Abstract: Although Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying (1993) is centrally concerned with the work of teaching and learning, its implications for educators in particular remain largely underexplored. This essay discusses how A Lesson Before Dying might serve as a resource for the theory and practice of pedagogy. Specifically, I am interested in how the main character's changing understanding of his own manhood impacts his work as an educator. I show how his students' interventions help Grant to slough off the "saviroist" model of pedagogy he has previous embraced and adopt a more effective pedagogical praxis. Ultimately, I argue that as Grant begins to challenge his prior understanding of what it means to be a Black man, his pedagogy changes in ways that have positive repercussions for his students' academic and personal outcomes.

Abstract: Critical accounts of the Black Arts era have often treated mass media as marginal or antagonistic to its aesthetic politics, obscuring the extent to which writers engaged film, radio, and recording technologies as sites of theoretical inquiry. This essay argues that Amiri Baraka's largely overlooked work for the Black Communications Project reveals how mid-twentieth-century mass communications infrastructures shaped emergent conceptions of Black collectivity. Drawing on recently recovered archival materials—including the film Black Spring , episodes of Baraka's radio program Black New Ark , and audio recordings associated with Black Spirits and It's Nation Time —the essay shows how Baraka transposed an African diasporic mode of call and response onto the abstracted situation of mass address. These experiments did not merely disseminate Black content; they staged Black sociality as an antiphonal and processual formation forged within the simultaneous temporality of broadcast media. By situating this aesthetic practice within the regulatory and infrastructural limits placed on Black access to the airwaves, the discussion reframes the Black Arts Movement as a sustained interrogation of how racial collectivities are mediated, scaled, and contested in mass media environments.

Review of John C. Gruesser's groundbreaking biography of novelist and publisher Sutton E. Griggs.

Abstract: Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) has long been regarded central to understanding a turn toward neo-slavery narratives within Black women's fiction of the 1970s. My reading extends the many excellent readings of the novel by elaborating, and enacting, a close attention to the movement and transformation of the text—both of its first-person protagonist and its form. My argument focuses on a generative instance late in the novel, a metafictional moment in which the first-person narrator and protagonist, Ursa Corregidora, interrupts her narrative, reconfiguring what has preceded it, narratologically and ontologically shifting the novel's force. No longer a novel about a blues singer, Corregidora 's transformation into a "blues novel," I argue, has generic and diasporic implications for reading the vast temporalities the novel assembles, maps, and probes. The aesthetic and epistemological effects of this "novelizing" of the blues renders more concrete the novel's exemplarity as a profound and generative instance of a radically diasporic literary consciousness within Black women's fiction. Key to understanding the singular gift of this novel's diasporic historical consciousness is how it yields only belatedly the context for understanding its narratological origins, the (im)possibilities for what the blues affords. While in one sense the novel gestures toward a "man-done-her-wrong" thematic, it elaborates with astonishing specificity the entangled relations between such intimate harm and the global structures within which its characters must be situated and seen as historical subjects. For what its transformation into a "blues novel" powerfully reveals is the everyday and the world-historical as interpenetrating dramas. In its own voice, and by way of song, the novel at once refuses and beautifully revises the very historical conditionality of African diasporic peoples in the so-called New World/"Plantation America."

Abstract: Harlem Renaissance writers and educators disagreed as to whether Black children should be prepared for or protected from knowledge of racism. Texts written for African American children of the period generally foreground positive models, Black achievement, and group solidarity. However, books and stories selected for "story hours" by the diverse, integrated, staff of the children's room in the Harlem branch library were written almost exclusively by white authors for (and about) white children. As head of the children's room at the 135th Street branch, Nella Larsen (like other librarians) generally selected books fully acceptable to Anne Carroll Moore, the influential white supervisor of children's services at the New York Public Library. Nevertheless, many of Larsen's choices have a racial logic. Drawing on a range of administrative documents (some written by Larsen herself), this essay argues that monthly reports on exhibits, story hours, and other activities provide a basis for informed speculation about Larsen's goals as a children's librarian. Her neglected Children's Room Reports anticipate stylistic and thematic aspects of her fiction while suggesting what drew her to such children's books as The Story of Doctor Dolittle or The Velveteen Rabbit . Extending recent work by Eric Gardner, Brigitte Fielder, and Nazera Sadiq Wright, the author asks "what was intended" when a librarian of color chose a specific "white" text for African American children. The essay claims that Larsen carefully pondered what sort of reading would best prepare a young Black child to cope with racialization. Her conclusion was: nondidactic stories depicting fluid subject positions, texts that offer opportunities for reflection, aesthetic pleasure, and emotional experience.