African American Authors Research Articles

Unjust: Publishing Black and African American Children’s Books and School Availability

Traditional book publishing has a pronounced and unjust deficiency of Black and African American voices. White culture, thoughts, and rules are the standard in traditional publishing. Black and African American authors are not typically picked up by white-dominated publishing companies. In traditional publishing, mostly white literary agents are gatekeepers and acquisition editors shut the doors too frequently to non-white authors. Aspiring Black authors then resort to hybrid or vanity press companies that often use unscrupulous practices, charge exorbitant fees, accomplish little or low-quality work, and deny authors’ agency and full rights in the final disposition of a book. Because a majority of traditionally published children’s books featuring Black or African American stories or characters are written by or illustrated by non-Black people, the wide possibilities of adventure, celebrations, discovery, and friendship stories are not published for Black children. Instead, publishers favor stories about slavery, the civil rights movement, famous Black people, and hair tales as well as racially ambiguous characters. Regrettably, Black and African American culturally relevant stories written and illustrated by Black or African Americans are not readily available to children in school and library settings consistent with schools’ community or student demographics. This article shares research findings and viewpoints of Kathy Anderson and Karen Bowlding, two Black children’s book writers and publishing consultants who are also parents. Black and African American students encounter education and cultural injustice because of the practices of traditional publishing companies, educators, and librarians. Parents and guardians can ameliorate these issues with discernment and action. Foremost, publishing company decision-makers must acknowledge their own racial biases that deny representation and authenticity to all children in our US classrooms.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s 1915 Pennsylvania Suffrage Speaking Tour Scrapbook

ABSTRACT In 1915 woman’s suffrage was on the ballot in Pennsylvania. State suffrage organizations mounted a vibrant campaign using a variety of strategies in support of enfranchising the women of the Keystone State. Speakers played a central role in this campaign, including a four-month lecture tour by African American author and educator, Alice Dunbar-Nelson. She kept a scrapbook of her tour that reveals her recognition of its historical significance. Her scrapbook also highlights the role of African American women who worked toward the goal of voting rights for all in Pennsylvania. Finally, it illuminates the strategies used by Pennsylvania suffrage leaders. While the men of the state voted down the suffrage referendum in 1915, the hard work of suffragists, including Dunbar-Nelson and other African Americans, paid off four years later when Pennsylvania became the seventh state to ratify the nineteenth amendment to the US Constitution on June 24, 1919.

Africa's Portrayal in African-American Writing

The depiction of Africa in African-American literature constitutes a nuanced and dynamic exploration, unveiling the intricate rapport between African-American writers and the African continent. Over centuries, Africa's portrayal has assumed myriad forms, serving as a symbolic homeland, a locus of struggle, and a wellspring of cultural inspiration. Imbued within these representations is a profound quest for identity and a yearning for belonging. Prestigious African-American authors, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maya Angelou, adeptly interlace African culture, folklore, and history into the tapestry of their works. In so doing, they delve into themes of heritage, resilience, and cultural pride, presenting Africa not merely as a nostalgic ideal but as a vibrant tapestry of traditions intricately shaping the African-American experience. This representation transcends sentimentality, offering a palpable connection to ancestral roots and cultural heritage. Yet, the portrayal of Africa in African-American literature transcends idyllic visions of a distant homeland. Renowned authors such as Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie confront the harsh realities of colonization, slavery, and oppression in their narratives. In their hands, Africa becomes a complex terrain of struggle and resistance, where characters grapple with the enduring legacies of colonialism and the intricate dynamics of post-colonial identity. The representation of Africa in African-American literature reflects broader historical and political dynamics. During the Harlem Renaissance, there was a surge of interest in Pan-Africanism, as African-American writers actively sought connections with counterparts on the continent in the fight against racism and imperialism. This period witnessed an embrace of African art, literature, and culture, as writers sought to reclaim and celebrate their African heritage.

True Women as Sacred Friends

Drawing from African American author and anti-slavery advocate Harriet Jacobs, this essay demonstrates that even well-intentioned white abolitionists can inadvertently reinforce racist systems. Jacobs sought help from white abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe to share her emancipation story, but received a response that exposed her past to Jacobs’s employer without consent. In her novelized memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs demonstrates the importance of Black voices and leaders in the abolitionist movement, showcasing feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty's concept of a “coalition” of women using their diverse positions to combat social inequities. By examining Jacobs's portrayal of the white women who aided her, I argue that Jacobs employs the rhetoric of true womanhood and sentimental novels to depict models of true allyship marked by consent-based sympathy. This essay delves into the nuances between sympathy and empathy in the context of nineteenth-century literature, referencing Gay Gibson Cima's assertion that these terms cannot be collapsed. By connecting Jacobs's use of sentimentality to Cima's differentiation between Black expressions of sympathy and empathy, this essay reveals how Jacobs strategically fosters empathetic connections between white and enslaved women, promoting a coalition of consent-based allyship in nineteenth-century abolitionist discourse.

“Foul Abolition Calumny”: Reframing Racial Violence in William Wells Brown’s Clotel & the Antebellum Press

Abstract Focusing on Brown’s Clotel (1853), this essay reconstructs the surprising print history of an infamous antebellum lynching that became a national sensation twice over: first, in 1842 when the Mississippi Free Trader published a graphic report legitimating white mob violence that went viral in the Northern press and, later, when Brown reframed that report in his 1853 novel. Brown’s remix was subsequently reported in the New-York Dialy Tribune, the nation’s leading daily, which attributed the report solely to the Mississippi paper. The Free Trader in turn lambasted the Tribune for its “foul abolition calumny,” not realizing that this sly critique of slavery and lynching originated with an African American author. Besides bringing to light a new source and context—an important discovery demonstrating that Clotel had a much greater presence in the antebellum US than previously assumed—I situate Brown within an earlier gallows tradition and a later practice of antilynching activism (à la Ida B. Wells) to argue that Clotel constitutes a critical inflection point: an early African American intervention in public discourses about criminalized Black people and white mob violence that played out before the Civil War—the standard starting point for scholarship on anti-Black lynching.

«По прозвищу Моисей»: литературные интерпретации жизни Харриет Табмен

The article is devoted to the formation of Harriet Tubman's image in the US literature. Two books belonging to the spread of Afrocentrism and the second wave of feminism — A. Petrie's non-fiction novel A Girl Called Moses: The Story of Harriet Tubman and M. Heidish's novel A Woman Called Moses — are chosen as the material for analysis. The article analyzes the main qualitative characteristics identified as early as in S. Bradford's book Harriet, Moses of Her People that form the discourse of race and gender in the mentioned narratives about Tubman, and identifies the main transformations of these characteristics. Thus, the work of African-American author A. Petrie reflects to a greater extent the sentiments of all her fellow women in the 1950s-60s Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States: while remaining within the generally accepted gender framework of feminine virtues, at the same time, the black woman was stepping out of her allotted racial limits. Furthermore, she shows that slavery is a cultural trauma that still defines how the African American community sees itself and its place in the society and how slavery is remembered as a means of self-identification within the African American community. Created by the white writer M. Heidish in the mid-1970s, during the rise of the second wave of the feminist movement, the novel reflects the very sentiments that characterized this movement and shows the view of a sympathetic Other on the issue of race. Thus, the article establishes the fact that Harriet Tubman plays a very important role in the African-American and women's discourse in the United States as an image that is given the necessary functions and qualities for its time based on the socio-cultural context contemporary to the interpreter.

Breaking the Bound of Cocoon -- A Comparative Study on Black Female Identity in Sula and Yearning

In the influential work, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Bell Hooks scrutinizes prevailing Black feminist discourses, emphasizing the hegemony of white feminists, intersecting forms of oppression, and the consequential loss of subjectivity. Nevertheless, hooks innovative analysis encounters limitations when addressing the complexities within a literary context. This study conducts a comparative analysis of Black female identity construction, exploring the applicability of hooks theoretical framework to Sula, a novel by African American author Toni Morrison. This paper seeks to clarify alleged contradictions and evaluate hooks theory in three key aspects: the common predicament of Black female identity, the process of identity formation, and the relationship between identity and social class divisions. The analysis uncovers the necessity of acknowledging the shortcomings of hooks arguments when applied to Black feminist literature, such as its inattention to the profound inner struggle originating from cultural constraints in authentic experiences of Black females. Due to distinct writing contexts and backgrounds, Bell Hooks and Toni Morrison diverge in their perspectives on Black female identity, necessitating a closer examination to steer Black feminism towards a more radical path in the future.

Enriching Humean Sympathy: Reading Hume’s Moral Philosophy in Light of African American Philosophical Thought

Abstract: In this paper, I show how reading Hume’s moral philosophy in light of seminal works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American authors can provide resources for developing a richer and more intentionally relational conception of sympathy. I begin by identifying two phenomena to which African American intellectuals like Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Anna Julia Cooper refer with the term “sympathy.” For ease of reference, I label these phenomena “sympathetic commitment” and “sympathetic understanding,” respectively. I then show that there are concepts in Hume’s moral philosophy that refer to similar phenomena and suggest that Hume scholars can draw on these concepts to develop an enriched and distinctively Humean sense of sympathy.

Afro-Asian Antagonism and the Long Korean War

American racial politics during the long Korean War formed what this essay terms Afro-Asian antagonism, a racial hate between African Americans and Asians (and Asian Americans). When the Truman administration issued Executive Order 9981 and proclaimed its commitment to military racial integration in 1948, two years before the outbreak of the Korean War, it seemed to signal a significant step of racial progress. Black servicemen who enlisted in the “liberalized” military, however, were strategically deployed to represent American national violence, especially to the eyes of Asians who were internalizing antiblack racism imported from the United States through the military apparatus. In the face of decolonization and an upsurge in civil rights movements, this article argues, the executive order molded Black Korean War veterans into an instrument to abort Afro-Asian connections while promoting racial liberalism to a global audience. The Korean War inaugurated the American Cold War racial formation that endures into the twenty-first century. Contrasting two Korean War novels written by Asian American and African American authors—Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl (2002) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012)—this article traces how Afro-Asian orphans and a Black veteran internalize and challenge the Afro-Asian antagonisms of the long Korean War.

ANALYZING RACIAL PROPAGANDA AGAINST SOCIO-CREATIVE PERSPECTIVE IN SELECTED POEMS OF COUNTEE CULLEN AND LANGSTON HUGHES

The social purpose of art expands its value and significance to problematize many social and political situations of day rather than limiting it to idea of aesthetic pleasure alone. African American philosophers, poets, and authors also attempt to project the issues of race and culture country is facing. They made an effort to create a strong literary framework despite various attempts at discrediting the significance of art and artists on global scale. Considering Alain Lock's idea of ‘Real art or Propaganda’ this paper examines true values of African American literature and takes it a step further to recognize the attempts made via literature to project their rights and preserve their culture and history. This influence never strays from true purpose of art and results in meaningful poems that appeal to human emotion and feelings on a universal level. They have historically given more weight to universal purpose of art, which is to arouse pleasure, and have utilized this as a platform to expose the systematic goal that disadvantages and presents negative picture of African American community.

Nancy Prince: Strategic (Re)mappings through Travel and Text

Growing up in extreme poverty in Massachusetts, Nancy Gardner Prince (1799–1859) experienced migrancy and dislocation from an early age. In 1824, she emigrated to Russia for nearly a decade, and later emigrated to Jamaica for a brief period. As an African American author who journeyed widely in the United States and abroad, Prince’s writings reveal the racial discrimination and regulation that she endured while traveling in the US, as well as the impact that such restrictions on her freedom of movement had on her conceptions of racial kinship and national belonging. This essay approaches the regulation of Black mobility as a crucial site of racial dominance, subordination, and exclusion, and theorizes that Prince’s writings strategically remap the racially uneven conditions that she experienced on her journeys to articulate a counternarrative of Black citizenship and belonging in the US. Prince not only flips the script by publicly exposing racist conveyance operators, her autobiography also forms a counterarchive that records her ancestors’ oral histories of dispossession and US patriotism. Through close readings and attention to her revisions, we see that Prince’s engagements with territorial concepts such as “country” and “place” contemplate the tensions inherent in African American identity during the antebellum nineteenth century, as they disclose the complex negotiations that shaped her travels and texts.

Introduction to “Dialogue on Democracy”

On June 2, 1939, Langston Hughes gave a lecture at the Third International Writers’ Conference in New York entitled “Democracy and Me.” To that audience, Hughes said that when in Europe he had spoken “first as an American and a writer, and second as a Negro.” But in America, “I feel it was in the interest of democracy to reverse the order and to speak primarily as a Negro and a writer, and secondarily as an American—because Negroes are secondary Americans.” He added that all the difficulties that Jews face in Hitler’s Germany are the same as those that African Americans in the United States face with one big difference. Democracy allows him, and others like him, to speak out. “Democracy permits us the freedom of a hope, and some action towards the realization of that hope. Because we live in a democracy, tonight I can stand here and talk to you about our common problem, the problem of democracy and me” (203).Hughes talked at some length about the difficulties of being an African American author in the United States, where black writers were paid less for books and lectures than their white colleagues. He also mentioned the pressure to conform to white expectations. “We are considered exotic. When we are not exotic, we do not sell well” (204). Rampersad suggested that the speech “was perhaps an apologia for the compromises forced on him since his return from the Soviet Union” (370). But in his conclusion, Hughes returned to the more general theme of democracy in America. “It is not a matter of mine or yours. It is a matter of ours. We want to create the American dream, a far more democratic America. I cannot do it without you.” His last words were: “We want America to really be America for everybody. Let us make it so!” (206).“Dialogue on Democracy” is a previously unpublished piece from the Langston Hughes Papers at Yale University.1 The Hughes Papers contain drafts and typescripts for this document that bear a date of February 9, 1939, although there is no date on the final version. Our text comes from the final typed text, with some handwritten additions and corrections. These are all clear, so we have silently incorporated the indicated changes to make the text readable. There is no evidence that it was ever submitted elsewhere for publication. Our goal has been to offer “Dialogue on Democracy” to readers of the Langston Hughes Review so that it can be part of further discussion.In Hughes’s style of “just myself talking to me. Or else me talking to myself,” as he said of about the creation of Simple, “Dialogue on Democracy” forms a kind of pairing with “Democracy and Me.” In the latter piece, in a voice with which we are familiar, Hughes offers the positive view of the future that we see in other works as he asks the audience to join with him to make progress. The premise is that Americans of all colors care about democracy and have faith in it. “Dialogue on Democracy,” offers the opposite assertion.2 Many Americans, faced with the fact that democracy means equal rights for all, would want to have no part of it.With all the talk of democracy and its future in recent election cycles, it seemed like a good idea to let Hughes speak to us on the subject with words that we had not yet heard from him. What Langston has to say here has relevance today, and it also shows that the crisis about democracy has been with us for decades. Hughes’s voice evokes Socratic questioning, and while one does not often see Plato and Hughes in the same sentence, it is worth noting that where Plato investigates the meaning of “beauty” and “virtue,” Hughes explores “democracy” and “freedom.” Hughes once stated, “I wish the smart people of the world could realize that they don’t know what they don’t know” (“Simple and Me” 262). That is the whole point of Socratic dialogue.

To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry

Reviewed by: To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry Riti Sharma Elizabeth McHenry. To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship. Duke UP, 2021, ix + 238 pp. It takes courage to write, and even greater courage to see oneself as part of a literary history. Elizabeth McHenry bases To Make Negro Literature on this premise. McHenry also reveals what it took for African American authors to make it in the publishing industry. To Make Negro Literature offers a rich and variegated approach to the method of reading literary history. One of the ways McHenry highlights is through the relationships and correspondences between authors, publishers, and other authors. This is identified toward the end of the book as a network of underground channels, which is visible to the naked eye. The book is a response to the question of how Black literature came into being, and the travails that people went through to create their places in the publishing industry in America and Europe. McHenry not only charts the contributions of writers who resided in America, but also takes into consideration correspondences between African Americans in Europe and how such correspondence can be viewed as part of African American literary history. The introduction itself stresses the complex literary landscape in which African Americans created their works of art in a bid to challenge stereotypes, racism, and fascism. The author explains that the word Negro with an uppercase N, as opposed to that with a lowercase n, was considered a word of dignity. This makes one ponder what strength a community may derive from reinterpreting remarks and words meant to be derogatory. To alter the flow of thought and perception is what most African American authors and public figures did, and McHenry provides a granular image of this history with the help of a few memorable figures. The first chapter explores education through self-learning—how average African Americans educated themselves with the help of books, instead of school. Formal schooling was in many cases a dream deferred, owing to responsibilities and the racially charged climate. The fixed, immobile site of education such as the Atlanta Exposition's Negro Building was replaced by a mobile and flexible form of literacy through books such as William Crogman's Progress of a Race. The chapter gives the publishing history of this book, the context in which it was created and disseminated, and how it performed the task of bringing literacy to a large portion of the American population. Now, McHenry points out that dissemination attested to a fact of racial pride and dignity, which aided in the sale of the books. This [End Page 179] allows one to analyze the logic behind subscription book selling that is situated on the premise of a personal relationship and respect for the buyer from the seller's side. Ultimately, owning a copy of Progress of a Race was a mark of self-respect. McHenry therefore establishes that the connection readers make with books is not only with the literary artefacts themselves but also with the politics of reception of a given work. Progress of a Race offered every reader a chance to engage with the politics of being Black in America and to understand the nuances in which identities can be formed. This chapter showcases Crogman's journey from the Liberal Arts Building in Chicago, the Negro Building in Atlanta, to the site of the book. The material being forged showed the progress from literacy to the literary, which entailed a deeper understanding of textual politics. McHenry argues that the concept of education herein shifted from the idea of being literate to the values one attaches to the process of reading. The second chapter details books that enabled one to move from literacy to literary. McHenry argues that bibliographies are a conceptual tool for understanding African American literary history. The argument grapples with the idea of the "site of learning" (37), which entails not only the details of the text and author but also the location of the text and author. Some examples include Daniel Murray's project, which draws on information from various sources outside America...

Review: Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja & Hess,” by Christopher Sieving

Review: <i>Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja &amp; Hess,”</i> by Christopher Sieving

Современный афроамериканский исторический роман

The paper discusses the works of African American writers of the end of the 1960s — the end of the 2010s that address the historical past of African Americans and explores the traumatic experience of slavery and its consequences. The tragedy of people subjected to slavery as well as their masters who challenged the moral and ethical norms has remained the topical issue of contemporary African American historical novel. Pivotal for the development of the genre of African American historical novel were Jubilee by the outstanding writer and poet Margaret Walker and the non-fiction novel Roots by Alex Haley. African American authors reconsider the past from today’s perspective making use of both the newly discovered documents and the peculiarities of contemporary literary techniques and showing a versatility of genre experiments, paying attention to the ambiguity of American consciousness in relation to the past. Toni Morrison combines the sacred and the profane, reality and magic while Ishmael Reed conjugates thematic topicality and a bright literary experiment connecting history with the problems of contemporary consumer society; Charles Johnson problematizes history in a philosophic tragicomedy. Edward P. Jones reconsiders the history of slavery in a broad context as his novel’s setting is across the whole country on a broad span of time. The younger generation of African American writers represented by C. Baker, A. Randall, C. Whitehead, J. Ward and other authors touches on the issues of African American history in order to understand whether the tragic past has finally been done with. Contemporary African American historical novel relies on documents, new facts, elements of fictional biography, traditions of slave narratives and in its range makes use of peculiarities of family saga, bildungsroman, political novel, popular novel enriching it with various elements of magic realism, parodying existing canons and sharp satire.

Violence as a Safeguard against Hostility: Black Mother-to-Son Parenting in Richard Wright’s Black Boy

Richard Wright (1908- 1960), an African American author, has grown up in the American South at a time when the American society has witnessed deep division, for together with the Whites vs. Blacks conflict there has been The Blacks vs. Blacks tension likewise, and violence has formed the dominant behavior between the conflicting groups. Wright’s autobiographical novel, Black Boy, shows how he has been reared by a mother who believes that violence is the only effective strategy to protect her son from their violent environment. The misery and hardships the mother, Ella Wright, has undergone in her larger society as well as with her family and separated husband, have led her to adopt this strategy. She uses violence to teach her son the priority of family, religion, and beyond everything else she teaches him violence itself as a means of self-protection. Albeit this strategy affects the mother-son relationship negatively on the part of the son at the beginning, the son’s intellectual maturity minimizes its significance, and he gradually starts to generate sympathy and show deep understanding towards his mother. The article discusses Wright’s mother use of violence as a method for bringing up her son, Richard Wright in his autobiography, Black Boy. It also examines the impact of this method upon Richard’s relationship with his mother and how he perceives her maternal role. Finally, the conclusion sums up the main findings of the article.

Being and becoming: A psychobiography of James Baldwin.

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a prolific African American author and activist whose writing centered primarily on race, sexuality, and religion. Baldwin's lived experiences and breadth of knowledge provided him with a unique perspective of the Black experience in America, a theme he frequently revisited in his work and the impetus for his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement METHOD: This article presents a psychobiographical application of Queering Black Racial Identity Development to conceptualize the life story of James Baldwin. This study explores the life of James Baldwin, highlights his influence as a historical figure and agent of social change, and explores the "why" of his life and behavior. Specifically, his decision to return to the United States during the Civil Rights Movement and possible reasons he avoided politicizing his sexuality in the same way he did his racial identity. As an African American, nonheterosexual, male author and Civil Rights activist, Baldwin's intersectional identities played a significant role in his decision to dedicate his life to writing and activism. Limitations of the study are discussed.

Alice Walker’s Treatment of Bildungsroman in The Novel “The Color Purple”

Author, poet, essayist, biographer, and activist, Alice Malsenior Walker is a multi-faceted African-American literary figure. This Pulitzer Prize-winning author has written extensively about racial and gender problems. Her best-known work is The Color Purple (which won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction). Alice Walker's personal experiences as a representative of African American women authors have influenced her distinct psychological perspective. In her work, she often employs the symbolism that is popular in dark literary works. Presently in domestic academia, there are only a small number of research on the novel's creative features and expression approaches that concentrate only on the novel's symbolic meanings of the colour picture. The book has an overall focus on the construction of language, the execution of voice, the evaluation of sexual orientation, and the redefining of identity of the narrative's female characters, particularly heroine Celie. The Bildungsroman thesis states that a character's environment, experiences, issues, and oppression all contribute to his or her psychological strength. A bildungsroman is a novel that aims to mould the reader's mind and soul via their experiences in the world. She draws inspiration from Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

Collective Trauma, Conditioned Identities, and the Struggle to Healing and Reconciliation in Toni Morrison`S Song of Solomon

As an outstanding African-American author who has got fame for her tragic novel, Toni Morrison is well-known for her depiction of black experiences as slaves. She is an expert in portraying characters who are dealing with the after-effect of their ancestral African-American traumas. Morrison`s community is weighed down by the heavy burden of rejection, oppression, racism, and white dominance, so they are burdened with a wounded psyche and body, therefore experiencing painful memories of their past. This paper focuses on Morrison`s one of the major novels, Song of Solomon which highlights traumatic events that the African American community is faced with. This paper aims to study the collective trauma of these black characters who struggle with major repressive pressures within trauma theory; it further intends to analyze how this trauma condition`s the characters` life and focus on their difficulty dealing with the problems. Also, it intends to deal with the issue of recovery and reconciliation among these black communities, whether they could pass the stages of recovery or rather are conditioned by the heavyweight of their trauma.

The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel by Anna Pochmara

Reviewed by: The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel by Anna Pochmara Michaela Corning-Myers (bio) The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel, by Anna Pochmara. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. 256 pp. Cloth, $114.95; Paper, $29.95; Ebook, $28.45. Anna Pochmara’s The Nadir and the Zenith is an excellent study of melodrama and temperance in late nineteenth-century fiction. Over the course of this concise and well-structured text, Pochmara seeks to achieve five goals. The first is a historical-aesthetic reclamation of the Nadir era, “the historical moment when black people’s status reached its lowest point” (1), as a productive period for African American fiction as prolific and multi-faceted. The second is defining the political consciousness of this era and type of literature. Third, Pochmara defines the political locus of the genre of naturalism as utilized by African American authors during the Nadir era. Fourth, Pochmara argues for the affective force of naturalism in the sense that there is a deep and sometimes indivisible relationship between sentimentalism and naturalism. Finally, Pochamara closely examines how ethical temperance in literature, manifesting as self-discipline among its youthful female characters, fosters social and political community. Pochmara draws from a compact archive of 26 primary texts published from 1876 to 1902. She also refers to an impressive bibliography of works from critics writing within the schools of neo-Marxism, critical race theory, and intersectional feminism. Pochmara’s refreshing text is emblematic of a crucial directional shift in studies in American literary naturalism over the last eighteen years: texts written by African American authors have been understudied at a substantial detriment to our field. Pochmara displays with acute attention to historical context the ways in which African American writers of this era were very much in tune with the literary— and political—conversations that evolved from the Antebellum Era into [End Page 100] the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. In fact, these authors drove that conversation with rigor: there could be no conversation about the political health of the United States without discussion of the emancipated slave, the African American emigrant workers in the North, and the continued activism of African Americans as they fought for better economic conditions and against the growing tide of anti-Black violence. Within this historical context Pochmara situates her compelling study of novels published in the Nadir era by Charles Chesnutt, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Amelia E. Johnson, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Pochmara maps a trajectory from midcentury sentimentalism into twentieth century naturalism as evinced by these authors. Pochmara makes three distinct interventions in the field of African American literary studies and literary history. First, she argues that the “New Negro” woman is posed in direct contrast to her antebellum-era progenitors, particularly in her assertion of control in her community (e.g., as an effective and inspiring teacher) and in her private life (e.g., in her assertion of her right to accept or reject marital suitors or decide her family members’ living situations). Pochmara’s second intervention asserts that the female “mulatta” character is central too in the texts produced by African American male writers. Pochmara’s third intervention situates her study within the field of literary history studies. She is critical of “atemporal” analyses, in particular ones that develop critical tools that could not have been adopted or understood in the era to which they are applied. Pochmara’s interest is in examining a body of work over a short period of time. She seeks specifically to enumerate and parse through the ways authors over time examined the same ideas in different ways. Across all seven of the texts Pochmara closely examines, authors unrelentingly engaged with the genres, subjects, and social ideas of their time. Pochmara’s study serves specifically to show how these novelists utilized the “mulatta melodrama” to discuss the political, social, and economic issues of the Progressive Era. The structure of the mulatta melodrama is emblematic of a relationship between the present and the past. Embodied by the past are the father—white, paternalistic, and failing—and...