Book Talk: Circulating Jim Crow by Dr. Adam McKible (Associate Professor of English at John Jay)

About the book:
The Saturday Evening Post was the most popular and influential magazine in the United States for much of the twentieth century. Today, the Post is usually remembered for its nostalgic Norman Rockwell covers, but beneath those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of editor George Horace Lorimer, the Saturday Evening Post helped justify racism and white supremacy by publishing white authors whose work used paternalistic tropes and demeaning humor that portrayed Jim Crow segregation and violence as simple common sense. In Circulating Jim Crow (Columbia University Press), Adam McKible tells the story of Lorimer’s rise to prominence and examines the white authors who provided the editor and readers with the caricatures they craved. He also explores how Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance pushed back against the Post and its commodified racism.
About the Author:
Dr. Adam McKible is an associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the author of Circulating Jim Crow (2024) and The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (2002). He edited and introduced Edward Christopher Williams’s When Washington Was in Vogue (2004), a previously lost novel of the Harlem Renaissance. He is also co-editor of a special issue of Modernism/modernity devoted to the Harlem Renaissance (2013) and of the collection Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (2005). His current projects include a collection entitled Jim Crow Modernism and a special issue of the Journal of Modern Periodicals devoted to the Saturday Evening Post.
Moderator:
Dr. Jean Mills is Editor-in-Chief of Feminist Modernist Studies and Chair of the English Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is currently working on her second book, Virginia Woolf and Philosophy, with Routledge. She specializes in Woolf Studies, Feminist Theory, Modernism, and Peace Studies.
Discussant:
Dr. Jesse W. Schwartz is a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College and a member of the faculty committee of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is co-editor of the essay collection New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture (2022), and his work can be found there as well as in Nineteenth-Century Literature, English Language Notes, and Radical Teacher. He is currently at work on America’s Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, Racial Socialism, and US Print Cultures, 1882-1929, which traces American cultural responses to transnational socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the intersections of racial formation and radical politics.
Discussant:
Dr. Kelley Kreitz is an associate professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in Latinx Studies at Pace University in New York City, where she also serves in the Provost’s Office as the director of the university’s experiential learning initiative. Her research on print and digital cultures of the Americas has appeared in Aztlán, American Literary History, American Periodicals, English Language Notes, and in her digital mapping project on New York City’s nineteenth-century Spanish-language press, C19LatinoNYC.org. Her book, Printing Nueva York: Spanish-Language Print Culture and the Literary Imagination in the Age of Electricity, is under contract with NYU Press.