The readings from “Street Players” this week were helpful in my understanding of how the publishing industry works, but have made me question how I view literature and wonder if I may be looking at it all wrong. The story Nishikawa tells about the Holloway House has provided me with an insight into how readership influences how we look at a story. What struck me was that Holloway House is a white publishing house, and used the black readership they gleaned from Pimp to profit, flooding the literary marketplace that were set in or starred protagonists from black ghettos. It brings into consideration the theoretical framework behind cultural appropriation. The pulp fiction genre lies in an interesting space where it allows a white readership to get a “taste of the exotic.. A bit of the other”, as Bell Hooks lays it out; but it also has a cultural significance to black readers as it validates their experiences and promotes their representation in this literary space. So, in examining the works of Iceberg Slim, it is important to acknowledge its initial readership. This insight made me problematize the pulp genre as possibly just a way for white readers to consume this underground aspect of black culture as black culture in its entirety – leading to prejudices and stereotypes. But this may be the same reason I have looked down on the genre.
The last two summers, I worked as a summer receptionist at my old middle school. In the slow days I passed my time reading books like East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. One of the janitors that I chatted with regularly was named Tee. She is an older black woman and when we spent lunches together, getting to know each other. I learned that she had a kid and had to drop out of high school, and now that she is at retirement age, she has to work as a janitor to take care of her elderly father. I would look over my volume at the books she read, which she called her “Gangsta books”, small mass market paperbacks with scandalous covers with black characters. What she was reading was black noir, I just didn’t know it at the time.
As an English major who is not well-read in black literature, but is trying to be, I realize now that I thought I was better than Miss Tee because I was reading classic literature. In our class conversations, I think we all have felt out of our element in reading from the noir genre, to the point where our conversations have left much to be desired. But to connect this to my personal experience, reading Trick Baby, I feel guilty that I have not exposed myself to this literature in the past. I think I have valued authors like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison as what black literature I should be reading, instead of looking at books like Trick Baby as another aspect of black representation in literature. So, I guess I am a voyeur into this pulp space, and I have to accept that as a learning opportunity.