Description
Book SynopsisAdam McKible demonstrates how the
Saturday Evening Post used stereotypical dialect fiction to promulgate white supremacist ideology and dismiss Black achievements, citizenship, and humanity.
Trade ReviewGripping and doggedly researched,
Circulating Jim Crow exposes the corrosion at the underbelly of the
Saturday Evening Post. Adam McKible reveals the larger cultural and political context that made the inherently anti-Black magazine popular. Through his deft and energetic prose, McKible offers readers a fresh lens to understand the era of the New Negro Movement as a whole. -- Emily Bernard, author of
Black in the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and MineThrough meticulous research and crisp prose,
Circulating Jim Crow greatly deepens our understanding of the
Saturday Evening Post, whose success in the first half of the twentieth century depended greatly on George H. Lorimer’s campaign to define American identity as white supremacist and antiblack. McKible offers a crucial warning for our time. -- Darryl Dickson-Carr, author of
Spoofing the Modern: Satire in the Harlem RenaissanceMcKible reveals that when not wrapping the American way in Rockwellian nostalgia, the
Saturday Evening Post did its best to thwart Black modernity. Full of sobering detail and impassioned judgment,
Circulating Jim Crow measures the forbidding height of the wall modern African American writing climbed and conquered. -- William J. Maxwell, author of
F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American LiteratureA brilliant new book by a major scholar of American periodical culture,
Circulating Jim Crow reveals the efforts to undermine black modernity at the heart of one of the most successful purveyors of nostalgic Americana. As voices for white supremacy again grow louder, McKible’s compelling analysis of the role cultural institutions play in normalizing racism and xenophobia couldn’t be timelier. -- Mark S. Morrisson, author of
Modernism, Science, and TechnologyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. George Horace Lorimer and Rising Jim Crow
2. Literary Aspiration and Intimate Minstrelsy
3. Irvin S. Cobb: Making the New Negro Old Again
4. Hugh Wiley, Edward Christopher Williams, and Black Doughboys
5. Octavus Roy Cohen, the Midnight Motion Picture Company, and the Shadows of Jim Crow
6. The End of the Lorimer Era
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
