color line in twentieth-century America. Garibaldi examines the character of what was known at the time as interracial literary culture, commonly defined by Black and cross-racial representation in America's predominantly white cultural life. He argues that cross-racial collaborations, which challenged the status quo and attempted to bridge the gap between American and African American literature, took place throughout the century in a variety of forms. Support for Black authors and non-stereotypical representations of persons of African descent, and the leadership of Black authors and editors such as W. S. Braithwaite (1878-1962), reflected changes driven by deliberate, conscious acts. Aspiring and established black authors and corresponding white interlocutors worked closely together in developing new ideas and perspectives in the first seven decades of the twentieth century even as white supremacy and hate speech also emerged and spread widely in print and popular culture. The book is organized chronologically and thematically, covering interracial responses to the racial tensions of the early twentieth century; the resegregation along racial lines of American literary culture in the 1920s; the mainstream success of several African American authors in the 1930s and 40s; the emergence of multiracial children's literature; tensions between supporters of racial cosmopolitanism and those lamenting the death of "Negro literature" after World War II; and the effect of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements on the meaning and legacy of interracial literary culture"--