African American Canon Research Articles

New Perspectives on William Demby: A Special Issue of African American Review

New Perspectives on William Demby:A Special Issue of African American Review Melanie Masterton Sherazi (bio), Ugo Rubeo (bio), and James C. Hall (bio) Introduction Following his service in Italy during World War II, William Demby (b. 1922) returned to live in Rome in 1947. Inspired by Giorgio de Chirico's paintings that he viewed often at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum in his youth and by Roberto Rossellini's films, Demby considered a move to Rome as the "gritt[ier]," less obvious choice than Paris for an artist.1 Rents were cheap in a city rebuilding itself from the rubble of fascism and war and a revolutionary antifascist current flowed through the artistic circles into which Demby landed, rather serendipitously, upon his postwar return. He was invited almost immediately to live in a flat on Via San Teodoro overlooking the Ancient Forum with a group of Italian leftist and Communist artists and filmmakers, including Renzo Vespignani and Marcello Muccini. There, he got back to work on his debut novel in progress, Beetlecreek, and was driven to complete it as an artist living among other serious artists. From his bohemian flat across from Rome's ancient ruins, Demby took a writing sojourn in the Palazzo Ca' Dario, an elegant, late fifteenth-century residence on Venice's Grand Canal, where Peggy Guggenheim was living just a few doors down.2 Of his first novel's extraordinary composition history, Demby himself acknowledged that some positive astral conjunction might have worked in his favor, recalling that "it all came together in a palace in Venice; and the first thing I know is that I had finished a novel" (qtd. in Micconi 131). Beetlecreek was, in fact, a novel several years in the making: Demby had work-shopped it before the war as Margaret Walker's student at West Virginia State College, then an HBCU.3 He continued drafting it during his service in Italy and while completing his studies at Fisk University under the mentorship of Robert Hayden.4 The spectacular Italian settings of Beetlecreek's composition are at odds with the novel's eponymous, fictional town in the segregated, Depression-era US South. Moreover, Demby's own mobilities signal the dizzying quality of his lived experiences in this period: a move with his family after high school from an integrated neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Clarksburg, West Virginia; his later wartime service in Italy in an African American troop; his settling into a flat overlooking the ruins of Ancient Rome; and his aforementioned retreat in a Venetian palace on the Grand Canal—all in the span of just a few years.5 In these ways and more, Demby's life and work resisted the entrenched racist norms of Jim Crow America. This special issue of African American Review appears in the centenary year of Demby's birth on Christmas Day in 1922. Although he was honored with an Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, Demby's body of work has struggled to gain a lasting foothold in the African American literary canon and in classrooms, perhaps for the very fact of his living off the radar for decades in Italy. In actuality, Demby often traveled between Italy and the United States while working and visiting family. The issue aims to energize new directions in the study of the overdetermined workings of literary reputation and of place, genre, and style in [End Page 111] the shaping of an African American canon. Presented largely in chronology with Demby's artistic career, which spanned over sixty years, the issue's essays celebrate and contend with his work's generative eclecticism and transnational orientations. Italian Contexts Just a few months after Beetlecreek's appearance in 1950, another fortuitous event happened to propel Demby's early career when the major Italian press Mondadori's "Medusa" series—widely acclaimed, and dedicated to the works of "Great Narrators of All Countries"—published Festa a Beetlecreek as Series No. 243 in its signature emerald-green hardcover. Demby's novel's translator, Fernanda Pivano, was a young intellectual from Turin who, though not an academic, was already on her way to becoming one of Italy's leading Americanists...

African American Canon and Criticism: Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey

Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988) examines the significance of the Signifying Monkey, a trickster figure in African folklore, and whose manner of speaking produces uncertainty and double meanings. He examines how the specific language usage of the Signifying Monkey is altered and appears in African American texts by analyzing the trope of the talking book in early slave narratives and contemporary African American literary works. Gates’s book is hailed as one of the most original and groundbreaking works, and critics’ responses in its twenty-fifth-anniversary edition show its continuing impact. However, it has also been criticized for an intertextual and apolitical reading of slave narratives and for reproducing essentialism of Black literature. Focusing on the trope of the talking book, I examine how Gate’s theory and related contentions reveal critical issues of the African American literary tradition and problems of canon formation, regarding the concept of distinctive and coherent African American aesthetics, elitism, and its relationship with African American readers.

Lateral Reading Lyric Testimony; or, The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in the Americas

Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave testimony, the canonization of Anglo-American poets like Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon has eclipsed the reception and translation of other enslaved poets across the Americas. This essay proposes a method of lateral reading to remedy this lopsided historiography. First, it tracks how conceptions of "American Negro Poetry" shifted throughout the twentieth century, from initially describing a multilingual, hemispheric network of Black writers to ultimately signifying an Anglophone, nationally bounded African American canon. Second, it considers the temporalities of lyric, which move outward rather than forward in time, to suggest how we might read enslaved poets without expecting that their works reflect the "experience" of enslavement. And third, it demonstrates how a cohort of enslaved Afro-Cuban poets together established and elaborated a "writing community" through lyric form, overlapping social networks, and shared participation in an urban periodical culture. Taken together, these insights enable us to glimpse a wider, hemispheric corpus of enslaved poetics in the Americas.

Poet-Critics and the Administration of CultureAmerican Guides: The Federal Writers’ Project and the Casting of American Culture

Poet-Critics and the Administration of CultureAmerican Guides: The Federal Writers’ Project and the Casting of American Culture

How to Blow Up a Wall with a Heartbeat

AbstractA manifesto written in the form of a letter is a tradition in the African American canon, one that undergoes a radical revision in this essay. Whether in My Dungeon Shook, the first section of James Baldwin’s 1963 classic The Fire Next Time or Ta‐Nehisi Coates’s 2015 Between the World and Me, the strategy was a pedagogical one. The double work being done in these texts was to use a stated reader, in each case a family member, to grant the writer an intimacy that guaranteed the larger claims made on racism in America. Yet both writers seemed ultimately to elude that stated reader for a not too implicit, liberal white reader. In “How to Blow Up a Wall with a Heartbeat,” the text reverses this tactic to ask what a new life teaches us about racism and the desire for human connection it frustrates. The time frame is the end of the Obama presidency, where there was a hint of hope, even if it was betrayed. It ends shortly after November 2016 when white Americans chose a president who threatened to initiate a new neo‐Jim‐Crow era and asks: How does the endless, generative power of life teach a man of color to love during a politically reactionary time?

Reading Contemporary African-American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African-American Canon. By Beauty Bragg

Reading Contemporary African-American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African-American Canon. By Beauty Bragg

Reading Contemporary African American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African American Canon by Beauty Bragg

Reading Contemporary African American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African American Canon by Beauty Bragg

Reflections on the Archive: Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson

Reflections on the Archive: Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson Caroline Gebhard, Katherine Adams, and Sandra A. Zagarell Some thirty-five years ago, even in order to read black American women’s writing from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries one would have to search out their work in archives that preserved rare and out-of-print books, periodicals, and newspapers. Thanks to the dedicated work of William Andrews, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Frances Smith Foster, Akasha (Gloria) T. Hull, Nellie McKay, Claudia Tate, Jean Fagan Yellin, and many others, scholarly editions of works by African American women writers like Alice Dunbar-Nelson are now accessible to scholars and students alike. What remains challenging is that very few personal papers from early black women have been preserved, hindering our understanding of their works and lives. To write a biography of “any person of color, or a woman of any stratum,” notes Sojourner Truth biographer Nell Irvin Painter, one “cannot stick to convention, for conventional sources mostly are lacking” (289). Similarly, in her 2015 book on William and Ellen Craft, two of the most famous escapees from slavery in American history, Barbara McCaskill recounts the difficulties she faced because much of the archival source material for the pair is either partial or missing: “no personal correspondence between the couple has been uncovered, nor have letters, diaries, journals, or other published or unpublished reminiscences” (11). [End Page 384] Even for later, highly literate and educated African American women writers like Anna Julia Cooper and Georgia Douglas Johnson, much has been lost. Mary Helen Washington discovered to her chagrin that love letters written to Cooper by her former ward had been discarded by a grandniece (xxxvii), and Hull records that “Johnson’s voluminous papers were summarily dumped on the day of her funeral” (16). As Lois Brown and other scholars have lamented, much remains unknown and perhaps irrecoverable about significant periods in Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s life. When she found that Hopkins’s papers at Fisk University are contained in only one box, Brown was compelled to ask, how could scholars “grapple with the seeming silences—these rhetorical ruptures and biographical caesuras—that all too often define the early African American canon and history?” (131). The archival resources for Alice Dunbar-Nelson, born Alice Ruth Moore in 1875, provide a striking exception to the general rule that the personal papers of black women born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are scarce, thanks to the careful preservation of her papers by her niece Pauline A. Young who was a professional librarian. But preservation is only part of the story. From early on, Dunbar-Nelson acted as her own archivist. In a letter to her then husband Paul Laurence Dunbar, she describes plunging “into a trunk full of letters” in order “to assort, arrange and compile them” (qtd. in Metcalf 553). Of the two thousand letters received since she left New Orleans, she tells him, she burned five hundred that “were worse than worthless” (qtd. in Metcalf 553). Yet she saved almost every letter to and from Dunbar, including those that reveal intimate details about their sexual history. From her early twenties until her death, Dunbar-Nelson continued with the practice of saving not only correspondence, even of a very personal nature, but also manuscripts, newspaper clippings, and other things she deemed important. In 1984 the University of Delaware Library acquired this extraordinary personal collection. The Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware fill thirty-two boxes and comprise more than twenty-five hundred items, among them manuscripts of Dunbar-Nelson’s published and unpublished works, including poems, short fiction, essays, speeches, lectures, dramas, and novels. The collection also contains her diaries, notebooks, and scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings, one devoted to reviews of her work, another to her 1915 suffrage campaign, and still others to her newspaper columns. She also kept records of the books she read, teaching notes, and a scrapbook she compiled on blacks in America. In addition, this archive preserves her extensive professional and personal correspondence, including her letters to and from Dunbar during their courtship, marriage, and estrangement, and letters from notables such as Victoria...

The Archive on Its Own: Black Politics, Independent Publishing, andThe Negotiations:

A couple of decades have passed since the heyday of African American literature’s canon formation—that period from the 1970s to the 1990s when primary sources were scoured for material that could be excerpted in anthologies, forgotten texts were given a new lease on life through reprints and scholarly editions, and mislaid or previously unknown works were excavated from dusty archives and made public for the first time. These efforts not only established the fact of a long-standing African American literary tradition but also legitimated the professional study of that tradition. It was a time of literary recovery and constitution, a time when demanding academic recognition was the name of the game. Today, several years removed from institutionalization, African American literary studies is witnessing a return to the kind of empirical research that made canon-building possible. The field’s “archival turn” reflects broader shifts in the discipline, including a certain exhaustion with rote or careless theoretical criticism, but it also marks a specific crossroads in how scholars engage with the African American canon. On the one hand are those whose field orientation “no longer requires an immediate political concern or social movement to authorize its lines of critical inquiry.” Such scholars feel encouraged to “return to the archive for the sake of returning to the archive” (Wilson 34)—that is, to treat the repository as an object of study unto itself, not the means to an end. On the other hand are those whose archival practice is positioned to legitimate the field’s extant body of knowledge. While undertaking the laudable effort of bringing new literary works to light, these scholars tend to play the hoary game of recognition—that is, to address the significance of whatever they find in the archive to a satellite of predetermined, canon-conserving interests. Doing so yields immediate legitimation for the archival discovery, but it also limits their understanding of what makes that discovery proper to the archive. Since the archival turn, the field’s most publicized discoveries have been framed in the narrow terms of canonical legitimation. In September 2012, for example, an article in the New York Times announced the discovery

Redefining the African American Canon Writer by Writer

Redefining the African American Canon Writer by Writer

PUSHING AGAINST THE BLACK/WHITE LIMITS OF MAPS: AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITINGS OF TRAVEL

Journeys are central to African American experience and literature. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to African American travel accounts. This relative neglect seems due to three main factors: the low esteem in which travel writing continues to be held, despite the growth of scholarly activity in travel writing studies; the predominance in the African American canon of narratives of forced or economically determined movement; and the uneasy relationship between postcolonial and American Studies that has seen scholarship on postcolonial travel writing focus predominantly on texts from other former colonies and dominions. Rather than occupying a marginal role, however, travel writing, in its diverse forms, has been fundamental to African American literary history. Its generic indeterminacy makes it a powerful vehicle for the African American protagonist whose mobility constitutes a refusal to be fixed. Both the movement that is narrated and the porosity of the genre's borders complement the fluidity of the self whose (re)construction is in process through travel.

Death-Defying Testimony: Women's Private Lives and the Politics of Public Documents

Death-Defying Testimony:Women's Private Lives and the Politics of Public Documents Lois Brown Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins succeeded as a playwright, acclaimed vocalist, enterprising journalist, feisty public intellectual, ambitious activist, eloquent patriot, and stalwart club woman from the 1870s through 1915.1 A fifth-generation New Englander born in 1859 in Portland, Maine, Hopkins was the only child of Sarah Allen Northup of Boston and Benjamin Northup of Providence, a couple whose marriage united powerful political and religious dynasties and blended tumultuous histories of freedom and enslavement. Hopkins's writing life began with an award-winning school essay on the evils of intemperance and ended with the most economical of writing occupations at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a stenographer. Her writing life and the lives she documents shape my approach to private writing and biography. In writing Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, I was compelled to document and assess the public and private lives she generated, sustained, and revised. I had time and reason to grapple with the archival and intellectual issues that emerge as a result of scholarly biography projects. We know projects like these often proceed as extended—sometimes seemingly never-ending—considerations of the politics of private writing, biography, and the archive. A Sojourner in the Archive As a literary historian, I have been a sojourner in the archive—one whose research plans do not always first yield the foundational organizing details of birth date, parentage, marriage, occupation, and church affiliations. I am in search of lives developed in the shadow of imagined democracy or sustained despite involuntary proximity to the blistering core of an America that accommodated and perpetuated enslavement. The free-born, self-emancipated, or enslaved individuals I encounter in the archives negotiated peculiar, highly racialized, and deeply sexualized institutions that co-opted their labor, bodies, identities, relationships, offspring, and [End Page 130] communities. Nineteenth-century people of color contended with racial and social realities and hierarchies that depended on and were strengthened by wholly permeable and vulnerable spheres—so much so that racialized notions of the private frequently are critiques of a volatile public sphere and of bodies that were always already available for public consumption. Biography projects about these individuals become considerations of the pursuits, acquisitions, fictions, and shifting valuations of privacy. This is a rigorous dance indeed, for biographer and subject alike, and there are breathless and breathtaking stakes at hand. As an earnest graduate student in the early 1990s, I went to Fisk University to see the Pauline Hopkins Papers. The very first question the archivist put to me was rhetorical at best: "You're here for a week? I don't know why you think you need all that time. It's only one box." Yet what was in the box, and the other items that emerged over the course of that week as I proved myself an earnest and worthy scholar-in-training, revealed two questions: First, what must we do in the face of sparse and provocative private writing when it has no linear foot breadth or documented provenance and raises more questions than it answers? Second, how do we grapple with the seeming silences—these rhetorical ruptures and biographical caesuras—that all too often define the early African American canon and history? I ask these questions even as I assert that our expectations of racialized private writing cannot be modest or anchored in disappointment and loss. We must have a practice of intellectual and archival optimism, and certainly the invaluable archival recovery and insistent intellectual work of many scholars—Carla Peterson, Frances Foster, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Gabrielle Foreman, Jeanne Pfaelzer, Karen Kilcup, Sharon Harris, and others—explains why. My decades-plus project on Hopkins and her world disciplined me and even rode me ragged at times as I embarked on wide-ranging physical and intellectual journeys, trekked to obscure and well-known archives, ventured into graveyards, stepped into municipal storage spaces, took up residence in countless airless microfilm rooms, and made forced, voluntary, and serendipitous marches across acres of library stacks. I muttered as much as I walked. Sometimes I cursed the fact that anything about Negroes was relegated...

Editor's Introduction: Multicultural and Multilingual Aesthetics of Resistance

Either get out, get white or get along. --George Schuyler, Black No More (11) As George Schuyler sarcastically comments his novel Black No More (1931), US culture seems to offer its multiethnic or non-white citizens few choices: Either get out, get white or get along (11). Exiting the system, whitening, or assimilation are posited as the only viable options for ethnic subjects. Yet this issue of MELUS illustrates that ethnic writers often undermine such simplistic choices through a multicultural and multilingual aesthetics of resistance. As W. Lawrence Hogue points out his essay, for postmodern theorists such as Jacques Derrida, meaning the West is defined terms of binary oppositions, a violent hierarchy which one of the two terms governs the Within the white/ethnic binary opposition the United States, the ethnic subject often becomes defined as an inferior other. However, many of the authors discussed this issue deconstruct this binary through oppositional and resistant aesthetic practices; furthermore, some of these authors take western modes of writing or subjectivity--such as sentimentalism or the persona of the slave--and turn these modes inside out, so they no longer exclusively signify subjugation or abjection. These writers thereby participate the project of reclaiming and repositioning ethnic subjectivities. By turning to multicultural aesthetics or by deforming western tropes, they may undermine or challenge Eurocentric modes of writing, releasing the potential of ethnic subjectivity to transform not only art, but culture itself. In her essay, Property Rights and Possession Daughters of the Dust, Nancy Wright argues that Julie Dash's landmark 1991 film uses specific aesthetic practices--such as visual images and voice-overs--to talk back to Anglo-American political and legal theories of property from the historical period represented the film, which positions the ancestors of enslaved Africans and First Nations people as the dispossessed. Wright argues that the film Gullah and First Nation groups enact a concept of their relationship to the land that is communal and custodial, rather than property based. Two sequences the film associate characters and the landscape with communal property relationships--a montage which Iona Peazant reads aloud a love letter from Saint Julian Last Child, and a sequence of images set the family graveyard, where Nana Peazant explains to her great-grandson Eli Peazant his relationship to his unborn child and ancestors. As Wright astutely notices, in these sequences, visual images locate the themes of family, possession, and property a matrix of historical allusions to property law and legal rights of ownership. They also contest visually and aesthetically the dominant view of the residents of Dawtaw Island (the film's setting) as the dispossessed. These characters may lack individual, exclusive rights to property, but their communal relationship to the land endows them with agency and allows them to retain their culture. Aesthetic practices used by eighteenth-century poet Wheatley--a diasporic presence and the creation of a distinct black slave persona and perspective--also endow her work with agency and cultural identity. In Phillis Wheatley, Diaspora Subjectivity, and the African American Canon, Will Harris argues that few critics have accounted for the uniqueness of Wheatley's contributions to diaspora writing. Wheatley's poetry was recognized England and France as a watershed literary feat and became a focal point for discussion of diasporal literary accomplishment among individuals such as Voltaire, John Paul Jones, and Francois, the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois. To understand the diasporal impact of Wheatley's poetry, Harris argues, her writing must be compared to black writers whose works preceded or paralleled hers and to contemporaneous writers who may have been influenced by her work. …

Phillis Wheatley, Diaspora Subjectivity, and the African American Canton

Critics generally agree in considering Phillis Wheatley, African American to author and publish book, as founding figure of African American literature. his foreword to Schomburg series on black women writers, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. goes so far as to acknowledge her as progenitor of African American literature (Gates, In Her Own Write x)--a label which not only gives her first credit, but also suggests that her work was in some way prototype for all race literature which followed hers. Although the overwhelming tendency in Wheatley criticism has been to upbraid her for 'not being black enough' (Gates, Trials 81), more thorough address of questions inherent in Gates's assumption about progenitorship places Wheatley's writing at heart of any definition of an African American canon. If Wheatley's writing can be considered prototype, what diaspora traces or influences did she distill and reshape? And if, as progenitor, she transmitted model for African American writing, what was that model? Finally, as progenitor of body of literature rather than simply participant in an American strain of poetry, how did this poet possibly influence African American prose writing--a mode of expression which was arguably uncontested in African American literary canon until Harlem Renaissance? Few critics have attempted to account for uniqueness of Wheatley's contributions to diaspora writing as key to her foundational role as African American literary progenitor. Perhaps Katherine Clay Bassard comes closest to explaining Wheatley's landmark role within diasporal context. Bassard, I believe accurately, suggests that Wheatley's writing represents an evolution in diasporal subjectivity. Bassard's argument does not chart this progression in terms of other African diasporal subjects and commentators. Bassard focuses on declarative nature of poems such as Answer to Rebus (1773) as assertions of subjective autonomy. For example, she sees this poem as a gesture of self-authentication (31), while viewing Wheatley's adroit negotiation of blackness in poems like On Being Brought from Africa to America (1773) as an effort at cultural mooring (38-39). Bassard believes that Wheatley perfects this effort in her elegies, through an implied yet absented communal counterpoint (59-70). But as Bassard suggests, Wheatley's pivotal role in diasporal discourse must be understood as global role as well (43). Why was Wheatley's poetry recognized even in England and France as watershed literary feat? And why was it focal point for discussion of diasporal literary accomplishment among likes of Voltaire, John Paul Jones, and Frangois, Marquis de Barbe-Marbois (Gates, Trials 33, 40-41), as well as among diasporal writers such as Ignatius Sancho (Edwards and Dabydeen 27-28)? To fully understand phenomenon, arrival of Wheatley as African American literary fore-parent must be reconstrued as consequence of diasporal phenomenon. We may best understand Wheatley's emergence as distinct literary figure by distinguishing her from her black literary contemporaries. Kidnapped from Africa when he was seven or eight years old as well, James Eliza John Capitein had earned several degrees in Holland by 1742, supported by philanthropic Dutch merchant. that year--approximately thirty-one years prior to publication of Wheatley's book--Capitein published volume of sermons and Latin treatise which, oddly, defends slavery. Briton Hammon published his narrative (A Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, Negro Man [1760]) approximately thirteen years prior to Wheatley's book. Former slave James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw published his A Narrative of Most Remarkable Particulars in Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, as Written by Himself (c. 1770), (1) just three years prior to publication of Wheatley's volume of poetry. …

Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature

Reviewed by: Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature Ryan Simmons (bio) Young, John K. Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2006. Most readers are probably not accustomed to thinking, in any prolonged way, about the circumstances under which books are produced. It is all too easy to succumb to the [End Page 957] notion that, in reading, we simply and rather mysteriously commune with the mind of an author: to forget that the making of the book itself, as a material object, was itself a thoroughly human and, therefore, a political process. Black Writers, White Publishers investigates the political consequences of this process, describing in detail how the pressures of the publishing industry have caused African-American authors’ works to be compromised, distorted, and in some cases rendered usefully—if unintentionally—ambiguous. As John K. Young demonstrates, the acceptance, the editing, the design, the production, and the marketing of books are inherently interpretive acts (45). And, despite the many gains associated with the emergence of an African-American canon written by figures such as Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison in the past century, Young reminds us that these writers’ ability to push back against racist and racialist assumptions is limited, dependent as they are on a predominantly white publishing industry, and in many cases on a mass readership that may only seek confirmation of its pre-existing attitudes. Black Writers, White Publishers examines each of these writers’ works from the standpoint of editorial theory, focusing on paratexts, the various emanations (titles, dust jackets, marketing campaigns, etc.) that mediate between the “inner” text and the reading experience it may come to produce. In Young’s account, elements of a book’s “presence in the world” (Gérard Genette, quoted in Young 4) that readers might not consciously acknowledge can be as meaningful as the book’s sequence of sentences and paragraphs. He is adept at analyzing books at both the macro-and micro-levels, working through specific, seemingly minor paratextual elements so patiently that they end up appearing to be, as he claims, evidence of a much larger, and more troublesome, phenomenon: “The American publishing industry . . . has historically inscribed a mythologized ‘black experience’ onto all works marked by race, in much the same way that, for much of the twentieth century, American jurists ascribed an innate blackness to all bodies marked as such, even if at the invisible and seemingly unknowable level of a drop of blood” (4). Although this conclusion may not be especially surprising, Young provides an eye-opening account of how such a problematic view of race has worked its way into the published work of African-American writers, in each case flouting the writer’s own apparent purposes. Chapter One, for example, begins with the premise that the publishers of the seminal Harlem Renaissance novels Quicksand and Passing were (predictably enough) less comfortable than their author, Nella Larsen, with a critique of the nation’s “ideological dependence on a strict racial separation” (44). Young’s discussion of the two published endings of Passing is particularly intriguing: the final paragraph of the novel’s first two printings disappeared from the third and subsequent printings. His description of the “interpretive effects” of the inclusion or exclusion of this paragraph is important because it is one of relatively few points at which he synthesizes a discussion of a book’s plot and themes in a conventional sense and the material circumstances of its production; unfortunately, this account is not as clear or as persuasive as it might be (51). On the other hand, the author’s description of his strategy for teaching Passing, in which he assigns half his students the variant with the final paragraph restored and the other half an edition in which it is omitted, is smart and enlightening: here, Young makes a strong case for his claim that to make such a text “pass as stable” by obscuring its “material and racial histories” is to render it complicit with the reductive views on race that Larsen attempted to combat (39). Young points out [End...

Racial Recovery, Racial Death: An Introduction in Four Parts

In February 2005, an article appeared in the Boston Globe asserting that census records list as white the author of two novels published in the Schomburg Collection of African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Jackson). The genealogical work reported in the Globe turned out be sound. Yet the researcher's not quite subtle interpretation of nineteenth-century Black writing, the repeated implication that she had solved the mystery of why Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's literature never fit with contemporaneous texts and themes (par. 4), and the popular press's eager unveiling of Kelley-Hawkins's racial mis/classification raised larger questions about nineteenth-century women and racial identity, identification, and indeterminacy. In response the new revelations, some reporters and critics have suggested that Kelley-Hawkins's work will be--and deserves be--reforgotten (McLemee, par. 2). (1) Such reviviscent insinuations recall the politics of disavowal and dismissal that are part of the reception history of nineteenth-century women's literary production. Indeed, this opposition women's putative concerns and the popular literary styles women often adopted undergirded the justifications for preserving almost exclusively male literary canons until civil and women's rights movements took root in the publishing and academic worlds of the early 1970s. Since then, more and more early Black women's writing has been recovered and reprinted. As it continues help desegregate literary canons and be placed in continually augmented historical contexts and evolving interpretative frameworks, scholars face the challenges of partial recovery and responsible speculation that are the necessary genesis of our work. It is worth recalling that our understandings of now-canonical authors such as Harriet A. Jacobs, Harriet E. Wilson, and Frances E. W. Harper, for example, have significantly evolved in the last decade as scholars have built on partial discoveries introduce new information--and whole new bodies (of work)--that inform our understanding of the period and the received paradigms that act as its scholarly prism. (2) Until 2005, Kelley-Hawkins belonged a group of authors identified as African American despite the partial or inconclusive information about their racial identity and identification. For example, despite the best-selling (twenty-first century) status of The Bondwoman's Narrative, this date, the work of some of the most noted scholars and highly skilled genealogists has yielded no definitive information confirm its author's racial identity (Andrews and Kachun, Editors' Introduction xxxviii). And although, as Daphne A. Brooks reminds us, the ethnographic facts about the wildly popular stage performer Adah Isaacs Menken and her personal life have largely remained a source of occlusion and contention (134), Menken's work, like Kelley-Hawkins's, is included in the Schomburg collection. The public attention and assumptions eddying around Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's reclassification provide an invitation for specialists in the field revisit and reframe some of the organizing themes and tropes that have come be associated with the nineteenth century: racial protest and racial uplift, passing, and the figure of the (tragic) mulatta. As Brooks puts it, such lingering controversies about race and cultural iconography force us to scrutinize critical methods for defining race and the tools that we use measure and evaluate its social and political worth and cultural authenticity (135). In this issue of Legacy, examinations of Kelley-Hawkins's work appear alongside essays that also place their analyses of forgotten, misplaced, and marginalized texts within the larger scope of nineteenth-century writing, recovery, and reception. From this vantage point, readers can reconsider the evolving politics of nineteenth-century African American canon formation, reassess how we evaluate racial evidence and authenticity, and rethink how and why racial identity, identification, and indeterminacy matter. …

Fraudulent Bodies/Fraught Methodologies

Critical Responses Fraudulent Bodies/Fraught Methodologies Daphne A. Brooks What do we do with the narratives, the authors, the spectacular figures that resist facile categorization in nineteenth-century studies? From the racially unmarked tales produced by Black women activists to the political outsider memoir of a traveling hairstylist, the subjects of the essays included in this issue of Legacy challenge long-standing definitions of race literature and complicate our understanding of the scope and range of nineteenth-century Black women's literary aesthetics. Wayward and unwieldy, the texts and figures discussed here incite debates about authenticity—discursive, generic, and racial—and force us to improvise new critical methodologies that disrupt narrow binaries (fake vs. real, legitimate vs. fraudulent). The innovative and forward-looking essays collected here encourage us to reexamine the critical methods that we use (or fail to invoke) in our readings of texts and figures that defy conventional categorization in nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies. In short, each essay demands that we reconsider what kinds of criteria we trust. Each essay here triggers thoughtful reflection on how we formulate historical and cultural narratives about race and what kinds of historical and cultural documents we rely on to build a Black literary canon. Likewise, all of the critics here generate edifying ways to navigate textual and historical excesses and opacities. They critically re-interrogate the sociopolitical utility of racially indeterminate characters who fall outside the putative bounds of nineteenth-century Black women's fiction. They reevaluate conventional "tragic mulatta" strategies of characterization. And they challenge constrictive analyses of nineteenth-century Black women's narratives that reproduce essentialist readings of the texts as well as their authors. Poised to make a crucial intervention in how we [End Page 306] think about the production of Black texts as well as Black identity formations in nineteenth-century culture, the Legacy essays in this special issue present new approaches to reading Black(ened) cultural marginalia in the archives. The wayward bodies in this issue encourage epistemological speculation, and they create the kind of "lacuna" that DoVeanna Fulton reads in her exploration of racially indeterminate figures in the fiction of Frances E. W. Harper. Fulton's work illustrates the value in "open[ing] up" texts "for multiple and varied engagements by different reading communities" (Fulton, this issue). Her essay recovers the sociopolitical resonances of these kinds of anomalous literary figures who refuse recognizable strategies of racial categorization, and she makes plain the specific sociopolitical intervention that Harper's text creates by signifying on and disrupting the segregated culture of social reform movements. Similarly, Xiomara Santamarina locates the waywardness in the narrative and authorial politics of Eliza Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, a text that manifests a kind of social and political indeterminacy resulting in its canonical marginalization in nineteenth-century African American letters. Santamarina demonstrates the multiple ways that Potter articulates a socially oppositional and economically independent self in her narrative. On the one hand, this scholar's interpretation aligns Potter's work with other circum-Atlantic Black female entrepreneurs and travelers such as Mary Prince. On the other hand, Potter emerges in Santamarina's study as somewhat akin to her unconventional contemporary, the racially ambiguous actress Adah Isaacs Menken. Like Menken, Potter displayed a "lack of reference to racial injustices," "peripatetic" impulses, and a professed "desire to see the world," qualities that have resulted in her work's consistent exclusion from rigorous critical studies of nineteenth-century African American and women's literatures (Santamarina, this issue). Yet, Potter's text clearly warrants further analysis as an early literary work that reinforces Claudia Tate's important claim that "the racial protocol for African American canon formation has marginalized desire as a critical category of black textuality by demanding manifest stories about racial politics" (5). This study of Potter challenges us to consider new methodological approaches to (re)reading the politics of desire in heretofore under-theorized nineteenth-century archival texts. Both Eric Gardner's and Cherene Sherrard-Johnson's essays negotiate new strategies of reading texts by authors whom some might call "racial outsiders." Gardner's critical recovery of novels by Levina B. Urbino and Laura Preston [Louise Palmer...

Race, Capitalism, and the Third-Sex Ideal: Claude McKay's Home to Harlem and the Legacy of Edward Carpenter

Though generally regarded as one of the first African-American bestsellers—achieving five printings in fewer than six months and selling over 50,000 copies—Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) has not received the enthusiastic reception into the African-American canon that its prominent place in literary history should merit. Most critics have either ignored or rejected it, while almost none have accorded it a major position in the lineage of African-American cultural expression. 1 To a large extent, this continued critical neglect is related to the initial charge that the novel was an example of white-authorized racism rather than authentic black cultural expression. In particular, Home to Harlem was thought to be derivative of Carl Van Vechten's sensationalistic depiction of Harlem, Nigger Heaven (1926), a commercially successful work that many black critics felt had exploited white stereotypes of black life. Subsequent evaluations of Home to Harlem have all offered subtle [End Page 825] variations on the extent of McKay's culpability, but almost none have questioned the assumption that his novel must be read solely in terms of its chronological precursor. 2

The Life and the Mind: A Reconciliation

With Psychoanalysis and Black Novels Claudia Tate significantly advances efforts to push understandings of African American literature beyond the social-action model that equates legitimacy with commitment to the political struggle to end oppression. In saying this, I do not at all intend to denigrate or diminish the significance of either the struggle or the criticism which has illuminated its position in the African American canon. Properly used, this model of commentary has made essential contributions to American literary scholarship. As with all critical models, however, it presents problems when it becomes a procrustean bed that critics use to cast off whatever offending textual limbs do not fit their particular paradigm.

James Weldon Johnson's "New York Age" Essays on "The Birth of a Nation" and the "Southern Oligarchy"

In his 1934 pamphlet Americans, What Now?, James Weldon Johnson offered his fellow African Americans an analysis of and recommendations for alleviating the racial problems that plagued them. Focusing at one point on the achievements and duties of the black press, Johnson asserts that African-American editors have a special responsibility to their readership. Black editors, he continues, cannot escape the moral responsibility of the ultimate effect of [their] work on the race, a race which has, as he emphasizes in a later section of the pamphlet, been depicted as a witless darky or a savage brute.1 These pernicious stereotypes, which color, influence, and constitute so large a part of national thinking about African Americans, are circulated throughout the culture by various media-including the relatively new medium of the motion picture (92). Urging black newspaper editors to continue the tradition of placing social responsibility above commercial success, Johnson remarks that he is not an impractical visionary but a former newspaperman who speaks from experience (30). Johnson's achievements as a novelist, poet, and critic have earned him a secure position in the African-American canon. His novel TheAutobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) is regarded as a landmark in African-American literature; the song Lift Every Voice and Sing (1900), which he co-wrote with his brother Rosamond, has been honored as the Negro National Anthem; his poetry, critical essays, and editions of spirituals won