Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow
Brooks E. Hefner
University of Minnesota Press
Retooling genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world for antiracist purposes is nothing new. Hefner traces it back to a phenomenon that began in the 1920s by Black authors in Black newspapers with large circulations among middle- and working-class Black readers. These popular stories differ significantly from contemporaneous, now-canonized African American protest novels that tend to represent Jim Crow America as a deterministic machine and its Black inhabitants as doomed victims. Widely consumed but since forgotten, these genre stories—and Hefner’s incisive analysis of them—offer a more vibrant understanding of African American literary history.