2The NAACP and the NUL evolved into genuine patrons of the literary arts and, in turn, helped usher in what is now formally known as the Harlem Renaissance, a movement characterized by an African American artistic flourishing—dance, painting, sculpture, music, and, of course, literature. However, while civil rights organizations encouraged black creative expression, it usually came at a price, mainly that of artistic supervision (Levering Lewis 175). Nowhere was this more blatant than with the example of The Crisis. Under Du Bois’s editorship, the magazine increased its dedication to the publication of young African American writers, partly because Du Bois wanted to tap the potential of literature in order to make white critics—and more importantly white society—realize how wrong they had been in assuming African American inferiority. In other words, Du Bois saw and used literature as a means to an end in the ongoing political fight for collective emancipation. This utilitarian vision was thrown into sharp relief over the year 1926. In February, Du Bois called for a symposium in the pages of The Crisis where, among other things, he expressed deep concern that “the continual portrayal of the sordid, foolish, and criminal among Negroes [was] convincing the world that this and this alone [was] really and essentially Negroid” (“The Negro in Art” 165). Various artists and intellectuals replied to Du Bois’s call—including Carl Van Vechten, whose provocative novel Nigger Heaven released the same year incensed many African American critics—and their answers were published throughout the year in The Crisis. With the publication of the final answers in the October 1926 issue, Du Bois released his own manifesto, “Criteria of Negro Art”, in which he clearly outlined his vision for black creative production. He famously stated:

[A]ll art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. (296)

3Du Bois might not have been defending the politics of respectability in particular when he wrote this. Nevertheless, this excerpt still illustrated how respectability politics encroached on the literary field: if African American artists wanted to express themselves in the context of segregation, they had no other choice but to put their best foot forward. At least, according to the editor of the most popular African American magazine at the time.

4Partly in reaction to the debate initiated by Du Bois and to his narrow and utilitarian vision of art and literature, seven African American artists decided to publish their own magazine where artistic license would not be restrained. As one of them later recalled, their goal was simple:

[B]urn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past, épater le bourgeois into a realization of the existence of the younger Negro writers and artists, and provide us with an outlet for publication not available in the limited pages of the small Negro magazines then existing, the Crisis, Opportunity, and The Messenger—the first two being house organs of interracial organizations, and the latter being God knows what. (Hughes, The Big Sea 235-236)

5Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, John Davis, and Aaron Douglas had met regularly over the summer of 1926 and each of them had agreed to give fifty dollars to finance the publication. Thurman would serve as the main editor, Davis was to be in charge of the business end, while Nugent’s role was to distribute the magazine (Hughes, The Big Sea 236). For what they had envisaged to be “a Negro quarterly of the arts,” they came up with a highly symbolic name: Fire!!. However, if the magazine did burn up a lot, it was not at all in the way they had intended. Not only did it fail, it failed miserably in almost every conceivable way. Yet, in spite of its failure, the name of the magazine, its contents, and its story have now become elements very likely to come up in any current-day discussion of the Harlem Renaissance. The magazine has now acquired a prestige quite unmatched and has been extensively studied, both within and outside of African American studies. Hence, this article will probe the reasons why Fire!! illustrates the possibility of reconciling failure and canonicity. First, I will determine why the magazine could be seen as a complete commercial and logistical failure when it came out. Then, I will assess its subsequent resurgence. Finally, I will explore the mechanisms which enabled Fire!! to remain meaningful for so long, both in the US and beyond.

A commercial, logistical, and strategic failure

Emulating Henry Louis Mencken’s succès de scandale

thru his half closed eyes he could see Beauty…propped…cheek in hand…on one elbow…looking at him…lips smiling quizzically…he wished Beauty wouldn’t look so hard…Alex was finding it difficult to breathe…breathe normally…why must Beauty look so long…and smile that way…his face seemed nearer…it was…Alex could feel Beauty’s hair on his forehead…breathe normally…breathe normally…could feel Beauty’s breath on his nostrils and lips…and it was clean and faintly colored with tobacco…breathe normally Alex…Beauty’s lips were nearer…Alex closed his eyes…how did one act…his pulse was hammering…from wrists to finger tip…wrist to finger tip… Beauty’s lips touched his…his temples throbbed…throbbed…his pulse hammered from wrist to finger tip…Beauty’s breath came short now…softly staccato…breathe normally Alex…you are asleep…Beauty’s lips touched his…breathe normally…and pressed…pressed hard…cool…his body trembled…breathe normally Alex…Beauty’s lips pressed cool…cool and hard…how much pressure does it take to waken one…Alex sighed…(Nugent 37)

7If this might seem relatively innocuous to modern-day readers, it happened to be the first openly homoerotic text by an African American to be published in the US (Silberman 255). To put it in context, critics were very displeased when Langston Hughes’s poem “Elevator Boy,” also appearing in Fire!!, introduced an elevator boy who decides to simply quit his job when he realizes there is no money in it. The decision taken by the elevator boy indirectly denounces the lack of white-collar opportunities for African Americans in a racist society. In his article on “The Negro Literary Renaissance” published in The Southern Workman in April 1927, Benjamin Brawley asserted that the full poem would “hardly do for quoting in this magazine” and pointed out that elevator boy was a “perfectly honorable employment and that no one with such a job should leave it until he is reasonably sure of getting something better” (179). A poem such as “Elevator Boy” was enough to set critics’ teeth on edge since a moralistic reading of texts often trumped more literary perspectives. As a result, texts which tackled prostitution or homosexuality were a sure way to incense them.

Fire!! under a barrage of setbacks

8Everything did not exactly go according to plan. Out of the seven editors, most were penniless. Hughes later revealed that only three of them had pitched in the fifty dollars that had been pledged, the other ones promising to do so when they had the money (Hughes, The Big Sea 230). Wallace Thurman was the only one with a regular—albeit low-paid—job, so he was led to assume the expenses of the magazine.

9In their attempt to make a splash, the editors were very keen on producing the best magazine possible, in terms of both content and format. As Hughes recalled, “only the best cream-white paper would do on which to print our poems and stories. And only a rich crimson jacket on de luxe stock would show off well the Aaron Douglas cover design” (quoted in Johnson and Johnson 78). Because of this insistence on quality, the bill ballooned and quickly amounted to a thousand dollars, at which point the editors simply could not pay the printer upfront. Thurman had to negotiate to gain access to all the copies, which he did, perhaps thanks to the behind-the-scene intervention of Alain Locke (Hughes, The Big Sea 236). The debt already incurred by the printer meant that no money was left to pay for distribution. Richard Bruce Nugent went on foot to distribute it around New York. On the whole, bookstands and newsstands refused to carry the magazine, with a library here and there which accepted to put it on display. Indeed, the extra expenses in paper quality had eventually made it too expensive to be sold massively. Its price was a dollar, while The Crisis or Liberator cost only fifteen cents, at a time when close to a third of African Americans living in the Mid-Atlantic area did not even earn five dollars a week (De Augustine Reid 110). The unsold copies had thus to be stored away in a basement. However, an actual fire broke out in the basement and ended up burning the remaining copies to ashes. In the end, Thurman was forced to bear the brunt of the fiasco directly: he had to pay off the debt incurred by Fire!! for the next four years, with other editors such as Hughes contributing meagerly whenever it was possible.

A magazine lambasted by the critics

10On top of being a logistical and financial disaster, Fire!! never attained its other strategic goals, either attracting censorship or ostensibly angering older critics such as Du Bois. Even though Hughes claimed in his autobiography that W.E.B. Du Bois “roasted” the magazine in the pages of The Crisis (237), David Levering Lewis tempered this recollection by underlining that Du Bois briefly praised the magazine for the quality of its printing and the striking illustrations by Aaron Douglas. Besides, the NAACP invited Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Wallace Thurman for a reading session on January 2, 1927, members of the old guard thus denying “the Fire!! editors the ultimate triumph of their public anger” (Van Notten 151). As for the other critics, they did not mince their words. For Benjamin Brawley writing in The Southern Workman, “The very first article ought not to have been written, to say nothing of being published; one of the poems seems to rest mainly on the strength of its swearing; and other contributions are in line with these” (183). In his review for the Baltimore Afro-American, Rean Graves went for the jugular by announcing right away that he had “just tossed the first issue of Fire into the fire”. He continued:

Aaron Douglas who, in spite of himself and the meaningless grotesqueness of his creations, has gained a reputation as an artist, is permitted to spoil three perfectly good pages and a cover with his pen and ink hodge podge. Countee Cullen has written a beautiful poem in his “From A Dark Tower,” but tries his best to obscure the thought in superfluous sentences. Edward Silvera is guilty of two poems. Langston Hughes, in three poems, displays his usual ability to say nothing in many words, willfully violating all the rules of poetics and still calling his work poetry. (quoted in Hughes, “Harlem Literati” 6-7)

11Critics did not really change their opinion of Fire!!, even after the initial shock of its publication had been absorbed. Two years later, in 1928, when reviewing the Saturday Evening Quill—another independent African American magazine which had just released its first issue—Aubrey Bowser in the New York Amsterdam News compared Fire!! to a “prostitute’s directory” (16).

The appearance of “Fire”, a quarterly review devoted to art among the younger Negroes, is particularly encouraging at a time when the Negro shows ominous signs of settling down to become a good American. Indeed, if Carl Van Vechten is to be relied upon, he is already making rapid progress in the matter of economic comfort and opulent display. […] This attainment may conceivably be for the best interests of both races. Yet it is a bit tragic to see Negro literature slip over into American literature. There is some irony in considering the Negro’s workmanship as a contribution to American arts and letters. Here, at last, is one time when the Negro should willingly keep in his place—and it is perhaps the one time when the white will not want to keep him there. Certainly the Negro has the basis for a literature which is singular and distinctive, which possesses a breath and animation all its own. No background for intense, emotional writing could be more auriferous than that of the Negro. In form and spirit he has the most desirable of models, for his blues and folk songs have a shapeliness no ingenuity could devise and he has injected into his best writing a blood curdling intensity no cool headed Americanized colored man could ever recapture. Why then must he be patronized and encouraged to become like his colorless brothers in the arts? Apparently the Negro has felt that he needed some journal distinctly his own—under his own editorship and management—to serve as the vessel of his thoughts. It is to be hoped that he will find in this new Negro quarterly the thing he needs to keep his artistic individuality. (258-259)

Resurgent Fire!!

Fire!! as inspiration for other African American little magazines

14Yet the story of Fire!! did not end there and then. Over the past century, it has proven extremely resilient. One of its most immediate effects was that its premature death actually served as a cautionary tale and lesson for further independent artistic endeavors initiated by African Americans. Later, reflecting on the Fire!! episode, Hughes identified the problem concisely: the whole affair had taught him “a lesson about little magazines. But since white folks had them, we Negroes thought we could have one, too. But we didn’t have the money” (The Big Sea 238). During the Harlem Renaissance, at least three more little magazines were published independently by African Americans in the years following the release of Fire!!: Black Opals, Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, and Saturday Evening Quill. All three of them experimented with a different financial approach to sustain the publication, even though they all ended up being short-lived—the longest running magazine being Black Opals with four issues.

15The latter was published in Philadelphia in 1927-1928 and relied on patrons, among them writers such as Marita Bonner or Jessie Redmond Fauset, who was an editor for The Crisis. Incidentally, Black Opals was edited by, among others, Arthur Huff Fauset—half-brother of Jessie—and Nellie Rathbone Bright who had both seen the Fire!! experiment go up in flames almost firsthand. Indeed, they were both listed among the patrons for the first issue of Fire!! who were thanked by the editors on the second page—although the amount of their contribution remained undisclosed—and Huff Fauset even contributed an essay to the magazine. The lesson of what happened to Fire!! was undoubtedly factored in when Black Opals was created. Fire!! and Black Opals might have appeared almost completely at odds in terms of contents, visual style, artistic and political ambitions, or even page layout. However, they did share a fundamental objective: serving as an independent outlet for black creative expression. As for Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, published in 1928, its editor was none other than Wallace Thurman. The second magazine edited by Thurman in New York bore some thematic resemblance to Fire!! as critics have noticed (Johnson and Johnson 88). The selection of short stories provides sufficient evidence: “Luani of the Jungles” by Langston Hughes deals with interracial marriage, while Roy de Coverly’s “Holes” and George W. Little’s “Two Dollars” tackle murder and prostitution.

16However, the continuity between the two magazines also appears in the way they were edited. Unwilling to reproduce the same mistake, Thurman had also asked for the contribution of older, more conservative African Americans such as Walter White and George Schuyler. More importantly, it appears that he relied on advertising to pay off the printer’s bill. Harlem carried ads for companies as varied as Fitzherbert Howell which specialized in real estate in Harlem, the Billy Pierce Studio which provided lessons for stage dancing, the Secretariat Lincoln School, Tabb’s restaurant and grill, and the Club Harlem cabaret, among others. Fire!!’s failure had been an opportunity to learn. When the Saturday Evening Quill Club in Boston decided to launch its magazine in 1928, it made the Saturday Evening Quill a yearly publication which would not be for sale. Members of the club financed the entire magazine but never intended to recoup their expenses, let alone make a profit out of it. Among the members were Waring Cuney and Helen Johnson who had both been published in Fire!!. The first two issues of Saturday Evening Quill received positive critical reviews until this experiment in financial independence was unexpectedly cut short by the onset of the Great Depression. On the whole, the question of financial sacrifice to secure editorial independence remained a crucial one for each of these publications but, one way or another, African Americans could still see their artistic expression be published in little magazines of their own outside of the house organs of civil rights organizations. Fire!! had just proven that it was possible, and several other groups of artists attempted it. As a result Fire!! can be seen as a first step in a collective process of editorial maturation.

The editors’ subsequent fame triggering a retrospective reassessment of Fire!!

17Today, we can see that the editors and contributors to Fire!! have left a mark which goes far beyond the mere existence of the magazine. Aaron Douglas’s work as an illustrator has become iconic: his murals adorn the walls of one of the largest resource centers on African American life and culture in the world, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—which is the branch of the New York Public Library located in Harlem—, while his paintings are often chosen as covers for books dealing with African American culture and history—one famous example being the third edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature released in 2014. While Zora Neale Hurston died in total obscurity in 1960, Alice Walker initiated a rediscovery of her work in the 1970s and interest in her work has remained largely unabated since: her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is often reprinted, translated, or reedited and is now commonly used as a textbook in high schools (Shea and Wilchek). Langston Hughes also occupies a prominent place in the African American literary canon (Lucas 281), while Countee Cullen’s poem “From the Dark Tower”, first published in Fire!!, is among the ten most reprinted texts in African American literary anthologies of the twentieth century. Out of the thirty most reprinted poems in these anthologies, more than a third were signed by contributors to Fire!! (Lucas 272). Thus, compared to other African American literary magazines of the twentieth century, if Fire!! initially failed abysmally from a commercial standpoint, its various contributors later went on to overachieve, the great collection of names retrospectively creating the illusion that the magazine must have been a hit. Surely, the reappraisal of Fire!! owed much to the fact that, as much as it had been a commercial failure, it was not an artistic failure, as subsequent scholars and historians concurred.

18This reappraisal also follows the general historiographic trend that has been ascribed to the Harlem Renaissance as a whole. Indeed, as Houston A. Baker succinctly put it in 1987, the early historiography which started in the early 1970s was dominated by a single question: “Why did the Harlem Renaissance fail?” (12). For scholars such as Huggins and Levering Lewis, the failure of the literary movement was virtually a foregone conclusion. When considering the Harlem Renaissance as a failed political and aesthetic movement, Fire!! appeared as a convenient example to bring up. Ever since Baker, the historiographic narrative that hung over the Renaissance has shifted on the whole from one of failure to one of success (Maxwell 754). In quite a complete reversal from early historiography, Eve Dunbar convincingly argued that failure could have been “a productive political and aesthetic strategy” during the Harlem Renaissance and also suggested that focusing on the “productivity of ‘failure’” (745) is a mode of inquiry which might still reveal new depths about the New Negro period.

Expanding Fire!!

19Although most of the copies had burnt, which made it very difficult to even lay hands on the magazine, its memory was kept alive by two editors in particular: Langston Hughes and Richard Bruce Nugent. The central position of Hughes in the African American literary canon ensured an interest in almost all of his literary endeavors, including Fire!!. He also contributed to this interest by providing precious details around the farcical circumstances of its publication when he published his autobiography The Big Sea in 1940. As for Nugent, he outlived all the other editors. When he met Thomas H. Wirth through a mutual friend, Arnold Rampersad, who had been “writing a biography of Langston Hughes,” Nugent had an epiphany:

One of the bonuses in meeting Wirth was the chance to view his remarkable collection of Afro-Americana. Meeting my long-dead friends beautifully preserved in books, pamphlets and pictures opened my eyes to the fact that among the things which cluttered up my living quarters—I have the incurable habit of never throwing away things which more tidy people dispose of once they have finished using them—were possibly many things that deserved better treatment than they were receiving from my hands and careless care. (Nugent 1)

20Among the “many things” was precisely a copy of Fire!! and this led to a facsimile publication of the magazine in 1982. This reprint, together with the academic interest in the Harlem Renaissance which had been kick-started by Nathan Irvin Huggins’s book Harlem Renaissance published in 1971, were factors which helped Fire!! find a new audience. In 2012, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) decided to rekindle the flames and launched Fire!!!: The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, an online-only journal whose opening editorial entitled “The Fire!!! This Time: Black Studies and the Digital Revolution” stated:

The original Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists stood outside of the academy and sought to capture the spirit of a new generation of Black intellectuals striving to break free from the confines of both internal and external racial expectations. In its current incarnation, Fire!!! seeks to meet the technological demands, scholarly expectations, and economic realities of a new age. The editors and ASALH believe that whatever confronts people of African descent in our changing world must be met by scholarship that lives up to the highest scholarly expectations and is yet accessible to college students, who are challenged to make the world anew. (3)

21Three elements are worth noting here. First, while Fire!!’s selling price had been too high for the magazine to be distributed massively, this digitally based venture insisted precisely on accessibility. Second, if the original magazine had been keen on shocking and, perhaps, antagonizing part of its readership, this new version was aimed at “college students”, confirming Fire!!’s entry into the academy. Third, the very title of the editorial was a nod to James Baldwin’s text, The Fire Next Time, published in 1963. To some extent, Fire!!’s resilience in African American culture may partly be attributed to its implied intertextuality with other publications, especially from the 1960s, be they Baldwin’s book or Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal’s anthology Black Fire, released in 1968. At any rate, by 2012 Fire!!’s content had not only become more accessible; it was also being discussed in academia, after being repositioned within a broader intertextual discussion spanning the twentieth century, and it had received tributes. In 2017, the readership of the magazine was able to grow even more when the publishing house Ypsilon-éditeur decided to publish it in French translation. Over the course of a little less than a century, Fire!!’s trajectory went from that of an apparently complete failure, hardly worth mentioning or reprinting, to that of a cultural artefact hailed for its boldness, deserving praise, and inspiring other ventures.

Failure as a possible gateway into the canon?

The irresistible appeal of the anecdote

The contribution of modernist and LGBTQ+ studies

23However great the power of the anecdotal may be, Fire!! also reached a canonical status through other means. Since the magazine continued to be mentioned and briefly studied in accounts of the Harlem Renaissance, it contributed to establishing its historical and cultural relevance, the early historiography thus providing the magazine with an epistemological lifeline. Yet this lifeline would have also proven to be short-lived if Fire!! had not contained some appeal of its own. Around the turn of the 1990s, two seminal works on the Harlem Renaissance indirectly made it possible to reassess the contents of Fire!! —Houston A. Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as Henry Louis Gates’s essay “The Black Man’s Burden” —by suggesting that the movement could not be contained within black studies per se since it converged with modernist studies and LGBTQ+ studies as well. As such, Fire!! could well represent a next to ideal nexus from which to examine the intersection between race, sex, and modernism in the Harlem Renaissance. This renewed epistemological potential led the magazine to be incorporated in new studies, for example A.B. Christa Schwarz’s Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (2003) or Eric B. White’s 2013 Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism. Incidentally, these works never mention the actual fire which had destroyed all the copies, suggesting the appetite for the anecdotal has been replaced by a keener interest in the magazine’s contents.

24The inclusion of Fire!! in studies on modernism also highlights the fact that the magazine should not be seen as a standalone: it was one of the “accidental companions, across media and cultures” (Pollentier and Wilson 2) that contributed to making up the “modernist communities” described by Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson in the volume they edited. If Richard Nugent did connect the birth of the project to conversations he had with Langston Hughes—in which Hughes insisted on “the importance of the Negro’s contributing his share of himself to a world that, so far, had never considered him a real person at all” (Nugent 1)—, it never explicitly transpired that the editors of Fire!! were overly concerned by the international reception of their magazine. Yet the editors were keenly aware of modernist endeavors. Joyce’s Ulysses, which had been banned in the US, particularly interested Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent for two main reasons: for the way it represented the “conflicted dynamics of the specifically minority literary renaissance” (Braddock 29) and because it indicated “a form of cultural capital that the young black intelligentsia could aspire to possess” (Braddock 35). The radical literary and artistic experimentations contained in Fire!! underline the transatlantic circulation of a world-view where moral values were seen as essentially transient, fragile, and constantly in flux (Singal 15). Although inadvertently, Fire!!’s early demise symbolized this modernist ethos.

Shared epistemological dynamics between failure and canonicity?

25This article explores the unique circumstances surrounding the publication, the initial reception, and the subsequent reappraisal of Fire!!. Despite a disastrous release, the magazine eventually acquired a specific place in African American culture and studies, underscoring how failure and its assessment may vary once a cultural object is removed from its historical context of production and reception. My focus being that of a case study, no generalizing assumptions can be extrapolated from this article. With that being said, I wish to end by delineating how Fire!! can illustrate the porous nature that can sometimes exist between the notions of failure and canonicity, and, to some extent, the way in which failure can serve as a gateway into the canon. From an epistemological standpoint, both notions are connected. The connection does not merely lie within the purview of the dialectic relationship uniting two elements which, on the surface, appear to be antithetic, but also springs from the very mechanisms we use to assess failure and canonicity. If a cultural production retains enough artistic merit, as is indeed the case with Fire!!, I would contend that, to some extent, the bigger the failure, the better the odds of entering a cultural canon for an artistic work.

26Four interrelated reasons come to mind when making such an assessment. First, failures tend to be inherently relative to expectations. There would hardly be any point in talking about failure if there had been no hope for a modicum of success in the first place. Thus, unexpected failures generate a form of intellectual curiosity: the more a cultural production fails, the more attention it is likely to receive. Scholars and critics may well be willing to examine the wreckage to understand the reasons behind the failure. Incidentally, Harold Bloom argued in The Western Canon that canonical works stand out in part because of their ability to defy expectations; they create “an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfilment of expectations” (3). In some cases, unexpected failures can create the same sort of bewilderment as canonical works.

27Second, each attempt at understanding why a cultural production failed can potentially pave the way to its ultimate reassessment and reappraisal. As Catherine Volpilhac-Auger asserted in the introduction to Oeuvres majeures, oeuvres mineures ?, over time some minor literary works become major works and vice versa, which underlines the importance of both reception as well as the evolution of literary tastes (iv). In order to identify the reasons for failure, historians will have to dedicate their attention to the work considered. Yet what are canonical works if not works which receive continued and dedicated critical attention as time goes by? More precisely, it is the sustained critical attention from academia which is actually vital for the survival of literary works (Genette 130-131). Works that are ignored can never attain canonicity: some failures may well be discarded, but not disregarded. The reason behind the scholarly critical attention given to Fire!! might have shifted over time—from the lure of the anecdotal to the analysis of the intersection between race, sex, and modernism—but it has remained, on the whole, quietly steady.

28Third, a failure entails a lesson, in other words, a form of knowledge that can be taught. Debates about the contents of a US literary canon have usually revolved around the central question of what should be taught in schools and universities (Cain 3). Canonical works, or classics, have historically been connected to the notion of teaching since they were initially works deemed worthy enough to be taught in classrooms by some authority—be it teachers, school boards, or university faculty. The authority in charge invariably decides what should be read, studied, and, if good enough, imitated, and what shouldn’t, because it failed to attain certain standards. Failed works may not be imitated, but they can nevertheless be studied in order to avoid pitfalls.

29Fourth, literary canons do not revolve so much around textual hallmarks as they do around textual functions within a larger social and cultural discourse. In other words, canonical works reveal as many things about literature itself as they reveal about the society and culture in which they are read and studied (Lucas 18).

30The resurgence of Fire!! shows clearly that its cultural value has fluctuated over time, with the emergence of new fields of academic inquiries always opening the way to a reassessment of failed works. Canonicity is not a quality inherent to a work; it is a characterization bestowed upon a work. To a large extent, failure operates the same way. This line of thought by no means implies that works that are considered failures are on par with what is usually labeled canonical works. Rather, the dynamics that preside over canon formation are extremely close to those that prevail when one tries to make sense out of a failure. Sometimes, as in the case of Fire!!, these dynamics finally converge.

Conclusion

31Today, Fire!! is often perceived as an iconic publication from the Harlem Renaissance, as a literary endeavor owing its successful afterlife to a seamless blend between modernity—it offers material fit to be discussed in present-day classrooms and scientific inquiry—and modernism: the magazine embodies a cultural, literary, and historical era. Fire!! is certainly not the first or the only cultural production to have been widely vilified upon its release, only to be lauded by subsequent critical reassessments. However, unlike some other failures, it neither led to the end of literary careers, nor was it the last—unsuccessful—attempt at producing black creative outlets aiming to be economically independent. On the contrary, it fortified the resolve of its editors and—in a very fitting call and response pattern—Fire!!’s symbolic cry for independence spurred other African American artists to answer and launch their own magazines.

32The symbolism behind Fire!!’s story does not end with unsold copies going up in flames. The magazine’s survival in cultural discourse is one characterized by uncommon resilience against a terrible initial misfortune, and this, to a very large extent, directly echoes the situation African Americans have had to face in the United States throughout their entire history. This broader cultural and historical resonance suggests that the story of Fire!! is unlikely to disappear from accounts of the Harlem Renaissance. However, the editors’ goal was never to make history, nor to mirror it somehow. After all, civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the National Urban League wanted literature to be subordinate to the ongoing political fights of the day. For a very brief moment, the editors of Fire!! managed to pry this aesthetic constraint open. For a an equally brief moment, they were victorious.