Ebony Accents in the Ivory Tower - academic publishing

Black Issues Book Review, Sept, 2001 by Angela Dodson

Black Books From Other University Presses

Presses at other universities have had their transitions, too, but are renewing commitments to African American studies. Joan Catapano, associate director and editor-in-chief of the University of Illinois Press recalls, "I was a graduate student in the 1970s, so I was aware of all this black studies scholarship, especially as it grew out of all the social ferment on campuses. Then it seemed in the '80s that there wasn't anything happening. I was surprised by this, and I thought we really should be doing something." As a new acquisitions editor at Indiana, she was not sure at first how to address the gap. Eventually, at a conference she met the scholar Darlene Clark Hine, who has written or contributed to scores of books on black history. They later collaborated with David Barry Gaspar and John McCluskey on Blacks in the Diaspora, a series on African American studies.

Catapano says that she was drawn to Illinois because of its reputation for having had one of the first and largest African American studies list. In 1971, it began the series Blacks in the New World, edited by August Meier and then press director Richard Wentworth, now retired. The series eventually produced many titles that are still selling. Catapano is planning a new series, yet untitled, with Hine and others with whom she worked on the Indiana series. "We plan to look at who is doing interesting work and to develop books with young scholars," she says. "We are more concerned with quality than quantity."

The Illinois press also helped to reintroduce Zora Neale Hurston to the world about twenty years ago by buying the reprint rights and republishing her fiction for a number of years. The work sold well enough that a commercial publisher eventually took back the rights, Catapano says.

New Black Studies Trends

The nature of black-interest scholarship that university presses publish has changed over the years, said Ann-Marie Anderson, assistant director and marketing director for Temple University Press in a Philadelphia. "I'd say there were three periods: In the 1970s, there was history; in the 1980s, literature, music and theology--the period of Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr.; and then, in the 1990s, the heavy cultural stuff--multiculturalism, [the deconstruction of] whiteness, critical race theory." Some scholars are calling this the era of "white studies," she continued. "It's an outgrowth of black studies.

"Now we're moving into mixed race" observes Temple's Anderson. "Next February we will publish More Than Black: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order, by G. Reginald Daniel." Of course, specifically black-interest titles continue to be a staple at Temple. One that Ann-Marie Anderson is especially excited about is The Black Female Body: A Photographic History by MacArthur "genius award" recipient Deborah Willis (see BIBR, July/August 2000 and September/October 2000 issues) and Carla Williams, to be published this fall.

Ann-Marie Anderson agrees that competition for African American titles has grown. "Commercial publishers have seen that blacks buy books. So, the pool of what university presses can publish is smaller. Now the authors are going to the major houses," she said. "Now the competition is real thick and when you don't have African American editors who have contacts, you get the last of the bunch or you get the very new people."