Yeah, I have a problem with dividing fiction into Fiction and African American fiction. If you want to call it White people fiction and Black people fiction, at least there’d be parity–but too often it’s like, “these are books with regular people, and these are books with Those People.”
Years ago I wanted to give someone a copy of a book by Jeanette Winterson. I went to a local bookstore and couldn’t find it anywhere. Finally I asked, and they told me to look under Lesbian fiction. WTF–Jeanette Winterson isn’t good enough for the plain fiction shelf?
Ghettoizing books is not, in my opinion, a strong move.
I know somebody who was tasked with doing genre pullouts in DVDs at another location and she was literally told that if it has enough black people on the cover it’s a black movie. Which blew my mind into little pieces.
At the very slightest and least problematic, it tells people “oh you don’t have to browse in here, it isn’t for you”.
But nobody can even tell me what an African American book even is! Like, Barbara Hambly (who is white) writes really fun mysteries about a free man of color in New Orleans in the IIRC 1830’s. So, is that a mystery? Is that an African American book because it deals very much with historical issues that community faced? Is it just regular fiction because it’s written by a white lady? (Actually I just looked up a few titles from that series and two were “Mystery” and one was “Af-Am”.)
What does that even mean?!
In practice it seems to mean that you’ve got a range of shelving that’s got relatively Serious Literature that Deals Thoughtfully with the Black Experience and is Mostly Written By Black People Except That One Barbara Hambly Mystery, and then at the end you’ve got the three half full shelves of the nasty books that aren’t checked out or missing. And then you’ve got the rest of the library. I think it’s frankly reprehensible and I have serious questions about the professional ethics involved.
When I worked at Borders, we asked Management why there was a separate African-American Literature section.
They explained that they had, at one point, re-integrated (ha!) them into the general Fiction section; however, when they did so sales for those books dropped like a rock. So they separated them back out again, and sales jumped again.
I’ve seen books labeled as “African-American” in the McNaughton catalog*, so it seems like the obvious (if not necessarily the most accurate) answer is “Whatever the publisher or vendor says is an African-American book.” Like a lot of academic libraries we don’t bother dividing our small McNaughton collection by genre, we just alphabetize everything by the author’s last name. If we ever decide to split things up further, the easiest thing to do would be to just take McNaughton’s word for what’s an African-American novel, what’s a mystery, what’s science fiction, etc.
Incidentally, while I understand being uncomfortable with “segregating” some genres of fiction, I can tell you from experience that patrons don’t really like having all genres thrown together. People do come to the desk and ask where the fantasy novels or mysteries are, and aren’t thrilled to learn they pretty much just have to browse through the McNaughton collection until they find something. At both my current job and my previous job I’ve suggested that we use stickers to mark different genres or at least separate fiction from non-fiction, but have always been told that this would create too much work when it comes to processing and shelving a collection that doesn’t serve our primary mission.
*For non-librarians, McNaughton provides a subscription service that allows us to lease current popular fiction and non-fiction books, with the option to purchase anything we want to keep at the end of the lease period. For an academic library, this allows us to provide our users with access to a rotating selection of the latest bestsellers while saving a bit of money and not getting stuck with copies of non-scholarly books that used to be hot titles.
Thanks, and apologies for not being clearer in the OP. Urban fiction (which could include almost anything set in a city) is a misleading label when really it’s more “African-American pulp fiction” [smaller case- no relation to the Tarantino film]). Like the Amish romance novels (which is really a madly popular thing) it’s huge but I have pretty much no personal knowledge of it. If Tyler Perry was a novelist, he’d probably be UF, because like the Madea films it’s an extremely popular genre specifically targeted to blue collar urban black audiences (though with fans from other backgrounds as well).
Sister Souljah, as mentioned by Zsofia, and Carl Weber are two of the most popular writers of UF at my library, and I buy anything they release for the collection, but I’m trying to find the other must-have writers.
It’s harder than you’d think to find good clear “must have” lists because it’s not mainstream. I’m trying to educate myself on the big names.
The “Should there be a black writers section?” is a big debate in public libraries. Some good points on both sides: on the one, if you’re really only interested in novels about contemporary black life but you don’t have a particular title or author in mind it can be very difficult to find one just going through a huge fiction section. OTOH, if you have an African-American section it seems kind of like segregation, and as Zsofia mentioned how do you make the cut? Should all black writers be pulled from the regular fiction collection or just contemporary/urban, and then when you have a crossover success like Sapphire it’s even more confusing.
The Deadly Streets by Harlan Ellison (It’s NOT Science-Fiction) may be what you’re looking for. The stories are all about street gangs and petty criminals in late 1950s NYC.
Tyler Perry once attributed his success to (my words, not his, though as close a paraphrase as I can remember) “I cater to audiences Hollywood doesn’t know exist”, and it’s a very similar matter with these books.
Seriously, if I had a fortune to invest I’d just make family movies with black casts and watch the money roll in. I don’t see how Hollywood doesn’t get that the reason terrible Tyler Perry movies are so popular is that they’re the only thing filling a niche that millions of people want.
Exactly. Even many of his fans will agree his movies aren’t good except for the Madea-acting-crazy parts, but they’re the only game in town. Sometimes you want to see yourself in a movie. I know when I was growing up broke and in the back-of-nowhere Alabama the last thing I wanted to see was some kind of John Hughes movie about a bunch of upper-middle-class/rich kids whining when they had families with no money problems and great wardrobes and went to a school that looked like it belonged on Star Trek (I want to strangle Ferris Bueller til this day). Same today with a lot of rom-coms: I felt/feel no connection to those people, and I’m white. When you add in race and religious issues you create even more distance.
They’re starving.
As I mentioned upthread, when it comes to the sexier type of urban fiction then Zane seems to be very popular – or at least she was a couple of years ago. She’s the only urban fiction author I can remember my patrons asking about by name. There’s also Nikki Turner, who’s famous enough that I at least know she’s an author of urban fiction despite being pretty clueless about the genre myself.
I just went down to the section and counted - we have exactly 54 books on the shelf, and I saw at least ten of those that really ought to be withdrawn for condition. That tells you how hard this stuff circs, because we buy a TON of it. We literally cannot keep it in.
I would love to have a separate Urban Fiction section. It’s not for any kind of racial or snobbish reasons but because it’s requested by the patrons; they- understandably- don’t want to look through a fiction section that includes everyone from Jane Austen to Philip Yancey when they’re not looking for a particular writer so much as another book like Family Business or Player Haters. I’d do the same for romance novels and the pulp horror and sci-fi stuff.
Btw I ended up reading Coldest Winter Ever because of this thread (I’ve always felt bad for not having ever tried an urban fiction book.). It’s funny, I expected a page turner and it really wasn’t. The last quarter or so really picked up and there’s some stuff in it there at the end that stayed with me. On the whole I was expecting to like it better than I did though. I may try another more “modern” example (I feel weird that this book that was written when I was in college is “old”) to give the genre a fair shake.
