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Street players : black pulp fiction and the making of a literary underground

Title
Street players : black pulp fiction and the making of a literary underground / Kinohi Nishikawa.
Author
Nishikawa, Kinohi
Publication
  • Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018.
  • ©2018

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TextUse in library Sc E 19-544Schomburg Center - Research & Reference

Details

Description
305 pages : illustrations; 24 cm
Summary
The uncontested center of the black pulp fiction universe for more than four decades was the Los Angeles publisher Holloway House. From the late 1960s until it closed in 2008, Holloway House specialized in cheap paperbacks with page-turning narratives featuring black protagonists in crime stories, conspiracy thrillers, prison novels, and Westerns. From Iceberg Slim's Pimp to Donald Goines's Never Die Alone, the thread that tied all of these books together--and made them distinct from the majority of American pulp - was an unfailing veneration of black masculinity. Zeroing in on Holloway House, Street Players explores how this world of black pulp fiction was produced, received, and recreated over time and across different communities of readers.0Kinohi Nishikawa contends that black pulp fiction was built on white readers' fears of the feminization of society--and the appeal of black masculinity as a way to counter it. In essence, it was the original form of blaxploitation: a strategy of mass-marketing race to suit the reactionary fantasies of a white audience. But while chauvinism and misogyny remained troubling yet constitutive aspects of this literature, from 1973 onward, Holloway House moved away from publishing sleaze for a white audience to publishing solely for black readers. The standard account of this literary phenomenon is based almost entirely on where this literature ended up: in the hands of black, male, working-class readers. When it closed, Holloway House was synonymous with genre fiction written by black authors for black readers - a field of cultural production that Nishikawa terms the black literary underground.
Alternative Title
Black pulp fiction and the making of a literary underground
Subject
  • Holloway House Publishing Co
  • 1900-1999
  • American fiction > African American authors > History and criticism. > 20th century
  • Urban fiction, American > 20th century > History and criticism
  • African Americans in literature
  • Race in literature
  • American fiction > African American authors
  • Urban fiction, American
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-290) and index.
Contents
Introduction: from sleaze to street -- Origins -- Up from domesticity -- Street legends -- Black sleaze -- Transitions -- Missing the revolution -- Return of The Mack -- Trajectories -- Difference and repetition -- Reading the street -- The difference within -- Epilogue: and back again.
Call Number
Sc E 19-544
ISBN
  • 9780226586885
  • 022658688X
  • 9780226586915
  • 022658691X
  • 9780226587073 (canceled/invalid)
LCCN
2018010068
OCLC
1028911584
Author
Nishikawa, Kinohi, author.
Title
Street players : black pulp fiction and the making of a literary underground / Kinohi Nishikawa.
Publisher
Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Copyright Date
©2018
Type of Content
text
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-290) and index.
Chronological Term
1900-1999
Research Call Number
Sc E 19-544
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