Kinohi Nishikawa's Street Players offers a robust exploration of the unlikely events that shaped black pulp fiction in the second half of the twentieth century, and their implications for continuing discussions on race, popular culture, and cultural appropriation. Nishikawa investigates this development by tracing the pioneering, if mercenary, role played by the publishing outfit Holloway House under the direction of Bentley Morris and Ralph Weinstock.

As the author shows, black pulp fiction developed more or less as an accident. When Holloway House published Iceberg Slim's Pimp in 1967, the paperback was its first by a black author, but it was also of a piece with the prevailing genre, sleaze. Nishikawa defines sleaze as “mid-century print commodities (pulps and pinup magazines) whose aim was to circulate fantasies of putting women in their place” (6). With the publication of Slim's Pimp and a few other early titles by black authors came a rapid series of events that saw black pulp fiction eventually emerge out of sleaze. Unlike sleaze, black pulp fiction chose for its setting black urban life and cultivated a vibrant black readership.

The book is divided into three parts – “Origins,” “Transitions,” and “Trajectories” – underlining a focus on genealogy. In chapter 1, “Up from Domesticity,” Nishikawa examines how Morris and Weinstock's earlier magazines Adam (1956) and Knight (1958) built on the “anti-domestic ideology” of the era already being tapped into by Playboy, but also how the latter would rebrand itself “as a vehicle for upmarket taste” (19). Chapter 2, “Street Legends,” discusses the early work of Iceberg Slim and Robert deCoy. Particularly insightful here is Nishikawa's reading of Holloway's probable involvement in the creation of the persona of Iceberg Slim, and how earlier scholars have, for the most part, taken at face value the company's claim that its motivations were wholly altruistic. In fact, Slim's Pimp, Nishikawa points out, served as “a [black] mask through which white readers were allowed, or given license, to feel closer to their manhood” (57). This intermediate phase of the “black mask” is the subject of chapter 3, “Black Sleaze.” The author identifies it as a subgenre of sleaze, designating the early black-authored, but white-oriented, titles that “made a lurid spectacle of blackness” and “found a receptive audience among urban blacks” (76). Importantly, he analyzes the evolving habits and tastes of black readers, and how these would ultimately prompt Holloway House to modify its content.

The new genre that emerged out of that experiment, then, is “black pulp fiction” proper, a subject the author discusses at length in the next two chapters. Chapter 4, “Missing the Revolution,” considers Slim's own growth, as he tries to reconcile his status as a pimp-culture hero with the more radical black identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s. But – as he argues in chapter 5, “Return of the Mack” – it was not until the publication of Donald Goines's Dopefiend that Holloway's experimentation with black pulp fiction would hit the mark. As he finds, “By taking a chance on [Goines's] writing, Morris and Weinstock opened the door to a new pool of creative talent, one that emerged out of an urban black readership” (139). This phase of Goines's prolific career would culminate in Holloway's launch of Players in 1973, a magazine devoted to the further exploration of black urban life.

The final part of the book examines the implications of the literary underground, focussing on the period between 1974 and the 1980s. As the author discusses in chapter 6, “Difference and Repetition,” this period witnessed a recycling of tropes already popular in the mainstream by black authors (including, notably, Joseph Nazel). Chapter 7, “Reading the Street,” offers a closer study of black readers and their interests and how Holloway's Players and paperbacks succeeded as both carriers and transmitters of “the black experience.” The final chapter, “The Difference Within,” considers how newer forces, such as black women readers and young men, asserted their presence as participants in the literary underground. Women writers such as Vickie Stringer produced their own “urban fiction,” while young men such as Ice-T turned to rap. Both of these developments, he argues, helped map a path for the reappropriation by black audiences of black pulp fiction.

Nishikawa's Street Players combines a close study of the history of black pulp fiction with a rich exploration of black cultural life in the mid-twentieth century, a nexus that touches on cinema, jazz, hip-hop and the politics of the civil rights and the black power movements. Scholars will find Nishikawa's focus on Holloway House particularly illuminating for thinking about the complex role of the “medium” in discussions on cultural appropriation. Further, his theorization on the black literary underground is useful for understanding the role of audiences in shaping the nature and form of art.