Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Abstract

Tara Green’s in-depth literary biography, Love and Activism: The Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, examines the life and works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, first-generation freeborn, post-emancipation Black woman activist and creative artist. Green’s work follows in the line of literary biographies such as Miriam Decosta-Willis’ Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995); Vivian May’s Anna Julia Cooper: Visionary Black Feminist (2007); Hanna Wallinger’s Pauline Hopkins: A Literary Biography (2012); and Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows (2003). As with these works, Green demonstrates the wellspring of unexamined histories that await us through archival work focusing in Black studies. Tracing the personal and career trajectory of Dunbar-Nelson, Green shows that African American art and advocacy are products of a long arc across the history of Blacks in the United States. It is the post-emancipation New Orleans and its legacy of enslavement that informed the social world into which Dunbar-Nelson was born. Green captures the significance of Dunbar-Nelson’s biracial heritage—its importance as biological and cultural DNA that shaped the personal, psychic, and social visions of Black identity across enslaved populations and their posterity. Green reveals Dunbar-Nelson’s key place in African American literary tradition and women’s advocacy, a legacy that spans fiction, nonfiction, periodicals, and playwriting. The biography underscores Dunbar-Nelson’s impact in what might be called the emergence into a twentieth-century Black women’s modernist ethos. This case is made through the biography’s demonstration of Dunbar Nelson’s work and life that clearly anticipated the boldness of Black women artists of the Harlem Renaissance and their groundbreaking work.The biography is a chronological structure organized by key eras and movements in America and in Dunbar-Nelson’s life. A key thread running throughout the biography is the matter of respectability politics in the lives of post-emancipation African Americans. Green masterfully balances the use of archives, historical and critical scholarship, and Dunbar-Nelson’s own writings to convincingly establish the importance of this biography. The book is organized into twelve chapters that begin in chapter 1 with historical and biographical overview of the New Orleans and southern milieu into which Dunbar-Nelson was born. Tracing Dunbar-Nelson’s life and career from her New Orleans birthplace, the biography concludes with coverage of the final months of her life and her death at age sixty in Philadelphia. Here Green circles back to the work’s central focus—respectability—and how Dunbar-Nelson’s life may have been articulated by her contemporaries through the prism of respectability, the archives underscore what was arguably a radical life.Between the first and final chapter are ten chapters that trace and detail the life and works of Dunbar-Nelson. Chapter 2 establishes her importance as an early and key voice in the turn of the century New Negro Women’s movement which rejected conventional nineteenth-century notions that “women must be pious, submissive, pure, and domestic” (30). Chapters 3 and 4 cover the years of Alice’s marriage to Paul L. Dunbar. Green provides an insightful look at how the tensions between the Dunbars and their desire for middle-class respectability were informed by the shadows of slavery that had dictated their family lives as young children. Chapter 5 looks at Alice’s life and literary production in the early period after Paul’s death. Green’s look at her work among the circle of Black women peers, Hurston, Fausett, and Larsen offers an important lens into the era of Black women’s writing that Dunbar-Nelson operates.Chapters 6 and 11 are separated by four chapters but work as bookends to the focus on Dunbar-Nelson’s navigation of same-sex and heterosexual relationships, revealing her independence of thought and manners when it came to her sexuality. Chapter 7 introduces the phase of Dunbar-Nelson’s third marriage—a period of almost twenty years in which she was an active speaker and campaigner for women’s suffrage and racial uplift. These chapters underscore Dunbar-Nelson’s deep-seated role in Black activism and her determination and work in circles where Black women were not always respected as equals.Tara Green’s biography stands not only as a major contribution in African American literary studies but is also important for its connections of literature and culture. Most poignant is the book’s critical look at the life and works of Dunbar-Nelson that captures the ongoing precarious impact of racism and sexism on Black health and mortality, safety, and financial stability undergirding Black life across socioeconomic levels. Educated, professional, middle- and upper-class Blacks of Dunbar-Nelson’s era were no less immune to racism and sexism than in the twenty-first century.