University of Massachusetts Press Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book)

Product Description Scholars have paid relatively little attention to the highbrow, middlebrow, and popular periodicals that African Americans read and discussed regularly during the Jim Crow era -- publications such as the Chicago Defender, the Crisis, Ebony, and the Half-Century Magazine. Jim Crow Networks considers how these magazines and newspapers, and their authors, readers, advertisers, and editors worked as part of larger networks of activists and thinkers to advance racial uplift and resist racism during the first half of the twentieth century.As Eurie Dahn demonstrates, authors like James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and Jean Toomer wrote in the context of interracial and black periodical networks, which shaped the literature they produced and their concerns about racial violence. This original study also explores the overlooked intersections between the black press and modernist and Harlem Renaissance texts, and highlights key sites where readers and writers worked toward bottom-up sociopolitical changes during a period of legalized segregation. Review The networks Dahn explores, then, are tools to describe different (but interrelated) elements of audiences encountering the periodicals in question. Though Dahn's primary focus is on the dynamics of particular texts within particular issues, she also provides a rich sense of each periodical's larger history, enabling her readers to appreciate the field from which a text or set of texts emerged.--American Literary History Dahn's palpable focus on the southern nodes in the African American periodical network furthers the recent important decentering of Harlem and the urban North as the most influential landscape for early to mid-twentieth-century African American literary and print cultural production.--Shawn Anthony Christian, author of The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader About the Author Eurie Dahn is associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose.