Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow

From the publisher's description:

From the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, Hefner recovers a rich archive of African American genre fiction from the 1920s through the mid-1950s—spanning everything from romance, hero-adventure, and crime stories to westerns and science fiction. Reading these stories, Hefner explores how their authors deployed, critiqued, and reassembled genre formulas—and the pleasures they offer to readers—in the service of racial justice: to criticize Jim Crow segregation, racial capitalism, and the sexual exploitation of Black women; to imagine successful interracial romance and collective sociopolitical progress; and to cheer Black agency, even retributive violence in the face of white supremacy.

Here are details of one review of the book:

Sorensen, Leif. Review of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground, by Kinohi Nishikawa, and: Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow by Brooks Hefner. American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, vol. 32 no. 2, 2022, p. 187-193. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/872549.

See in particular Chapter 2, "Romancing the Race: The Politics of Black Love Stories."

Attending to the romance fiction published in the Black press [...] can illuminate some of the more powerful cultural work of early twentieth-century romance fiction. This is because even if romance stories in the pulps acted as narrative forms of wish fulfillment, they also described and delineated forms of acceptable behavior, effectively policing the boundaries of reproduction. Readers who encountered romance pulps became instilled with a host of conservative values that ran alongside legal and social prohibitions. For example, representations of interracial or interethnic encounters - a staple of the sensational pocket paperbacks of the late twentieth century - were almost completely absent in the most popular romance pulp magazines in the first half of the century. At a time when interracial marriage was outlawed in many states, the pulps worked to produce a fictional world in which such encounters were unpresentable because they were unthinkable; wishes like these would never be fulfilled by pulps like the popular Love Story. Romance pulps accomplished this by eradicating racial difference almost entirely, presenting readers with fictional worlds of pure whiteness. When romance fiction appears in Black newspapers, this space of pure whiteness is not transformed through a complete reversal, although some stories do take place in exclusively Black spaces. Symptomatic of the more complex articulations of Black pulp, other romance stories represent interracial encounters in both realistic and utopian forms, acknowledging the existence (and the fraught power dynamics) of these relationships rather than simply ignoring them, as the pulps chose to do.

Likewise, the romance fiction discussed in this chapter reveals the way the genre could model acceptable, gendered behavior for its largely female readership. Pulp romance, for example, depended on rivalries between women and typically rewarded the final, generally chaste romantic "clinch" to the most stereotypically moral character in the story. [...] By contrast, romance fiction in the Illustrated Feature Section and other Black newspaper venues offered a far more morally complex understanding of women's roles. By attending to the realities of Black women's experiences in particular, these romance stories recognized the intersections of race, class, and gender that put these women in circumstances that were a far cry from the fairy tale-like wish fulfillments of romance pulps.

This chapter offers an alternative reading of the interwar love story by foregrounding the peculiar dynamics of this genre as it appeared in African American newspapers. This was a place where writers and readers could encounter realistic alternatives to romance formulas in the pulps while simultaneously enjoying the utopian pleasures of socially progressive romantic fantasies. Central to this argument is the figure of Gertrude Schalk, one of the most intriguing writers to publish in these venues.

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In the spring and summer of 1934, the Baltimore Afro-American deployed the presumably apolitical genre of romance to challenge social and legal injustices, including the bans on interracial marriage and sexual double standards confronted by African American women; interracial romance stories would continue to appear as both central narratives and subplots through the 1950s.