“Faithful Reflection” and the Work of African American Literary History

Homes On-the-Road, Terrorized Cabins, and Prophetic Nightmare-scapesEmma J. Ray's Unsettling Western Fantasies Shelly Jarenski (bio) Despite almost thirty years of scholarship on women's experience in the mythic West of the United States, scholarship that began in many ways with Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her, the frontier myth continues to conjure gendered notions of pioneerism, nonconformity, and adventure. Even when the gendered aspects of this myth are challenged, the American West that most people imagine is still inherently white. In many ways the story of African American women's experience as agents in one of the most palpable fantasies of American belonging has been obscured or erased.1 This erasure has given us an inaccurate sense of both the United States' and African American history. As Eric Gardner's recent work has powerfully documented, this erasure has also given us a truncated definition of African American literary history, one that is limited to the long-form stories of enslaved and ex-enslaved people in rural southern and urban northeastern geographies. And, as Kolodny argues, it has caused the prevailing fantasy of the United States' frontier to be one of "privatized erotic mastery" rather than one of a "home and familial human community within a cultivated garden" (xiii); and, to extend Kolodny, the dominance of one fantasy over the other has fueled realities of genocide and environmental exploitation. Finally, this erasure has limited our perceptions of who belongs in the nation's narratives, defining who gets to be a "real American" and who does not. However, placing African American women's narratives at the center of our study of American western literature presents a counternarrative to the mythic West by re-centering feminized ideologies of community, care, and cooperation into the pioneer fantasy, [End Page 381] including reimagining these feminized ideologies into environmental relationships. Re-centering African American women's narratives of the West also shifts African American literary history, extending it beyond rural southern and urban northeastern geographies. And, of course, re-centering African American women's narratives in our study of American western literature allows us to reimagine national belonging. This essay aims to unsettle some of our conceptions of belonging, and of the West, by studying the 1926 memoir of Seattle-based, formerly enslaved evangelical reformer and itinerant preacher Emma J. Ray, titled Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed: Autobiography of Mr. and Mrs. L. P. Ray.2 Although Ray's narrative conforms to masculine aspects of the frontier fantasy at times, more often it breaks with those norms by positing decidedly feminized ideals of resistance and coming of age. For example, Ray and her husband, L. P., find their second freedom—that is, salvation—by conforming to the norms of temperance, service, and grace. Also, Ray transitions from a meek, passive, and placating woman at the beginning of the narrative to an outspoken leader by the end, and she does so through her reliance on Black, often female, communities of piety, such as the Colored Women's Christian Temperance Union and Methodist tent revivals, rather than through any kind of isolationist self-reliance or trials with the landscape. Ray's coming of age in the midst of communities is a reversal of the "solitary Black westerner" stereotype defined by Quintard Taylor as "a solitary figure loosened from moorings of family, home, and community" (qtd. in Johnson 11). Ray's reversal and resituation of this stereotype is crucial for the way we imagine race as well as gender, as Michael Johnson argues that this figure functions imaginatively to "transcen[d] race in part by separating himself from the black (eastern) community to become a member of white (western) society" (11). Ray's coming of age is instead embedded in western, Black, religious communities led by women. In addition to these racialized and feminized modes of resistance, Ray deploys three connected, deeply unsettling themes in her autobiography: mobility, domesticity, and the environmental imaginary. These themes were of crucial importance to those people who were held in bondage's post-emancipation realities, and they have [End Page 382] special resonance for women in the context of the mythic West. These themes are unsettling in Ray...

On the basis of “Bars Fight, August 28, 1746,” a single poem written in the eighteenth century and published nearly one hundred years later in 1855, Lucy Terry (Prince) became a compelling presence in African American literary history. This single poem has been anthologised in such significant anthologies as The Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter (2002), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Nellie McKay (2004), and Call & Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, edited by Patricia Liggins Hill (1997). In the documentary Africans in America, “Bars Fight” is referenced as a historical document and its creator is described as “the author of the first poem composed by an African American woman.” On the basis of a single poem, then, Lucy Terry has virtually received canonisation in the annals of African American literary history and in American literary history. Yet students consistently question the inclusion of this poem in my American literature survey course syllabus.

This article explores in four sections the logic and impact of the ways in which all archival collections, but African American collections most poignantly, are incomplete; and how a national search engine for African American history confronts and attempts to address the absence of African American stories, voices, documents, and histories. Following the work of scholars such as Verne Harris, Michelle Caswell, and others, the first section analyzes how and why archives are always necessarily incomplete, as well as the particular reasons behind the bias and erasure of and within African American history and the archives that have come to collect and represent it. The second section discusses how Umbra Search African American History (umbrasearch.org) was conceived as a response to the need for a more complete archival record of African American history and culture. Section three presents Umbra Search as a case study—what it is, how it has grown, the role of partners, and the challenges it faces. The final section considers the roles of academic and community collections, technology, and collaboration in creating access to a deeper and more fulsome representation of American history and culture.

African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910 offers a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary approach to early twentieth century African American literature and culture. It showcases the literary and cultural productions that took shape in the critical years after Reconstruction, but before the Harlem Renaissance, the period known as the nadir of African American history. It undercovers the dynamic work being done by Black authors, painters, photographers, poets, editors, boxers, and entertainers to shape 'New Negro' identities and to chart a new path for a new century. The book is structured into four key areas: Black publishing and print culture; innovations in genre and form; the race, class and gender politics of literary and cultural production; and new geographies of Black literary history. These overarching themes, along with the introduction of established figures and movement, alongside lesser known texts and original research, offer a radical re-conceptualization of this critical, but understudied period in African American literary history.

My purpose in compiling this book was to produce a “student-friendly” course book in African American Studies, the elective course I designed and introduced into the English Department curriculum at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš. The book is meant to provide a brief introduction into the history and culture of African Americans in the U.S., but could also be of interest to the general public, and, hopefully, may add to the practice of teaching African American literature and history already established at Serbian universities. The main purpose of the book is to get the readers/students acquainted with the key events in African American history, the most important political and cultural figures and the most prominent themes in African American culture. One of the goals would also be to spark further interest in this topic area and open possibilities for similar postgraduate academic courses. As most available books in African American studies deal either with history or literature, I have made an attempt to consider the subject from the perspective of cultural studies, integrating historical data with sociological, political and cultural commentary. I have deemed that such an integrative approach would provide the best insight into the study area and give the fullest picture of the African American contribution to the U.S. and world history and culture. The book is divided into eight chapters covering the period from the origins of the Atlantic slave trade to the contemporary period. The concept of individual chapters is as follows: an outline of the most important events, developments and historical figures of a particular period is followed by two or three brief excerpts from some of the most important works by major African American writers which illustrate the most important theme(s) covered in the chapter, accompanied by a brief commentary with topics and questions for further study.

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gary Nash; American Indian Studies Center Fortieth Anniversary. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1 January 2011; 35 (1): 33–37. doi: https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.35.1.gq644g6x64254319 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest Search

Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music. By Burton W. Peretti. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Pp. 223, glossary of musical terms, chronology of selected dates, acknowledgments, introduction, documents, selected bibliography and discography, index, about the author.)Burton W. Peretti's Lift Every Voice contributes to a much-needed discussion of African American musical history by providing an important, albeit brief, visitation of the social issues entwined in the professional experience of some of the United States' most important and influential artists. Any work that focuses on this subject matter, particularly covering such a broad swath of history in one volume, will bring comparisons to Eileen Southern's The Music of Black Americans (Norton, [1971] 1997). While Southern focused on chronicling major events and actors in African American music history, Peretti covers less material and embarks much more freely in historical contextualization. His depth of knowledge as a scholar in jazz and blues is clear, and all of the important events and performers are thoroughly covered. Information on these genres is easy to come by, and there are no major new revelations brought to light in LiftEvery Voice. It is the subject matter outside of those two areas that is most significant.Peretti gives readers a fairly unique examination of the lives of numerous historical figures. Two notable subjects include Billy Kersands and William Marion Cook. Kersands was a black minstrel-era entertainer who gained national prominence through the exploitation of stereotypes that were caustic even by early twentieth-century standards. Cook's story is poignantly expressed in the recollections of his mother, as she lamented how Cook devoted years of his life to serious musical training in the United States and Europe only to achieve economic success by writing coon songs. Cook and Kersands are examples of African American musicians who endured the racial indignities that were part and parcel to their commercial success. Both are important stars in an era that needs to be explored more fully to understand early American music. While there are biographical sketches dealing with some of the major figures of the era, unfortunately the nature of their musical contributions are a reminder of a painful and unresolved chapter in American history that is something of an intellectual minefield. Peretti acknowledges not only the strides that these performers made to advance professional possibilities for other African American performers, but he also recognizes the personal and societal conflict inherent in their means to success. …

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPaul Harvey, Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Pp. 264. $53.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper).Rachael L. PasierowskaRachael L. PasierowskaRice University Search for more articles by this author Rice UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 2Spring 2019LGBT Themes in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702429 Views: 59Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No Access“PREMATURELY KNOWING OF EVIL THINGS”: THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN GIRLS AND YOUNG WOMEN IN SLAVERY AND FREEDOMWilma KingWilma KingWilma King is Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of American and African American History at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Search for more articles by this author Wilma King is Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of American and African American History at the University of Missouri, Columbia.PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 99, Number 3Summer 2014 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.99.3.0173 Views: 1297Total views on this site Copyright 2014 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

This essay explores assumptions underwriting literary categorization, focusing on Jewish American literary history in particular (mostly), and considers the scalar logic that allows us to link the singular text, with all of its luminous possibility, with the particular world of a given literary category. The essay’s first section critiques major claims about Jewish American literary history made over the last 20 years by observing the persistently underexamined use of a metaphorical and metaphysical concept of identity, and then lays out problems with scaling up between select texts and the larger category of a given field of literature. Problems of scale in Jewish American literary history are highlighted by comparison with recent critiques of African American literary history. Scale itself harbors problems of commensurability insofar as scaling between a single object and a set to which the object belongs requires acts of comparison which leap over differences of kind, a problem explored in the essay’s second section through analogies with problems of commensurability in the discipline of physics. The third section locates those problems of commensurability in Nicole Krauss’s novel Forest Dark (2017) and reads that novel’s direct confrontation with literary history as exemplifying how literary scholars can foreground multiplicity and possibility, precisely through the foregrounding of their own situated practice as interested agents. Rather than reproduce that figment by projecting a historically continuous and recognizable Jewishness across two centuries of literature, Jewish American literary studies should ally and coordinate itself with the field-questioning work occurring among Black and Latinx studies scholars who substantiate the salience of their field’s identity-based study, even as they depart from its historical formation.

Previous articleNext article No Access“To Stamp Out the Oppression of All Black People”: Ron Grayson and the Association of Black Gays, 1975–1979Kevin C. QuinKevin C. Quin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 2Spring 2019LGBT Themes in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702439 Views: 303Total views on this site © 2019 by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No AccessQueering the Black Church: Notes from the Black Press, 1945–1960Gregory ConerlyGregory Conerly Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 2Spring 2019LGBT Themes in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702438 Views: 356Total views on this site © 2019 by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article FreeFront MatterPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 107, Number 2Spring 2022Reconsidering the Uses of Violence in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/720955 Views: 34Total views on this site © 2022 Association for the Study of African American Life and History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBlack Bodies on Lockdown: AIDS Moral Panic and the Criminalization of HIV in Times of White InjuryRené EsparzaRené Esparza Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 2Spring 2019LGBT Themes in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702415 Views: 1160Total views on this site © 2019 by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

This chapter shows how recent scholarly writing is bringing gender from the margin to the center of scholarship on race and religion and proposes new areas for research in American Indian, Latina/o, Asian American, and African American histories. These recent and future publications use intersectional and interdisciplinary methods to transform categories of scholarly analysis, namely those of religion, racial violence, and politics. This chapter broadly examines the state of this field of gender, race, and religion in American history and then turns to a case study of one of the field’s best developed areas, African American religious history, to show how attention to gender is changing the terms of scholarly conversation.