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Killing John Cabot and publishing black: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot
African American Review, Winter, 2002 by James D. Sullivan
The late sixties do not, of course, mark a clean break in Brooks's poetry. The literary sophistication of her earlier work persists in the later work, and the political thrust of her later work pervades her earlier work as well. (6) After all, she considered the 1960 "We Real Cool" her greatest success by her new popular standards; of her later work only "The Boy Died in My Alley," from the 1975 Beckonings, in her judgment, came close (Hull and Gallagher 20).
Riot, however, makes a decisive break in the material contextualization of Brooks's poetry. Before that chapbook, her books arrived in one's hands through the ostensibly transparent medium of a major publishing house. One was not to notice the institutional mediation, but read transparently through it to the poet's work. A publication is not, however, an utterance of only the writer, but an utterance also of the publisher and of the other institutions-such as retailers, schools, and libraries--through which the artifact passes. Each institution, in conveying the text, places its own quotation marks around it, offering it--even when expressing full approval--within the context of its own values and interests, which are, of course, not always the values and interests of the writer. The reception of Brooks's work through 1968 clearly demonstrates the extent to which a publisher's imprint inflects both the way a work is valued and the way it is understood. When contrasted with Broadside, it becomes clear that Harper's imprint is racially marked as white and that it carries a set of assumptions and values with which Brooks wished, by the late 1960s, to dissociate herself. Literary publishers specifically identified as African American, such as Broadside Press and Third World Press, on the other hand, quote the text (Brooks's or anybody else's) within a context of values and interests specifically marked as black, in the process placing more emphasis and value than do publishers marked as whit e upon the depiction of and comment on African American cultural and social experience, and they thus encourage readings that particularly value these aspects of the texts.
In the 1960s, Brooks was coming to understand poetry not simply as a set of texts, but as a cultural practice that implicated a broad range of people who produce, distribute, and consume poetry in a variety of contexts and settings--from the editorial offices of Harper & Row and the armchairs of her reviewers to the workshops she conducted in her living room for local college students-and the tavern they wandered into for their impromptu reading--each of which inflects the text's meanings. Who publishes a literary work is, therefore, not just a commercial accident, a note upon the spine or title-page irrelevant to the meat of the book. The founding of small African American presses such as Broadside and Third World made it possible to publish work identified with African American cultural nationalism without that level of irony added to the text by reliance on white cultural institutions. The challenge here for the criticism of African American literature is to recognize that literature always appears under t he name not only of an author, but also of a racially marked publishing institution whose mission always inflects the work.
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