To Make Negro Literature

“From the title to the final words of her coda, Elizabeth McHenry provokes, persuades, and prods readers to apply thought to the knowledge presented in this book. It is a nuanced and wise offering of immaculate research and righteous rumination to anyone—whether the casual browser who never once thought about the topic or the most sophisticated scholar of Black culture generally and print culture particularly.” - Frances Smith Foster, author of ’Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America

“In this revelatory study, Elizabeth McHenry argues that the turn of the twentieth century, so often lamented as a nadir of race relations, was in fact the pivotal era when the infrastructure for the African American literary tradition was built. Looking behind the scenes to efforts that at first glance might seem perfunctory or crassly commercial (subscription bookselling services, printing presses, reading rooms, bibliographies), she unearths the enormous labor—albeit sometimes aborted or thwarted or unfinished—undertaken by writers and intellectuals in the period to create the very concept of ‘Negro literature’ as a viable publishing category as much as an ideological project linked to uplift and civil rights.” - Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination

"This reviewer found especially engaging the author's assessment of Mary Church Terrell’s efforts to publish short stories and the records she kept (for posterity) of publishers’ rejections. Other chapters are equally engaging, revealing surprising information about the interstices of the African American literary tradition. In sum, this is a riveting, much needed account of the spaces between recognized African American literary success and the scaffolding that enables it. Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers." - A. S. Newson-Horst, Choice

"McHenry teaches how to read the past in order to glean the lessons to be learned from defeat. If we study failure, we can learn about process, creativity, and the makings of literary culture in the US alongside the country’s history of racialized and gendered violence. . . .  By reading in this way, McHenry invites failure to speak and us to admit how it has made and shaped this literary history. Such reading reveals how Black authors have wrestled with and against 'what is.'" - Tara A. Bynum, Public Books

"McHenry thus challenges scholars to rethink what types of work receive critical attention. Instead of prizing only texts that are original, creative, and public, what if we attended more closely to pedagogical, utilitarian, and unpublished works? What would a bibliography of African American literature’s queer failure look like?" - Laura E. Helton, Bibliographical Society of America

"To Make Negro Literature does not brashly proclaim the renewal of African American, and, in fact, of American literary history, but instead proposes to subtly challenge the accepted narrative, by encompassing objects and individuals heretofore excluded from 'literature' and literary culture. . . . By suggesting that we turn to the 'underground' structures of literature, and consider failure as a form of resistance, Elizabeth McHenry invites us to think about the potentiality of literature, and of literariness." - Cécile Cottenet, Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone

"A richly innovative archive of under-researched, though vital textual practices alongside defamiliarizing and thus generative readings of better-known ones. . . . The timely analytical and methodological interventions in To Make Negro Literature emerge from McHenry homing in on failed, unrefined, and workaday black texts." - Douglas A. Jones, Jr., American Literary History

"McHenry’s detailing of African American genres and authors that are commonly overlooked offers readers a more comprehensive view of African American literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Readers of McHenry’s book are called to appreciate noncanonical African American literature through her clear explanations. . . . This book will interest scholars of African American literature, especially those who wish to learn more about unfamiliar writers and works." - Courtney Walton, European Journal of American Studies

"A luminous venture into a little-known corner of African American literary history." - Sara Rutkowski, Journal of Southern History

"To Make Negro Literature is an archivally rich, lucidly written, substantial, and award-winning contribution to our ever-deepening understanding of African American literary history. . . . . It is no overstatement to conclude that if literature scholars in all fields apply McHenry’s generous example to other authors, works, and times, we stand to gain an immeasurably more inclusive understanding of literary history and theory, with the potential to do much greater justice to people and literatures of the past, present, and future." - Marcy J. Dinius, MLQ

"This volume mines unexamined archives and neglected fields of thought to sketch out why failed publications, bankrupt publishing ventures and disdained modes of textual distribution fundamentally constructed a world in which Black writing and the powerful ideas about social and cultural values could emerge as we see them today." - Susanna Ashton, Criticism

"By reorienting archival research . . . and instead focusing on instances of what she calls literary 'failure'—unpublished stories, unfinished encyclopedias, frustrated careers—McHenry’s latest makes an invaluable contribution to the theory and practice of Black archival and print culture studies." - Marc Blanc, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association