On Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism: The Black “Boogeymen” of Childish Gambino and Ghali

Reviewed by: The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South Lisa Hinrichsen (bio) Harris, Trudier. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009. Resonating with W. E. B. Du Bois’s prediction in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that the problem of the twentieth century would be the color line, Trudier Harris’s The Scary Mason- Dixon Line assesses the landscape of African American consciousness one hundred years later, arguing that the afterlife of slavery and subjugation on southern soil continues to disturb and inspire African American literary production. For Harris, the lingering anxiety and fear surrounding the South as a historic site of white privilege and black degradation initiates what she terms a “confrontation” in the work of all African American writers, whereby they must negotiate a fundamental ambivalence about membership in a society that calls their belonging into question. In setting up the South as ground zero for African American literary consciousness, Harris contends that all African American writers, even those not born below the Mason-Dixon line, feel “compelled to confront the American South” (1). As her emphasis on the word “compelled” makes clear, Harris argues that the charged relationship between writer and region is part of a rite of passage into African American belonging: “African American writers cannot escape the call of the South upon them . . . Not one of them considers himself or herself truly an African American writer without having confronted the South in some way” (2). Thus, all African American authors are, as the provocative title of her first chapter indicates, “Southern Black Writers No Matter Where They Are Born.” Through negotiating a polarity of repulsion and attraction inherent to a history both traumatic and triumphant, African American writers seek the space to enable “creativity operating under the influence of history” (1). Over the course of ten brief chapters, Harris explores the fraught intersection between the South and African American literary imagination, reading native-born black Southerners such as Ernest J. Gaines, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, Phyllis Alesia Perry, [End Page 1384] Tayari Jones, Edward P. Jones, and Raymond Andrews, alongside non-Southern writers James Baldwin, Octavia E. Butler, and Sherley Anne Williams. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line focuses on contemporary African American fiction (1964–2003), but the scope of the work that Harris examines deliberately stretches across genres, genders, themes, and storylines to support her sweeping claims. The range of her text thus functions to interject into and expand conversations about the relationship between geography and identity formation, African American identity and creativity, intersections between African American and European American writers, and Southern literature and culture. Her introductory chapter explores the way the South comes to represent a “cultured hell” (3) for African American writers, a phrase she borrows from Claude McKay’s poem “America.” “The South” is, for Harris, a slippery nexus of meanings, and her argument shifts, at times problematically, between the South as an idea, a geographical place, and a historical experience. While her text consistently foregrounds how regionalism remains a relevant marker of social, cultural, and individual identity, Harris needs to be more explicit in detailing how both the South and the color line have been reconfigured in the late twentieth century through cultural and political changes such as the struggle for civil rights and the Black Power movement, which fundamentally altered the terms of this historical confrontation and raised key questions about cultural and individual self-determination. Subsequent chapters explore the psychosexual dimensions of this confrontation in James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie (1964); the struggle to claim black masculinity in Ernest J. Gaines’s “Three Men” (1968); the rewriting of African American agency under slavery in three neo-slave narratives: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003); the spatial and temporal portability of racial fear in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Vietnam poetry (1988); heteronormativity and queer masculinity in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989); the relationship between folk communities and fear in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998); Tayari Jones’s efforts to domesticate fear in her...

Excerpt of the content: Jewish activist communities have historically been allies to communities of color in the fight for racial justice and equality in our country. Jews were among those who worked to establish the NAACP in 1909. In the early 1900s, Jewish newspapers drew parallels between the Black movement out of the South and the Jews' escape from Egypt, pointing out that both Blacks and Jews lived in ghettos, and calling anti-Black riots in the South "pogroms." Historically, Jewish leaders stressed the similarities rather than the differences between the Jewish and Black experience in America, and emphasized the idea that both groups would benefit the more America moved toward a society of merit, free of religious, ethnic, and racial restrictions. In more recent history, Blacks and Jews fought side by side in the Civil Rights Movement. The kinship and relationship between the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has been regularly and continually celebrated. What has been less often discussed is the relevance of the social circumstances that created and, in some cases, still sustains a rift between Black activists and white Jewish anti-racism activists. In the late 1960s, the birth of the Black Power movement shifted the emphasis in Black activist communities toward self-determination, self-defense tactics, and racial pride. While this shift was crucial to the evolution of Black consciousness and identity in America, the expansion from the singular nonviolence and racial integration approach espoused by King left many white Jewish activists with little input in the Black community and an anti-racism movement that seemed to be moving on without them. Click for larger view "Blacks and Jews fought side by side in the Civil Rights Movement," the author writes. Here, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth march alongside Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965. Since the 1960s, efforts at coalition building and solidarity work for justice between white Jewish and Black communities have suffered and never reached the pinnacle that was reached during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. The rapid decline of American anti-Semitism since 1945 (alongside the nation's continuing and pervasive anti-Black racism) and the increasing gap in accumulated wealth and education between Black and Jewish communities have widened the rift of perceived shared interests between Black and Jewish activists. Many of the civil rights struggles that joined Blacks and Jews in the middle of the last century--i.e., anti-lynching, desegregation, voter registration, etc.--were typically organized around divisions in society that easily identified injustices between persecutors and their victims (a division in which Jews could also identify as victims). Between the late 1960s and the present, much of the anti-racism work that has galvanized Black activists has shifted and come to be concerned more specifically with disparities in access, privilege, and power between those with and without white skin privilege in our country. Click for larger view Members of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue pray alongside Rev. Dr. J. Alfred Smith Jr. of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, California, after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's killer. Disappointingly few synagogues nationwide engaged in similar expressions of Jewish-Black solidarity. A Weakened Coalition In 2013, the lack of deep and abiding connections between Black and Jewish communities of activists became apparent to me in the disparate responses I encountered to the events surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman. Here's a quick summary for any readers who need a reminder of what happened: in July 2013, after more than sixteen hours of deliberation, a jury of five white women and one Latina woman found George Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter. Previously, on a drizzly February night, Zimmerman had shot Martin, an unarmed seventeen-year-old, in a gated community in Sanford, near Orlando. Citing Florida's stand-your-ground law, Sanford police originally did not charge Zimmerman or take him into custody. Only after social media outrage and civil rights protests alleged racial profiling and discrimination did Governor Rick Scott appoint a special prosecutor, who brought the charges against Zimmerman six weeks after... Language: en

This article provides a Black theological reading of the cultural production of African American producer, writer, actor and entrepreneur, Tyler Perry, in conversation with the African American writer, director, producer and polemicist, Spike Lee. In this article I seek to explore issues of masculinity, as addressed through the prisms of cinematic and religious imagery, juxtaposing Perry and Lee and their differing conceptualizations of Black masculinity. In looking at the work of Tyler Perry I hope to explore how Black male identity is played out in terms of religio-cultural tropes within the mainstream culture of America. What I offer in the pages that follow is a reading of Tyler Perry that locates him within a tradition of masculinity in America. What I forward is a historicist interpretation of Black masculinity, which sees Tyler Perry as a gendered throwback from the not too distant past. In light of this reading, I argue that Perry embodies a cultural legacy of African Americans, which has not been fully engaged, a legacy that is worthy of critical examination.

This paper examines the approach toward narratives of Black Power by African American and black British writers in the post-Civil Rights era. The relationship to Black Power politics is explored here in the particular context of how African American and black British writers are perceived to relate to a “memory of Africa”; how “Africanness” fits into these diverse configurations of contemporary black identity. African American writers often find that Black Power, with its heavy reliance upon iconography, has failed to acknowledge the fluid relationship which exists in African American communities and artforms with a traditional African American past, and with a “memory of Africa” within that tradition. The performance of Black Power is a practice which is shown to distance the present from the past, whereas traditional African American artforms are understood to figure performance as a site where the past may “possess” the present. Black British authors are not concerned with situating the memory of Africa as part of a continuous tradition in the way that African American writers are. Both American tropes of blackness, and the memory of Africa itself, are dramatized in black British fiction as inherited tropes which must be adapted in order to bear any relevance to contemporary experience. The very different kinds of emphasis that writers from these two cultural scenarios place upon notions of performance and tradition, in relation to blackness, lead us to discover that narratives in the vein of the “Black Atlantic” must be approached with some caution if they are understood to provide a global locus of identification while also respecting specific conditions of local cultures.

The year of John Brown's unsuccessful uprising at Harpers Ferry, writer, lecturer, and political activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper launched African Americans' participation in the art of short story writing. Harper's short story “The Two Offers” (1859) appeared in the Anglo-African, a magazine published in New York from 1859 to 1865 by Thomas and Robert Hamilton with a view to educate, encourage, and provide a voice for black people in America. Emblematic of the work of racial uplift, the tale traces the lives of two young cousins, Laura Lagrange and Janette Alston, and the consequences of the one young woman's decision to pursue romantic love and marriage and the other's attempt to discover the full scope of her abilities and inner self. For Harper and African American writers who followed her, the short story provided a vehicle through which they could explore the complex realities of African Americans' lived experiences in a form shorter than that of the novel. As an African American woman writer, Harper opened a way for other black women to explore the tension between women's self-fulfillment and adherence to social convention implicit in Anglo-America's cult of true womanhood. There are those nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American women short story writers, like Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, who are perhaps better known for their accomplishments as novelists, poets, and essayists. Because of its accessibility, the short story invites innovation, an opportunity to experiment with style and form, voice and language. An exploration of the short story reveals black women's significant contributions to the aesthetic and political contours of the form over time.

Preface by Rafael Perez-Torres Introduction Aparajita Nanda Part I: Identity Politics 1. Beyond Identity: Bearings Wlad Godzich 2. 'One Like Me': The Refugee as Relational Figure Keith P. Feldman 3. Transnational Identity and the Muslim Diaspora in Camilla Gibb's Sweetness in the Belly Esra Mirze Santesso 4. Power, Politics, and the Post-National world of Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood Aparajita Nanda 5. 'Exotic Fagdom': The Baraka of Surplus Love in a Transnational Context Suelghee Lee Part II: Legacy/Trauma/Healing 6. Rethinking Reconciliation: Reflections on Genocide in Africa Pal Ahluwalia 7. Chinese Communism, Cultural Revolution, and American Multiculturalism Steven Lee 8. Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica: A Transatlantic Genre for the Restoration of History Cameron Bushnell 9. Animal Ghosts, Colonial Haunting: History's Presence(s) beyond Benjamin and Derrida Cassel Busse 10. Paul Beatty's Slumberland and the Myth of Blackness George Hoagland Part III: Literary Crossings 11. A Borderless World: Literature, Nation, Transnation Bill Ashcroft 12. National Identity Reconsidered: The Intersection of Ethnicity and Sexuality in The Book of Salt Debora Stefani 13. Writing at the Crossroads: The Black Atlantic, Transnation and Virginia Woolf in Biyi Bandele's The Street Pamela McCallum 14. Revisioning Al-Andalus in Nacer Khemir's film, The Dove's Lost Necklace Cynthia Mahamdi 15. The Language of Nation beyond Borders: The Bilingual Trilogy of Francisco Jimenez Juan Velasco Part IV: Established and Emerging Canons: Revisions and Re-Visions 16. Countering Visual Regimes: History, Place and Subjectivity in the Art of Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds Hertha D. Sweet Wong 17. Transnational Feminisms and Double Understanding: What Academic Women's Memoirs Reveal Wendy Robbins, with Clarissa Hurley and Robin Sutherland 18. Radical Connections/Radical Breaks: African American Writers and the Haiku Form Meta L. Schettler 19. Chinese Obsession, Racial Melancholia, and Male Hysteria: Recuperating Taiwanese American Writer Liu Da-ren in (Chinese) American Studies Su-ching Huang Afterword by John C. Hawley

Chester B. Himes: A Biography

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

Identity Recruitment and the "American Writer":Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse, and Biographical Criticism Josh Lambert (bio) Placing an author into the category of "the American writer" is the kind of simple biographical criticism regularly practiced without much self-consciousness, not only by book prize committees and journalists, but equally by literary scholars as they construct syllabi, edit journals, and subtitle books. Other categorizations, especially when they associate a writer with a minority or historically disempowered group—for example, "African American writer," "Chicano writer," "Jewish writer"—can cause controversy and consternation when imposed by critics. It is telling about the relative appeal of such labels that authors regularly respond to what they perceive as constraining categorizations imposed by critics with the assertion of their place within what they understand to be the broader category of the American writer. Famously, for example, in his 1959 essay "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American," James Baldwin remarked that he "wanted to prevent [himself] from becoming . . . merely a Negro writer," preferring the taxonomic company of "American writers." When Victor Martinez won a National Book Award in 1996 for his debut novel, he noted that he "wanted to be an [End Page 23] American writer, not just a Chicano writer" (qtd. in Sneider). Philip Roth has consistently rejected his categorization as a "Jewish writer." For example, in 2005, when a journalist asked him whether or not he accepted being labeled "an American-Jewish writer," he replied no, that he considers himself "an American. . . . America is first and foremost" (Roth, "It"). Why do these and other authors reject the categories of "Negro writer," "Chicano writer," and "Jewish writer" in the first place?1 One answer can be found in Amy Hungerford's study of the relation between persons and texts in postwar American literature, The Holocaust of Texts. Hungerford contextualizes such minority categorizations, specifically the one rejected by Roth, within what she diagnoses as a pernicious tendency in "[p]ostwar criticism and literary theory . . . to imagine the literary text as if it bore significant characteristics of persons" (4) and, more specifically, to accept the notion of a "text that can bear cultural identity" (5). Hungerford objects to the idea of an identity-bearing text in part because she understands it as having the potential to make "the individual subordinate to . . . coercive group identities" (123). She reads Saul Bellow as struggling against the threat posed by the "forces of identity recruitment" (147)—those parochial literary critics eager to impose reified, "coercive" ethnic identities onto authors—by "publicly resist[ing] attempts to categorize him as a Jewish-American writer" (146). Similarly, Roth's most frequently quoted quip on the subject—"I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew" ("Jewish Intellectual" 35)—resonates with Hungerford's emphatic distinction between persons and texts, particularly her "vision of the writer distinct from the writing he or she produces" (150). Roth's statement, spoken at a symposium in Israel in 1963, presents his acknowledged ethnicity and his authorial vocation as distinct, independent nouns, not as an inexorably linked adjective and noun. [End Page 24] Critiquing oversimplified notions about the relations between authors and their texts, as Hungerford does, is certainly valuable. Common practice though it may be, to regard a text as ethnically or racially Jewish is self-evidently absurd, and the same can be said for parallel constructions that impute race, sexual orientation, gender, or other qualities of persons to pages full of words.2 Moreover, as Hungerford notes, "two of the most powerful twentieth-century critical movements, New Criticism and deconstruction," have devoted considerable effort "to limit[ing] and critiqu[ing] the relationship between persons and texts" implied in such formulations (4). The most famous proclamations of such limits were W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy" and Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author," though those essays were hardly unique in endeavoring to render "the question of meaning . . . rigorously divorced from questions of biography and intention," as Stanley Fish has phrased it (10). It would be a mistake, however, to think that by agreeing not to discuss Baldwin, Martinez, Roth, Bellow, or any other novelist...

Outside the confines of academia, John Edgar Wideman has achieved a celebrity few avant-garde or African American writers could claim. Although most of his novels are radically innovative and more or less inaccessible to readers lacking at least a college education, Wideman's persona exerts a strong appeal for journalists and literary scholars alike. Several popular magazines have run features focusing on the contrast between his extraordinary success and the troubles of his boyhood community or have published reviews of his novels. Klaus Schmidt lists seven published scholarly interviews in a 1995 bibliography, and Bonnie TuSmith's Conversations with John Edgar Wideman (1998) compiles nineteen interviews. Schmidt, however, bemoans the meager response to the writer's actual published work and presents his own article on Reuben as attempt to insert a missing page in literary history (81-82). In light of the accolades Wideman's fiction has garnered, reflected in laudatory reviews and significant awards, the virtual silence his work has registered from scholars of American literature stands in stark contrast to the scrutiny with which the work of African American women writers is habitually treated. Apparently Wideman, who has written provocatively about the psychic conflicts associated with being a Rhodes scholar and college professor whose son and brother are in prison, presents an irresistible subject for those interested in popularizing the work of African American while his novels and short stories are seen as too self-consciously experimental, apolitical, or disturbing. Only two book-length studies of his career, which is in its thirty-fourth year, exist in print, leaving James W. Coleman's 1989 monograph as the definitive study. (1) Coleman's analysis illuminates much about Wideman's concerns and technique and also makes a convincing argument about the evolution of the novelist's vision. But some of Wideman's most important work has appeared since Coleman's publication of Blackness and Modernism, including a collection of short stories, Fever (1989); the novel for which he won his second PEN/Faulkner Award in 1991, Philadelphia Fire; a meditation on race, Fatheralong (1995); and a semi-historical novel, The Cattle Killing (1996). Because of the relevance of its concerns, the urgency and distinctiveness of its voice, and its uniquely expressive narrative technique, Philadelphia Fire (1990) in particular deserves serious consideration. Philadelphia Fire represents the apex of the late modernist project Wideman initiated with the highly experimental Hurry Home (1969). (2) Keith E. Byerman, while drawing a definite distinction between Wideman's fiction and that of white postmodernist writers, notes that Wideman just as clearly sets himself apart from the orthodox critical realist tradition so often prescribed for writers with a social conscience (34, ix). Through a fragmented narrative and a modernist collage of voices, the novel treats the city of Philadelphia as a self-enclosed world of the artist's creating, a consciously textual world that contains, unifies, and imitates universalized themes within its structure. A troubling look at juvenile violence in the urban environment calls into question the seemingly insurmountable status quo that brutalizes socially marginal classes of people, as well as the significance of fictional narrative as a counter to the totalizing discourse of history. Structurally and thematically, Philadelphia Fire argues for a new form of narrative that transcends the typical modernist writer's alienated, authoritative vision. Wideman distinguishes between a kind of realism that cynically asserts the inevitability of social decay--the of the aloof politician who recognizes only changes for the worse in the living conditions of the poor--and a participatory, potentially liberating realism, defined as a linguistic construct. …

The Neo-slave Narrative and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada W. Lawrence Hogue (bio) Between the 1830s and the 1860s, African Americans published many slave narratives, including those of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Henry Bibb (1849). But perhaps the most influential slave narrative during this period was that of a white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852. Even as Black writers rediscovered their African and African American cultural and historical past during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, there were only two narratives or novels about slavery, Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (1936) and Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon (1931).1 Nor were any narratives/novels about slavery written by African Americans in the 1940s or the 1950s. But the absence of texts about slavery by African Americans does not mean the absence of the image of slavery and the enslaved African American before the American public. Within the institutions of the ideological state apparatus, such as the media and education, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin's influential and widespread construction of slavery was taught in high schools and colleges and was reproduced on television and in Holly-wood. There were many film adaptations of Stowe's novel, including nine from the silent era—especially Edwin S. Porter's 1903 twelve-minute film adaptation, in which Uncle Tom is "a childlike, unthinking, and happy slave" (hooks 2013, 99). Later there were Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), Song of the South (1946), and The Foxes of Harrow (1947)—all dealing with the Civil War, slavery, and Reconstruction. The mainstream literary establishment, educational institutions, and Hollywood successfully established Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and related films as the generalized truth about slavery. In the 1960s, things begin to change for African American writers and the representation of slavery. In 1962, William Melvin Kelley in A Different Drummer revisited and reconfigured the enslaved African, giving him subjectivity and agency. In 1966, Margaret Walker published Jubilee, which is about her great-grandmother, who was a slave. In 1971, Ernest Gaines published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which is about a one-hundred-year-old Black woman who was born in slavery and had [End Page 253] lived to see the beginnings of the civil rights movement. With these texts, along with John O'Killen's Slaves (1969), Gayle Jones's Corregidora (1975), Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Alex Haley's Roots (1976), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991), J. California Cooper's In Search of Sale Factory (1994), Lorene Carey's The Price of the Child (1995), Lalita Tademy's Cane River (2000), Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2004), Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (2007), Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016), and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer (2019), slavery returned to the center of African American literature. Why were African American writers again writing slave narratives or novels about slavery? Was it the stories about slavery that their grandparents had passed down, as in the case of Walker's Jubilee? Was the new emphasis on slavery a result of the 1960s, which created a generation of African Americans who had "assessed and absorbed their history, and, in that tremendous action, ha[d] freed themselves of it and w[ould] never be victims again" (Baldwin 1997, 20), or who, in critically examining their history, had psychologically broken away and freed themselves from white hegemonic narratives about slavery (embodied in Stowe) and, therefore, could revisit the issue of slavery from a different space, giving them an understanding of their own power and agency? Seemingly, the 1960s produced a generation of African American historians, scholars and writers who revisited, dusted off, interrogated, and critically studied and reclaimed African and African American history, cultural traditions, and belief systems that had been denigrated, appropriated, omitted, and/or excluded by Western reason. But unlike normative American society, this generation viewed this history and these...

African Americans in Television: Behind the Scenes. Gregory Adamo. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. 200 pp. $119 hbk. $32.95 pbk.Gregory Adamo, an assistant professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore, goes behind the scenes of the television production industry to describe the experiences of African American producers and writers early in the twenty-first century. The account is based on interviews with seventeen industry professionals between 1998 and 2005, and it describes the hurdles they face in a business where success depends as much on who you know as what you know.Adamo, a former general manager of a college radio station in New York, began this project as part of his doctoral work at Rutgers University. He focuses on what he calls the new normal, the time in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century when black shows became a standard part of the network TV repertoire. Adamo argues that the success of shows like Sister, Sister and Everybody Hates Chris was due to five factors: the Fox network's strategy to gain viewership by appealing to an urban market, the creation of the UPN and WB networks in 1995, the expansion of cable channels, the mainstreaming of hip-hop culture, and the African American writers themselves, who, seeing the opportunities, seized them.It is the last point on which this book is primarily focused. Through the interviews, Adamo tells how these writers and producers started in show businesses and fought their way to positions of influence. Although Adamo is white, he says that the interviewees spoke candidly about their experiences within the Hollywood system. Some of the revelations are not surprising: college connections and internships do matter; network executives are reluctant to take risks with unknown talent and unorthodox ideas; and well-placed mentors can steer novices to success. These keys to employment and promotion are true regardless of race.The strength of this book lies in its description of less obvious aspects of the black experience in Hollywood, particularly those issues on which the interview subjects disagree.One of those issues is the role of affirmative action in aiding the careers of black television industry professionals. Rose Catherine Pinkney, senior vice president of Comedy Development at Paramount Communications, tells Adamo that she is proud that she is a product of affirmative action because her experience is proof that such programs can work to provide the industry with talented workers. But Shirley Salomon says that she was offended when she found out that she was hired as a director's assistant on the soap opera One Life to Live primarily because she was a minority. …

The arrival of new media often generates a gap between accepted or “high” texts and those new texts regarded with suspicion or simply labeled “low.” The popular drama in Shakespeare's time was regarded as low and gradually achieved high status. Following a similar trajectory, the novel began as a low form and was gradually elevated to the level of literary art. . .But the rise of so many new media, recently, has threatened to leave us with a deep gap between what is thought of as “high” art or literature on the one hand, and “mass” or “popular” culture on the other. - Robert Scholes, The Crafty Reader Popular culture has always been where black people theorize blackness in America. It has always constituted the sphere where black people produce narratives of pleasure, oppression, resistance, survival, and heroic performances. The kinds of stories told in popular culture may be characterized as black feminist (“Think” and “Respect” by Aretha Franklin and “Ladies First” by Queen Latifah), theses on black unemployment (“Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding), interpretation of black rights (“Pay Back” by James Brown), or black funk pleasure (“Little Red Corvette” by Prince). - Manthia Diawara, “A Symposium on Popular Culture and Political Correctness” Girlfriend fiction, Urban Romance, Black Erotica, Speculative Fiction, or Detective Fiction, all these terms can be used to describe the subgenres of popular fiction written by African American women writers in the twenty-first century. Though the last fifteen years has seen the publication of hundreds of titles, from major publishing houses and vanity presses, the existence of what is now understood as African American popular fiction dates back many decades and points to the existence of distribution networks not found in mainstream culture.

Reviewed by: Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863 Charles Irons (bio) Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863. By Rita Roberts. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. Pp. 261. Cloth, $39.95.) In Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, Rita Roberts sets out to explain why so many black northerners in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries identified themselves proudly as “Americans” despite their country’s wretched record on issues of racial justice. She concludes that African American activists and reformers remained committed to the United States because they believed that the Christian God would soon transform the country into a land of hope and opportunity for all. Evangelical northern blacks, she argues, were convinced that “Americans, black and white, would become a new people, distinct from any population in the world, because of their Christian republican faith” (3). African American northerners, in her account, began to lose hope in this millennial vision by the 1850s and started seriously to consider emigration away from white Americans. With the coming of the [End Page 440] Civil War, however, and particularly with Lincoln’s move toward emancipation, they recommitted themselves to the country of their birth. People of color in the antebellum North generated a rich body of literature, which Roberts plumbs for her analysis. She draws extensively on the public record: on periodicals, pamphlets, convention records, and published narratives. The fact that evangelicals authored such a large proportion of African American publications in the antebellum period—and enshrined their hopes for uplift in them—resoundingly supports Roberts’s basic contention about the linkages between evangelicalism and reform (by which Roberts means “abolition, antiracism, and black community development” [3]). However, her decision to limit her use of ecclesiastical sources to denominational newspapers and published sermons constrains her ability to probe fully the connections between evangelicalism and activism. How did activists conceptualize the relationship between their public advocacy for reform and their work within individual congregations? To what extent did church members empower or restrain their activist leaders? On what issues were there the greatest conflicts between rank-and-file members and activist leaders—or among leaders? Roberts may have found answers to these and other questions in church minutes, records from denominational meetings, theological treatises, and other such sources, all of which would have helped to situate her authors in specific faith communities and give more content to their beliefs and practices. What is more, Roberts might have used ecclesiastical sources to develop more fully her understanding of the concept of millennialism. She holds that black evangelicals believed that God would intervene in history to help them transform the United States, but she does not interrogate this belief systematically. In a nice section on David Walker, Roberts notes that black evangelicals by the late 1820s were moving with the Arminian stream of the Second Great Awakening toward what Timothy Fulop has called a more activist “progressive millennialism” (77–83). She does not address the relative weight of the two other varieties of black millennialism that Fulop identifies, however, or wrestle with tough questions about black evangelicals’ understanding of race and millennialism. Laurie Maffl y-Kipp has recently demonstrated how profitable a more aggressive interrogation of the concept can be in Setting Down the Sacred Past (2010), a theologically astute analysis of African American race histories. In a powerful fifth chapter subtitled “The Problem of Race and Black Evangelical Reform,” Roberts surveys the often contradictory strategies through which leading black activists confronted racism in the late antebellum period. In African Americans’ efforts to combat new theories of black inequality, Roberts argues, “reformers placed themselves at a disadvantage [End Page 441] when they shared with promoters of scientific racism a nearly similar standard of civilization and a restricted application of Christianity” (152). For instance, when intellectuals such as New York physician James McCune Smith, who receives central billing in the chapter, used science to refute white claims of racial dominance, they tended to do so in a way that reified the idea of essential racial differences. African American activists’ response to this rhetorical dilemma illustrates Roberts’s thesis...

For African American writers in the 196os and 1970s, interpreting black experience largely meant doing so in the context of the black nationalist movement. With its emphasis on community, a revolutionary future, and present subjectivity, black nationalism was proposed as the route to liberation -liberation that was to garner support in the works of black artists and the development of a black aesthetic that stressed racial stability and solidarity. Yet, in the midst of these shaping forces, African American women writers such as Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Louise Meriwether complicated notions of black unity and revolution by collectively showing that nation-building could not occur without discussing the relationships between black men and women and addressing the specific realities of