On May 24, University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe announced that funding for the University’s 54-year-old press would be ended almost immediately. The 10 undersigned scholars, who comprise all of the editors of the 16-volume Collected Works of Langston Hughes, believe this is a grievous error and that President Wolfe should reverse this decision.
Great universities define themselves by what they publish and how those publications influence other scholars and readers. This is true regardless of the field. A major research university that ceases operations of its press indicates that it has lost interest in a crucial part of its mission.
Despite the invaluable merit of the essential publications on Langston Hughes’s work by the Oxford University Press, and the supplemental contributions by the University Press of Kentucky and the University of Illinois Press, the unrivaled sequence of books on Hughes by the University of Missouri Press makes it arguably the publisher of the most definitive collection of the kind to date. Furthermore, the University of Missouri Press has rightfully earned distinction among a handful of receptive presses to publish definitive literary criticism by and on African Americans since 1980, particularly under the editorship of the now retired Beverly Jarrett.
The body of work from the University of Missouri Press challenges narrow perceptions and misreadings of Hughes (who was born in Joplin, Missouri) as a simple, folksy writer by bringing back into publication texts that reveal a profoundly broad and intellectually engaging understanding of 20th-century U.S. culture and the role of race in world affairs.
Our work on these volumes also contributes to the larger, ongoing project among scholars of African-American literature to recover texts by black American writers that have been historically marginalized from the American literary canon. This large-scale process of textual recovery and publication, begun on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, is truly one of academe’s most important success stories. Without the work of scholars engaged in this project, African-American literary studies in the academy simply would not exist, and American literary studies in the 21st century would look very different indeed.
More than a local budgetary decision, then, this closing reduces significantly the intellectual quality of academic diversity in the U.S.; indeed, it impairs the very mission of the humanities. It diminishes greatly the impact of the University of Missouri on the profundity of this vital conversation. We admonish President Wolfe to reconsider his decision and allow the University of Missouri Press to continue its record of scholarly excellence.
Joseph McLaren
Arnold Rampersad
Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper
Christopher C. De Santis
Leslie Sanders
Dolan Hubbard
R. Baxter Miller
Dellita Martin Ogunsola
Dianne Johnson
Stephen C. Tracy
Ned Stuckey-French
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