Dana A. Williams’s long-awaited book Toni at Random is a revelatory portrait of the novelist from an unusual vantage point: her innovative and influential work as an editor at Random House from 1971 to 1983. Morrison famously pulled off an unprecedented juggling act, holding a full-time editorial career as one of the very few African American faces in senior roles in the trade publishing world while somehow finding time to complete Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Tar Baby (1981), as her own reputation as a novelist grew. The book raises fascinating questions not only about Morrison’s singular path but about the complex relationship between editorial practice and writerly practice in general, and about the position of African American literature in the US publishing landscape. As a book mainly concerned with the 1970s, Toni at Random can also be read as an intriguing if oblique reflection on the afterlives of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and the extensive efforts at institution building that had emerged in the previous decade, not only in the Black studies and African American studies programs that were founded in colleges and universities around the country but also in Black independent and small-press publishing.
The document published here for the first time, “Group Life and Literature,” is an unfinished late essay by Claude McKay, the vagabond poet and enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance. 1 Although no date is given on the typescript or on the folder in which it resides at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, it was probably written in 1938 or 1939. The reference to Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children , which was published in 1938, as a “recent startling phenomenon,” added by hand on the typescript, means that at least this annotation could not have been made earlier. Despite being professional rivals at the time, notably in their conflicting relations to the Communist Party, McKay and Wright were then both part of the Federal Writers’ Project and worked together in the FWP’s New York City offices (see Cooper 362). As a New Deal program launched by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) agency, the FWP ran from 1936 to 1940 and provided life-sustaining employment to thousands of established and emerging US writers during the latter half of the Great Depression, including, among many others, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Richard Durham, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, Dorothy West, and a young Ralph Ellison (who also worked at the New York branch).
This essay examines the turn to a discourse of sustainable development through two novels by Ng & utilde;g & itilde; wa Thiong'o: Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2004). Looking at the specific characters, images, and plotlines from Devil on the Cross that are reworked in Wizard of the Crow, the essay traces the shifts in Ng & utilde;g & itilde;'s thinking on development and the environment across the roughly twenty years separating the two novels. Mapping these moments of rewriting onto the history of sustainable development, which emerged in the same period as a kind of rewriting of prior development paradigms, the essay shows how Ng & utilde;g & itilde;'s literary response to environmental crisis exposes the fantastical modes of thinking at the heart of sustainable development; it also provides a vision of sustainability that challenges mainstream conceptions of what solutions are considered to be-in the words of the mandate given to the World Commission on Environment and Development-"realistic."
