Description
Book SynopsisScholars 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.
Trade ReviewDahn’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
