Jonathan Fenderson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042430
- eISBN:
- 9780252051272
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042430.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Movements and Social Change
This chapter explores Hoyt Fuller’s work as the lead editor of Negro Digest, one of several magazines produced by Johnson Publishing Company (JPC). It recounts the magazine’s centrality to both the ...
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This chapter explores Hoyt Fuller’s work as the lead editor of Negro Digest, one of several magazines produced by Johnson Publishing Company (JPC). It recounts the magazine’s centrality to both the resurgence of a popularly rooted Black nationalism and the associated emergence of new modes of thinking and organizing as it related to African American art, intellectual work, and social activism. By chronicling the strained professional relationship between the magazine owner, John H. Johnson, and Fuller, the magazine’s editor, the chapter illuminates the intraracial struggle between an emergent group of Black nationalists and a more established elite class of African American liberals. This struggle was perfectly encapsulated in Fuller’s efforts to undermine what he deemed as the bourgeois Negro politics of JPC. By advancing “Black” as a counter to JPC’s dominant discourse, Fuller used Negro Digest as an influential print mechanism in the production and amplification of an alternative politics for African Americans.Less
This chapter explores Hoyt Fuller’s work as the lead editor of Negro Digest, one of several magazines produced by Johnson Publishing Company (JPC). It recounts the magazine’s centrality to both the resurgence of a popularly rooted Black nationalism and the associated emergence of new modes of thinking and organizing as it related to African American art, intellectual work, and social activism. By chronicling the strained professional relationship between the magazine owner, John H. Johnson, and Fuller, the magazine’s editor, the chapter illuminates the intraracial struggle between an emergent group of Black nationalists and a more established elite class of African American liberals. This struggle was perfectly encapsulated in Fuller’s efforts to undermine what he deemed as the bourgeois Negro politics of JPC. By advancing “Black” as a counter to JPC’s dominant discourse, Fuller used Negro Digest as an influential print mechanism in the production and amplification of an alternative politics for African Americans.
Kinohi Nishikawa
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042775
- eISBN:
- 9780252051630
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042775.003.0010
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Movements and Social Change
The chapter is anchored in a survey of African American-owned small presses, literary journals, and magazines to demonstrate how the Black Arts Movement’s editors negotiated readerly taste and ...
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The chapter is anchored in a survey of African American-owned small presses, literary journals, and magazines to demonstrate how the Black Arts Movement’s editors negotiated readerly taste and institutional politics to bring Black Arts to the masses. I consider, for example, Dudley Randall at Detroit’s Broadside Press, Naomi Long Madgett at Lotus Press (also Detroit), and Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) at Chicago’s Third World Press alongside Hoyt Fuller’s work for periodicals in Chicago (Negro Digest/Black World), and Nommo, the small literary journal of the Organization of Black American Culture. The chapter also reveals how post-civil rights black literary publics formed and considers how, for example, the establishment of Howard University Press in 1974 extended the black intellectual tradition’s effort to recover a “usable past.”Less
The chapter is anchored in a survey of African American-owned small presses, literary journals, and magazines to demonstrate how the Black Arts Movement’s editors negotiated readerly taste and institutional politics to bring Black Arts to the masses. I consider, for example, Dudley Randall at Detroit’s Broadside Press, Naomi Long Madgett at Lotus Press (also Detroit), and Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) at Chicago’s Third World Press alongside Hoyt Fuller’s work for periodicals in Chicago (Negro Digest/Black World), and Nommo, the small literary journal of the Organization of Black American Culture. The chapter also reveals how post-civil rights black literary publics formed and considers how, for example, the establishment of Howard University Press in 1974 extended the black intellectual tradition’s effort to recover a “usable past.”
Jonathan Fenderson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042430
- eISBN:
- 9780252051272
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042430.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Movements and Social Change
This book is the first to document and analyze Hoyt Fuller’s profound influence on the Black Arts movement. Using historical snapshots of Fuller’s life and activism as a means to rethink the period, ...
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This book is the first to document and analyze Hoyt Fuller’s profound influence on the Black Arts movement. Using historical snapshots of Fuller’s life and activism as a means to rethink the period, Building the Black Arts Movement provides a fresh take on the general trajectory of African American literary (and cultural) studies as the field developed over the course of two explosive decades in the mid-twentieth century. The book argues that the Black Arts movement can be understood as a pivotal and volatile moment in the long history of America’s culture wars. Moreover, by shifting our focus from creative artists and repositioning Fuller at the center of the movement--as one of its most underappreciated architects--the book grants new insights into the critical role of editorial work, the international dimensions of the movement, the complexities of sexuality, and the challenges of Black institution building during the 1960s and ’70s.Less
This book is the first to document and analyze Hoyt Fuller’s profound influence on the Black Arts movement. Using historical snapshots of Fuller’s life and activism as a means to rethink the period, Building the Black Arts Movement provides a fresh take on the general trajectory of African American literary (and cultural) studies as the field developed over the course of two explosive decades in the mid-twentieth century. The book argues that the Black Arts movement can be understood as a pivotal and volatile moment in the long history of America’s culture wars. Moreover, by shifting our focus from creative artists and repositioning Fuller at the center of the movement--as one of its most underappreciated architects--the book grants new insights into the critical role of editorial work, the international dimensions of the movement, the complexities of sexuality, and the challenges of Black institution building during the 1960s and ’70s.
