The field of popular fiction is a relatively unexplored terrain in African American as well as American literary history and criticism. Reasons for this exclusion or oversight are manifold and range from academic practices and aesthetic standards that qualify a text for inclusion in the canon, to the politics of publishing, and the stereotypes or myths that persist about African American readers and their reading habits. In the fields of literary criticism and the teaching of African American literature, for example, scholars and critics alike have restricted their efforts to reviewing, promoting, and canonizing only those texts that fit the prevailing aesthetic and literary standards. While this paradigm – the New Criticism and the reading practices it has encouraged – has allowed for the inclusion of a few women writers and writers of color, it has kept in place a rigid division between high and low, or elite and mass culture, an emphasis on invention over convention, and a distinction between literary and commercial forms of literature that have shaped literary scholarship and reading practices to this day. According to the New Criticism and the practices of literary appreciation it has established, the only literature that deserves merit is independently created and does not respond to the demands of the literary marketplace or the audience, as does much of popular fiction. Applying these standards to African American literary texts (and indeed all literary traditions) has pushed much of its literary production out of the classroom, off the bookshelves, and into the dustbin of literary history.
Similar standards and hierarchies exist in the study of popular culture. The field of African American popular culture studies has almost exclusively focused on music, film, and popular (folk) heroes, especially with the emergence and popularity of rap, hip-hop, and black youth culture in the 1980s and 1990s. Popular culture studies in general continues to privilege rap, hip-hop, and black film over romance, mystery, or science fiction writing. Much cultural studies scholarship has focused on the representation or misrepresentation of African Americans in the popular culture at large, and little attention has been paid to the ways in which African Americans have represented themselves in popular genres or in literatures that are written primarily for the entertainment of a black reading public.
The exclusionary practices of the literary marketplace have been equally dismissive of African American popular fiction. Mainstream publishers closed their doors to more than a few black writers and paid little attention to marketing or publicity. Even when a particular work of fiction sells successfully in the black community, it may never appear on the radar screen of Publishers Weekly or the New York Times. Since the availability of books by African American authors has never been limited to bookstores, those outlets which report to the bestseller lists, black bestsellers have often reached that status outside mainstream economies of book publishing and the book trade. A long history of black publishing exists in America, and African American authors have distributed their work through a network that includes subscription and book clubs, and those venues easily accessible to the black community such as barbershops and beauty parlors, and through author programs or corner stores, church fairs, and community festivals. Finally, popular authors and some “serious” authors have responded to the demands of the black reading public by self-publishing their work.
Given this history, little is known about the popular genres that make up the bulk of African American popular fiction. Stereotypes about this literature continue to persist, influence its study, or perpetuate its neglect. Books that sell by the millions and ensure their authors’ celebrity status are easily dismissed as potboilers, their subject matter considered trivial, and their authors accused of “selling out.” Recent developments in cultural and literary studies that see popular culture, including popular fiction, as contested terrain, and as a space where meaning is struggled over, however, have provided us with the analytical tools to see these texts as powerful critiques of dominant ideologies and as sites on which cultural and social conflicts are played out. Tracing some of the developments of black popular fiction is one way of assessing the contributions to African American literary production and may suggest the important directions for future study. We expect popular culture to pay attention to trends and formulas but that posture is complicated by changes in technology, the politics of reading, and the ever-changing tastes and demands of a reading public.
How do we define popular fiction? Is it the number of copies a book sells, its genre or formulaic nature, its success as a commodity in the literary marketplace (as a book, for example, that starts a series of spin-off books), or is it its success amongst its intended audience, and the ways in which a book gains momentum, i.e. sales, through word-of-mouth? If a book’s or writer’s popularity is measured by the number of copies it sells during a particular year, then the honor of being the first black popular novelist goes to Richard Wright, whose Black Boy was the first book by an African American author to make the Publishers Weekly bestseller list in 1944.1 Native Son sold equally well during the 1940s, as a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection. If, on the other hand, we measure success by the number of novels a particular author has written, Wright’s success is easily eclipsed by Frank Yerby, who remains to this day the most prolific African American author. Yerby, who published 33 novels between 1946 and 1985, maintained a steady presence on the bestseller list, and some of his novels sold more than one million copies during their first year. His novels were found on the list six consecutive years, from 1946 to 1952, and then again in 1954. It was not until 1977, however, that an African American author, Alex Haley, the author of Roots, made it to the coveted Number One position. Today, the most “successful” African American novelist is Terry McMillan, who reached the bestseller list in 1992 with Waiting to Exhale and whose subsequent novels have maintained great commercial appeal. The first “literary” text by a black author to appear on the list is Toni Morrison’s Paradise in 1998. If “making the list” is the hallmark of popular achievement, then African American classics like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which have sold steadily over the years and have made their authors household names, can be considered neither popular nor bestselling fiction.
If, however, we measure the popularity of a literary text by subject matter, by success among its intended audience, and meeting audience demands, then popular fiction has always been integral to African American literature. Not only is African American literature grounded in the oral tradition, the most popular of all cultural practices, but, as some critics have argued, African American literature has had its roots in popular literary forms from its very beginning. Writers such as Martin R. Delany and Pauline E. Hopkins, who are to be found in every anthology of African American literature – and thus could be deemed “literary” rather than popular – liberally drew on conventions of the popular in their writings. Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859), for example, has been interpreted as “speculative fiction” for its use of the supernatural and the visionary, and Pauline E. Hopkins created the first black female detective in her serialized novel Hagar’s Daughter (1901–02). In fact, most of Hopkins’s novels would be considered popular fiction today, as they easily combine the genres of romance and mystery into their plots. Moreover, if we assume that black popular fiction is directed at a broad black readership, then its roots are to be found in those black-owned publications such as The Colored American and other magazines aimed at African American audiences and which regularly featured literature designed to appeal to a broad readership.
From a contemporary vantage point, African American popular fiction has been and is a growing and constantly shifting field that is governed as much by mainstream market demands, trends, and formulaic conventions inherent to different genres, as by the black literary tradition and the demands of an African American reading public to see itself reflected in literature. The range of African American popular fiction is broad and includes easy-to-read bestsellers, genre or formula fiction, such as the romance, mystery, detective fiction, fantasy and science fiction, as well as pulp fiction, or, as it has also been called, “ghetto realism.”2 African American popular fiction is often grounded in the “real” and the “immediate,” making explicit reference to the African American experience and issues of concern to the black community, whether in texts geared to a middle-class female audience or an urban male working-class audience.
For popular fiction to work, to be successful and to attract and maintain a body of devoted readers, it has to embody elements of recognition and identification, “approaching a recreation and identification of recognizable experiences and attitudes to which people are responding,” Stuart Hall has pointed out.3 Or, as one scholar of black pulp fiction has said, “Many readers . . . seek a better understanding of the world in which they live. And these writers provide them with characters and episodes they know and can identify with from their daily living.”4 But rather than just holding up a mirror to African American life and affirming the realities of some aspects of black life, it can also serve as a powerful vehicle of critique, often explicitly indicting the social and political forces that create and maintain racial inequalities.
One of the sources of black popular fiction or genre fiction is to be found in the detective tradition, considered to be the most widely read literary genre. African American writers have been writing in this genre since the early twentieth century when The Colored American featured Pauline E. Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter and J. E. Bruce’s The Black Sleuth (1907–09) was serialized in McGirt’s Magazine.5 Writing for an audience of middle-class, educated blacks, Hopkins and Bruce used the detective convention to critique racism and to focus on racial uplift. In doing so, Hopkins, Bruce, and those that followed in their footsteps have modified established conventions of both the classical and hardboiled detective genres. Stephen Soitos has pointed out in The Blues Detective, black writers “manipulate conventional detective structure and characterization which in turn alters the moral message.”6 In the hands of writers such as Rudolph Fisher, who published The Conjure Man Dies (1934) during the late Harlem Renaissance, Chester Himes, probably the most prolific and most misunderstood detective fiction writer, and now Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins series, African American detective fiction affirms blackness, attributes the detective’s success to his blackness and ability to move in two worlds, and to his use of black vernacular.
Chester Himes, credited with breaking the color barrier in American crime fiction,7 began writing detective fiction in the 1950s and 1960s while living in Paris as an expatriate. He had already published a number of “social protest” novels in the United States and wrote detective fiction primarily to make money. Himes’s expertise and mastery of the genre brought him greater recognition in Europe than in his native country. In his novels, Himes appropriates the hardboiled detective novel through the use of Harlem as a setting and a pair of rather uncharacteristic detectives, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, who are as violent and corrupt as the neighborhood they serve. The peculiar and sometimes absurdly comic violence that informs his fiction is often misread as violent, sensationalist, and exploitative. Himes’s Harlem series is now considered part of his social protest fiction and as a commentary on the world that produced the criminals his detectives are chasing.
Contemporary African American detective fiction has been flourishing with the 1990 publication of Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress and other novels in the Easy Rawlins series. Focusing on private eye Easy Rawlins, a migrant from Texas living in Los Angeles, Mosley uses the hardboiled genre to comment on and critique race and race relations in postwar California. Like his predecessors Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, Easy Rawlins benefits from knowing two worlds and solves crimes by moving in both the black and the white community. Coming to writing after a career as a computer programmer, Mosley has published six novels in the Easy Rawlins series as well as a collection of short stories and science fiction. His popular success, especially after the movie Devil in a Blue Dress starring Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins, has made him one of the most recognized African American novelists and a spokesperson for black writers.
Today, much of African American detective and mystery fiction is in the hands of women writers and their female detectives, despite the mainstream success of Walter Mosley. Following the example of Dolores Komo’s Clio Browne (1988), the first detective novel since Hagar’s Daughter to feature a black woman protagonist, authors such as Valerie Wilson Wesley, Nikki Baker, and Barbara Neely have not only brought a feminist or womanist perspective to the genre, but they also continue a tradition of subversive representation of the detective figure.
Another source of contemporary black popular fiction is the adventure fiction of Frank Yerby. Yerby’s thirty-three novels sold more than 55 million copies during his lifetime. His popularity peaked during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Frank Yerby’s novels were predominantly written for and read by a white audience – in fact, many devoted white readers were unaware that he was African American – and many of them fall into the category of the Southern historical romance, or the “costume novel,” a term Yerby coined himself.
Yerby’s relative obscurity and absence from histories and anthologies of black literature illustrates the dilemma of the (black) popular novelist. Scholarship on his work is virtually non-existent and Yerby has been “criticized for not exploring race issues, and ignored when he did.”8 However, looked at from a contemporary perspective, much of Yerby’s fiction can be considered the forerunner of contemporary black popular fiction. Yerby wrote in 1959 in “How and Why I Write the Costume Novel” that “the novelist’s job is to entertain.” In order to do just that, a novel requires the following ingredients: a picaresque protagonist, a sexy heroine, and a “strong, exteriorized conflict.” Together with a “lean, economical plot” and set against a historical background, a novel is to please readers, Yerby argued, to “help them endure the shapelessness of modern existence.”9 This formula also exists in much of contemporary popular fiction. While the antebellum South as a setting has given way to contemporary urban America, and white characters have been replaced with black ones, plotlines remained basically the same. Picaresque protagonists still roam the pages of black popular fiction, although their roguishness has been tempered by thirty years of feminism and the emergence of women writers; heroines are still sexy and beautiful, but for many of them the pursuit of a handsome hero and their eventual submission to his desires may no longer be at the top of their agenda.
The emergence of contemporary African American mass or pulp fiction written exclusively for a black audience can be dated back to the publication of Pimp: The Story of My Life and Trick Baby in 1967 by Robert Beck, better known as Iceberg Slim. Since the publication of Iceberg Slim’s books, the Los Angeles-based Holloway House has become one of the largest producers of fiction aimed at a “mass” African American audience; it has steadily recruited black authors, expanded its list of paperback originals, and has called itself “the World’s largest publisher of black experience paperbacks” since the 1970s. Holloway House’s list of titles covers a wide range of popular fictions, ranging from what Greg Goode has called “ghetto realism” to detective stories, thrillers, historical novels, romances, family sagas, confession stories, autobiographies, and fictionalized autobiographies, as well as erotica and pornography. Holloway House authors, such as Donald Goines, Joe Nazel, and Odie Hawkins, are extremely prolific and almost rival Frank Yerby as the most widely published African American author. A cursory glance at bibliographies of African American literature shows that Holloway House books command a major part of the African American popular fiction market and thus African American fiction as a whole.
The novels of Holloway House can be considered African American pulp fiction and conform in many ways to standard definitions of the genre. They are printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, their plots are often “lurid and sensational,” and much of the action revolves around violence and sex. The books have catchy titles, gaudily illustrated covers, brief and livid summaries of the book’s content on the back, and prices as low as $1.95 and no more than $5.95. Written in an easily comprehensible style and language, the novels follow a simple formula and a linear and chronological pattern. The language is descriptive – denotative rather than connotative – and the dialogue often graphic. Characters are simple and one-dimensional, and the plot leaves little room for ambiguity. Plots, however, are varied and manifold, ranging from hustler cautionary tales to threats to the African American community, political intrigues and conspiracies against the African American nation, mistreatments by the justice and legal system, and historical injustices against African American individuals and communities.
Though it constitutes a genre of its own, African American pulp fiction is squarely located within the African American expressive tradition. Most Holloway House novels within the ghetto realism subgenre draw on naturalist novels of the 1940s and 1950s and the “protest” novel and prison autobiography of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They share similarities with commercial African American popular culture such as blaxploitation movies of the 1970s, black action movies of the 1990s, and rap music and videos. Given this heritage, African American pulp fiction barely resembles the escapist and fantastic plotlines that dominate much of the market. On the contrary, in bringing together the African American expressive tradition and popular genres, the pulp fiction of Holloway House represents a site in American popular culture where conceptions about African American life in America are scrutinized and contested. While crime and violence constitute most Holloway House novels, their use is never gratuitous; rather they are used to realistically describe the lives of young, urban males whose only chance at success often lies in crime. In doing so, these novels mirror and validate many of their readers’ immediate circumstances and environment, but at the same time create a space where these circumstances can be evaluated, where resistance can be imagined, and where contradictions can be resolved. Scholars have seen these novels as “ghetto cautionary tales,” a claim that is easily borne out in the pages of Iceberg Slim’s autobiography: “if one intelligent valuable young man or woman can be saved from the destructive slime, then the displeasure I have given will have been outweighed by that individual’s use of his potential in a socially constructive manner.”10 Yet embedded in every cautionary tale is a theme of social protest. While the lifestyle of the hustler is not to be emulated by readers, authors make it very clear that he is a product of his environment where poverty leads to crime, and hopelessness to violence.
Holloway House has consistently appealed to an audience of young, urban, and working-class African American men. The books are easily accessible to a popular audience in the black community: paperback and magazine bookstores in the inner city, newsstands, and supermarkets, barbershops, and pool halls, as well as bookstores on army bases overseas. Not surprisingly, novels by Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, both Holloway House perennial bestsellers, are used in California prisons as part of the Prison Literacy Act, which ensures prisoners are taught how to read.11 Given that little has changed in American inner-city black neighborhoods over the last thirty years, authors like Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines enjoy continued success among male members of the hip-hop generation. Iceberg Slim, for example, is referenced in the names of rappers Ice T and Ice Cube, and Donald Goines’s and Roland Jefferson’s novels have been reissued as part of W. W. Norton’s Old School Books line of black pulp fiction reprints.
Today, the tradition of black pulp fiction is carried on by the (S) Affiliated publishing company (financed by actor Wesley Snipes, and edited by Marc Gerald, former editor of the Old School series), which recently started publishing a series of novels about black street life directed at young urban readers and patterned after hip-hop and rap videos. These pulps come with a CD and carry advertising for urban gear; they will be sold not in bookstores, but in record and clothing stores that cater to young black customers.12
While African American authors have firmly established themselves in the field of detective fiction, they remain few in science fiction. Until the 1960s, when Samuel R. Delany broke the genre color barrier with the publication of his first novel The Jewels of Aptor (1962), virtually no black science fiction writers existed. Gregory E. Rutledge, in one of the few critical assessments of African American science fiction, argues that reasons for the absence of African Americans from the genre include the belief among writers, publishers, and critics alike that (white) readers will not read about black characters, the uneasy relationship between people of color and science, socio-economic conditions that prevented the emergence of writers, and conflicts between the “objectivity” of science and the subjectivity of Afrocentric value and belief systems.13 Yet, features of science or speculative fiction have been part of African American literature from the beginning. Sandra Govan, for example, argues that elements of the supernatural pervade such texts as diverse as Martin Delany’s Blake (1859–62), Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899), and Edward Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro (1904).14 George S. Schuyler’s novels Black No More (1931) and Black Empire (1935), generally considered satires on black life during the Harlem Renaissance, liberally draw on elements of speculative fiction; yet, despite the alternative world they present, the novels have never been considered science fiction.
Authors such as Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler, who began their publishing careers in the 1960s and 1970s, have done much to open the field to black authors, readers, characters, and to racial themes in general. Given the popularity and longevity of the genre overall, however, there are few other writers who have been equally successful. The stature of Butler and Delany as science fiction writers is immense; both have received the Hugo and Nebula awards – Butler even was the recipient of a McArthur genius grant – and both have been credited for transcending the genre and becoming “literary” writers. Delany, whose writings include science fiction, autobiography, literary criticism, and theory, has been called “one of the field’s pre-eminent stylists,” and his novel Dhalgren sold half a million copies during its first two years, placing it in the ranks of the top ten bestselling science fiction novels.15 Moving from space opera to fantasy fiction, and from sword and sorcery tales to science fiction theory, his writings have greatly enriched the genre, partly because issues of race and sexuality are at the center of his writings, and partly because of the highly innovative and literary language he has used. Octavia Butler, who started writing science fiction after she attended a workshop with Delany in the 1960s, was the first African American woman to publish in the field of science fiction. Her many novels, though set in multiple universes, realities, and time periods, squarely fit into the African American (and also the feminist) literary tradition. For example, in her novels Kindred (1979), Wildseed (1980), and the “patternist” series, Butler reworks the issue of slavery – the power one human, extraterrestrial, or organism holds over another, whether through overt force, physical superiority, or mind control – in creative and innovative ways. Other novels – most notably Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) – deal with the establishment of new social orders and communities based on equality, social justice, and religious freedom. Her leaders or protagonists are almost exclusively black women who transcend slavery – mentally and physically – and who move on to create community and generations.
Other black science fiction writers have continued to expand the genre for black readers, black characters, and black subject matter. Charles R. Saunders, for example, writes adventure fantasy about African warriors in the sword and sorcery tradition. His trilogy, Imaro (1981), The Quest of Cush (1984), and The Trail of Bohu (1985), locate the superhero and his mythic quest in Africa and amongst African civilizations. Steve Barnes, who generally writes hard-core science fiction with his co-author Larry Nivens and occasionally writes for the TV and book series Deep Space Nine, also writes futuristic action adventures and fantasy novels about alternate worlds where historical realities are reversed and where slaves become masters and masters slaves. His novel Lion’s Blood (2002) is an inversion of American history, where blacks own plantations in the South and where Irish and French work as slaves. Recently, Barnes’s wife Tananarive Due has also contributed to the genre with her novels The Between (1996) and The Living Blood (2001). Jewelle Gomez is the author of The Gilda Stories (1991), a pro-feminist vampire adventure that moves from the period of Southern slavery to the present. More recently, Nalo Hopkinson, a native of the Caribbean who now lives in Canada, won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest for Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), a novel that uses Afro-Caribbean folklore and magic in a futuristic setting. Hopkinson has since published two more books – Midnight Robber (2000), a novel, and Skin Folk (2001), a collection of short stories – both of which engage Caribbean-inspired themes and magic in the context of other worlds. Walter Mosley has also ventured into the field of science fiction with his novel Blue Light (1998), as has Harvard law professor Derrick Bell with his Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992).
In the 1970s and 1980s, literature aimed at black readers was mostly restricted to specialty publishing houses, such as Holloway House and black-owned publishers, and to the occasional African American writer at a major publishing house. Now, almost every major publishing house has added an imprint or series directed at African American readers to its repertoire. Random House, for example, has three imprints: Villard/Strivers Row, named after two blocks in Harlem; One World Books, which focuses on multicultural titles that are mostly African American; and Harlem Moon which acquires hardcover titles for Doubleday, another division of Random House. Warner Books established Walk Worthy Books, focusing on commercial fiction with Christian themes; Dafina, an imprint of Kensington Publishing, has cornered the self-improvement market; and Amistad of HarperCollins publishes both critical works and commercial fiction. This trend was preceded by romance publishers which started imprints directed at black women readers in the late 1980s. Sandra Kitt, the most prolific and well-known black romance writer, published her first black romance for Harlequin in 1985. Today black romances flourish in a market where they have both an independent audience and cross-over appeal. Arabesque books, a romance imprint of Kensington Books, the second largest romance publisher, for example, generates about 10 percent of the publisher’s net sales.16 BET enterprises has launched Sepia, its own imprint of trade paperback and mass market titles.
The market for African American popular fiction experienced an upsurge in the 1990s when the number of hardcover books and paperback originals by black authors rose tremendously, giving rise to a new subgenre in African American popular fiction that some have called “sister-girl” and “brotherman” novels.17 These sometimes steamy novels cover the ups, downs, and sexual politics of romantic relationship from either a female or male perspective. Changes in the class structure of the black community, the consolidation of the publishing industry that resulted in fewer publishing houses and more attention to bestsellers and money-makers (for example, Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter was paid an advance of $4.2 million for his first novel The Emperor of Ocean Park, 2002), and advances in technology that led to new advertising and promotional strategies are responsible for the renaissance in African American mass market publishing we witness today. During the 1980s and 1990s growing class distinctions in the black community increased the number of middle- and middle-upper-class black Americans and subsequently produced a greater market of black readers.18 For example, a 1994 study showed that “African Americans spend more than $175 million per year on books” and that book purchases in the black community rose by 26 percent between 1988 and 1991.19 According to industry statistics, these numbers have continued to climb and reader demand for black fiction increased even more in the second half of the 1990s. Some of these changes are visible in the meteoric rise of African American book clubs. The African American Book Club Summit, with more than 350 members, for example, hosts an annual cruise, bringing together readers and authors.20 Other factors contribute to this shift as well: an increase in black-owned publishing companies, a proliferation of black authors, black writers associations, and writing workshops,21 and an abundance of websites that deal with many aspects of commercial or mass market literature aimed at black readers. These demographic changes and increased demand for novels by black authors also did not go unnoticed by the mainstream publishing industry. Beginning in the early 1990s, publishers began to look at blacks as customers and consumers whose demands deserve attention and started recruiting black authors who could write in those genres.
The internet and computer technology have greatly contributed to the increased availability of black popular fiction by giving more authors opportunities to publish their works and to promote themselves. Self-publishing, a method of publishing used by black authors in the past, has become easier with technologies such as desktop publishing, on-demand printing, and the dissemination of literature through the internet. Many novels that have become bestsellers among black readers were self-published first. The most famous case in point is E. Lynn Harris’s novel about bisexuality, Invisible Life (1991), which sold more than 10,000 copies at book parties, in barber and beauty shops, and in black bookstores before it was picked up by Anchor Books. Harris has since published seven more novels and has become one of the most successful and popular black male writers today. Many of the new African American imprints of major publishing houses draw on this reservoir of self-published novels for their catalog.
Much of this revolution in black publishing has been made possible by women readers, writers, editors, and publicity agents. Women, on average, read more books than men do and are also responsible for the book purchases in their household. The African American Literary Book Club (www.aalbc.com) claims that 84 percent of its members/visitors are female, college-educated, and middle-class, a profile that may easily characterize the majority of contemporary African American readers.22 Author Terry McMillan is generally credited with inaugurating this renaissance in commercial fiction with the publication and success of her novel Waiting to Exhale (1992). As mentioned, detective fiction is predominantly written by women, as is romance fiction, and the so-called girlfriend novel to which McMillan has given rise. Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey has also done much to popularize the writings of African American women, such as Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, but also lesser-known writers, such as Pearl Cleage and Lalita Tademy. Any novel featured on Oprah’s Book Club is guaranteed to reach bestseller status and often spawns a cottage industry of related books. Much of the book industry is also headed by women; Toni Morrison was one of the first African American editors at Random House in the 1970s; today most of the imprints mentioned above have black women executive editors, wielding considerable power on what gets published.
While much of the success of black popular fiction today is driven by black readers, it is also true that novels such as McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale and Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress have had tremendous cross-over appeal. Waiting to Exhale not only dispelled the myth that blacks don’t read but also showed publishers that white readers will pick up a book by a black author for entertainment. Henry Louis Gates has argued that more and more Americans now have the capacity “to identify with black characters; the black experience is a metaphor for the larger human experience.”23 This ability to identify with the “other,” I would argue, is also part of the growing similarity between black and white middle-class readers and their experiences in contemporary suburban America.
Current African American popular or commercial fiction is too large a field to be condensed into a simple formula, but what many of the divergent genres have in common are plotlines that revolve around the emergence and consolidation of a growing black middle class. As such, they can be called black novels of manners that have picked up on Terry McMillan’s focus on chronicling the social and love lives of the black petty bourgeoisie. Characters are almost exclusively members of a suburban middle class with college educations, who have overcome, or never even faced, racial discrimination and/or economically disadvantaged backgrounds. They have succeeded in a capitalist society; they may live in predominantly black worlds, but they are not very different from the worlds white characters inhabit in similar novels aimed at white readers. Unlike the African American pulp fiction described earlier that focuses outward, onto the neighborhood and streets and external problems that face the inner-city black community, the contemporary black novel of manners focuses inward, onto creating and maintaining family and relationships. Much like their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, contemporary African American novels deal with social customs and mores, the pursuit of happiness and romance, and professional success. Not surprisingly, much emphasis is placed on those material possessions that constitute or mark a new class: education, careers, lineage, houses, taste, and cars to name just a few. Most important, though, is how characters relate to each other in these new social circumstances; women and men, parents and children, gays and straights, all struggle to figure out where one belongs and what blackness means in the twenty-first century.
At this point in time African American popular fiction may have come full circle. Today’s authors have become household names and are receiving generous advances for their work; they are making their presence felt in all genres of popular fiction and are reaching readers in unprecedented numbers. They draw on a rich legacy of black popular fiction as they are forging ahead to capture new markets and readers. Since its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century, African American popular fiction has attempted to balance the demands of its reading public with the conventions and formulas of genre fiction. In this sense, African American popular fiction makes a contribution to the African American literary tradition and to mainstream commercial fiction as well. Readers want to see themselves represented in the texts that they read, and this is perhaps more true for African American readers as a historically excluded population. Whether in science fiction, pulp fiction, or detective fiction, in romance or easy-to-read bestseller, black authors have claimed these genres as their own, modifying and expanding them to write about issues of interest to black readers. As popular fictions with wide distribution networks not limited solely to bookstores, they have the potential of reaching an audience – both black and white – far bigger and more diverse than that of more “literary” novels. Some novels exist within the mainstream, others outside it; some celebrate the achievements of a new class or chronicle love affairs, others critique the virulent racism that keeps large numbers of African Americans disempowered or imagine different worlds altogether where racism is examined. Collectively, they provide a site on which issues affecting African American life can be scrutinized, critiqued, and – depending on the genre – reimagined.
1. Michael Korda, Making the List (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001), p. xxiii.
2. Greg Goode,“Donald Goines,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955 (Detroit: Gale, 1984).
3. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1981) p. 233.
4. Quoted in Gwendolyn Osborne, “The Legacy of Ghetto Pulp Fiction,” Black Issues Book Review (September 2001): 50.
5. Hagar’s Daughter is available as part of Hazel Carby, ed., The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Black Sleuth, ed. John Cullen Gruesser (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002).
6. Stephen Soitos, The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), p. 4.
7. Charles L. P. Silet, The Critical Response to Chester Himes (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999).
8. Bruce A. Glasrud and Laurie Champion, “‘The Fishes and the Poet’s Hands’: Frank Yerby, A Black Author in White America,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23 (Winter 2000): 15–21.
9. Harper’s Magazine (October 1959): 145–150.
10. Robert Beck, The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1971), p. 7.
11. Black Issues Book Review (Sept. 2001): 56.
12. See: Martin Arnold, “Coming Soon: Paperbacks that Sound Like Hip-Hop,” New York Times (Sept. 21, 2000).
13. Gregory E. Rutledge, “Futurist Fiction & Fantasy: The Racial Establishment,” Callaloo 24.1 (2001): 236–252.
14. Sandra Y. Govan, “Speculative Fiction,” The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, eds. William L. Andrews, Trudier Harris, and Frances Smith Foster (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
15. James Sallis, Ash of Stars: On the Writings of Samuel R. Delany (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), pp. x, xv.
16. Theola Labbe, “Black Books in the House” Publishers Weekly (Dec. 11, 2000): 36.
17. For the increased purchasing power of African Americans in the 1980s and 1990s and the response of American capitalism to it, see Robert Weems, Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
18. “The Trouble with Success,” Publishers Weekly (Dec. 12, 1994): 33.
19. African American Book Club Summit, http://www.pageturner.net/Cruise/index.htm
20. For a useful introduction to the black writer’s market, see Jewell Parker Rhodes, Free Within Ourselves; Fiction Lessons for Black Authors (New York: Main Street Books, 1999).
21. “In the Market for Romance,” Black Enterprise (Dec. 1996): 62.
23. Quoted in The New York Times, July 26, 2001.
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