African American Fiction Research Articles

History for Our Children: An Interview with Christopher Paul Curtis, a Contemporary Voice in African American Young Adult Fiction

Christopher Paul Curtis's first book The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 (Delacorte 1995) took the world of Young Adult fiction by storm. Named to the American Library Association's list of Best Books for Young Adults, The Watsons swept more than twenty-five major awards and honors, including the prestigious Newberry Honor Book Award and the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award for African American Writers. His second novel Bud, Not Buddy (Delacorte 1999) seems set to follow the same path. Having also won the Newberry Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award, it continues to receive widespread critical and popular acclaim. Peter E. Morgan: Christopher, your second book, Bud, Not Buddy, has achieved considerable success since its publication. Like The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963, it has won almost every award a young adult book can win, and it has been widely reviewed not only by The Horn Book Magazine and professional publications that one would expect but also in the mainstream adult media like U.S. News and World Report. What does it mean to you to receive this kind of recognition? Christopher Paul Curtis: It's absolutely wonderful, and it's wonderful for a lot of reasons. It's wonderful to get recognition. It's a sort of validation, too, because people figure that if a book wins the Newberry or Coretta Scott King honors, then it's a good book. Writing is such a solitary pursuit--you do it by yourself, and you sometimes think in the back of your mind, Maybe I'm crazy. Sometimes I think, This is a really good story, and other times I read what I have written and think, Oh my God, how could I send this out to anybody? So, you're battling back and forth. And then, when you get recognition like that, it really validates your work. It's a really good feeling. It's great. PEM: It must be good for sales, too. Do you have any idea how many copies of The Watsons have been sold? CPC: Actually, The Watsons has sold over three hundred thousand copies--one-eighty in hardback and one-twenty in paperback. It's been translated into eleven different languages now. The real surprise for me was that the last language of the eleven was Spanish--I would have thought Spanish would have been one of the first. PEM: Do you get international fan mail? CPC: No. I've never gotten a letter from overseas. Most of my letters come from America. It's funny, too, that in Canada, where I live, the book has sold no more than about a thousand copies. It does much better in Germany than in Canada--more than twenty-five hundred copies so far. The translation was up for an award in Germany, the equivalent of the Newberry, and I think that helped it a lot. PEM: Are most of your letters from young readers? CPC: Yes. Young readers and teachers. PEM: How do you respond to them? CPC: You know, at first you are so grateful that somebody is writing to you, that you write long letters back, but after a while there are just so many letters. You want to respond to every single one of them, but, you know, it's impossible. Once I got a letter from a girl who put her picture in with it, and I thought, Oh, that's so sweet, so I wrote back a long letter, and I sent a picture of my family. Well, two days later, letters and pictures from her whole class arrived--for some reason, hers had just arrived first. I couldn't write to every single one of them and send them all pictures, so, I wrote a letter to the teacher and asked her to share that letter with all the other kids. PEM: The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 was the book which allowed you to say good-bye forever to your job as an auto worker at Body Plant No. 1 in Flint, Michigan. Would you say briefly what the story is about? CPC: It's the story of a family in Michigan in 1963. The narrator is Kenny Watson, who is ten years old, and he's got a thirteen-year-old brother who's really hard to live with. …

O Mother, Where Art Thou? The Daughter's Quest for the Mother-of-History in African-American and Caribbean Women's Fiction

O Mother, Where Art Thou? The Daughter's Quest for the Mother-of-History in African-American and Caribbean Women's Fiction

"You Think Like You White": Questioning Race and Racial Community through the Lens of Middle-Class Desire(s)

Consistently attended to by sociologists, political scientists and historians, US intra-racial class difference (and conflict) has perhaps enjoyed its most complex ongoing representation in literary realm, especially in fiction and criticism. These representations, from proverbial beginnings marked by Phillis Wheatley's poetry, to post-race era that is second millennium, refuse to cast subject as singular or stable and ever encourage readers to dispense with grand narratives of race. Paradoxically, an incredibly resilient conceptualization of a has proliferated within literature and oftentimes masks or completely negates an otherwise obvious heterogeneity. In this essay I examine three novels from 1980s in order to identify contradictory impulses that propel understandings of the race both towards and away from monolithic, often in same breath by same speaker. I contend that it is within context of post-civil rights 1980s-in which a stable black identity said to issue from a unified community is paradoxically both asserted and questioned-that a postmodem critique which defamiliarizes received identities emerges. I treat postmoder not exclusively as a period that chronologically follows modem, but also as a critical tension inherent in and its rational institutions, one that names instabilities within category of identity itself. In this sense, novels from 1980s revisit earlier historical periods in which modem identity was supposed to have been established. I understand postmodern in African American fiction to be critical reflexivity of contemporary literature to revision ways that has been constructed in historical past. Andrea Lee in Sarah Phillips (1984), Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987), and Walter Mosley in Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) use intra-racial class difference, especially middle-class aspirations, to refute romance of grand narratives of blackness. These three authors map quarrels within US identity politics across sparsely populated terrain of middle-class blackness and expose a set of contradictory truths including racialized community as a shelter from racism and violence; heterogeneity as incontrovertible evidence of evolution and equality; and class as an ultimately divisive and problematic difference. Generated in 1980s, these novels revisit earlier historical moments-Reconstruction, post-World War II, and Civil Rights era-in order to nuance these quarrels. All three novels offer us new insights into intertwined histories of racial uplift and individualism on one hand, and American identity on other. All three suggest that racial unity may have always been in tension with differences of social level, class, caste, and regional heterogeneity among blacks

Remembering generations: race and family in contemporary African American fiction

African American writers explore the enduring effects of slavery on American society Slavery is America's family secret, says Ashraf Rushdy, a partially hidden phantom that continues to haunt our national imagination. Remembering Generations explores how three contemporary African American writers artistically represent this notion in novels about the enduring effects of slavery on the descendants of slaves in the post-civil rights era. Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Rushdy situates these works in their cultural moment of production, highlighting the ways in which they respond to contemporary debates about race and family. Tracing the evolution of this literary form, he considers such works as Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998), in which descendants of slaveholders expose the family secrets of their ancestors. Remembering Generations examines how cultural works contribute to social debates, how a particular representational form emerges out of a specific historical epoch, and how some contemporary intellectuals meditate on the issue of historical responsibility - of recognizing that the slave past continues to exert an influence on contemporary American society.

The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt

As the first African-American fiction writer to achieve a national reputation, Ohio native Charles W. Chesnutt (1858 1932) in many ways established the terms of the black literary tradition now exemplified by such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson. Following the highly autobiographical nonfiction produced by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other slave narrative writers, Chesnutt's complex, multi-layered short fiction transformed the relationship between African-American writers and their readers. But despite generous praise from W. D. Howells and other important critics of his day, and from such prominent readers as William L. Andrews, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Eric Sundquist in ours, Chesnutt occupies a curiously ambiguous place in American literary history. In The Absent Man, Charles Duncan demonstrates that Chesnutt's uneasy position in the American literary tradition can be traced to his remarkable narrative subtlety. Profoundly aware of the delicacy of his situation as a black intellectual at the turn of the century, Chesnutt infused his work with an intricate, enigmatic artistic vision that defies monolithic or unambiguously political interpretation, especially with regard to issues of race and identity that preoccupied him throughout his career. In this first book-length study of the innovative short fiction, Duncan devotes particular attention to elucidating these sophisticated narrative strategies as the grounding for Chesnutt's inauguration of a tradition of African-American fiction.

The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction

The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction

Black Orpheus: music in African American fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison

Black Orpheus: music in African American fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison

Freedom to Self-Create: Identity and the Politics of Movement in Contemporary African American Fiction

Freedom to Self-Create: Identity and the Politics of Movement in Contemporary African American Fiction

Crossing Borders through Folklore: African American Women's Fiction and Art

Crossing Borders through Folklore: African American Women's Fiction and Art

Contemporary African American Fiction: The Open Journey

Previous studies of modern African Americans have either ignored the journey or have interpreted it in very different, usually pessimistic, terms. Contemporary African American Fiction focuses on the journey as a limitless process of renewal, self-creation, and culture building, stressing the persistent vitality of the open journey in African American literature, its wonderfully protean ability to assume an endless series of liberating new forms.

Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction

Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction

Book Review: Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction

Book Review: Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction

Contemporary African American Fiction: The Open Journey

Contemporary African American Fiction: The Open Journey

Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction

Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction

Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction

Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction

Reclaiming community in contemporary African American fiction

Reclaiming community in contemporary African American fiction

Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature

Reviewed by: Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature Ashraf H. A. Rushdy Madelyn Jablon. Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997. x + 209 pp. It wasn’t long ago that those of us who spent our professional lives writing about the experiences and representations of people of color, women, and working people were troubled, a few scandalized, by some of the antihumanist claims of postmodernity. The author seemed to be dying just as African American authors were being brought to renewed life; the subject became split, internally divided, eternally deferred, unintelligible, and essentially absent, just as women, workers, and otherwise colonized peoples were finding their voices and their subjectivities. For some, it appeared that the ontological claims of modernity (death and absence) and the epistemological pronouncements of postmodernism (deferral and aporia) were yet another means of ensuring that those wounded by the material realities of history would continue to be misserved by the intellectual climate of the present. The “other” emerged to find the self absent; the ethnic author was born into a cemetery. This history, for Madelyn Jablon, seems to be repeating itself from the other side. Anglo-European theorists are now claiming the end of postmodernity just as African American authors are beginning to get recognition for a long history of theories and practices of self-conscious artistic representation. Just as African American authors otherwise [End Page 502] as diverse in subject matter and style as Ishmael Reed, Al Young, Albert Murray, Xam Cartiér, Leon Forrest, Reginald McKnight, Clarence Major, John Edgar Wideman, and Ntozake Shange produce works of heightened self-consciousness, of “Black metafiction,” William Gass, the critic who coined the term “metafiction,” is condemning the practice as a form of solipsistic, bourgeois self-indulgence, and advocating a “new realism.” Intellectual trends, it seems, just keep exceeding the grasp of ethnic literary practitioners, just keep excluding the rabble from the elite. Black writers in the seventies found themselves serious subjects in an age of play, and in the nineties become playful artists in an age turning serious. It is hard to tell whether this historical repetition is tragedy or farce. In this study of self-conscious texts in contemporary African American fiction, Jablon offers two challenges to those who have theorized and renounced metafiction. First, she claims that earlier theoretical descriptions of metafictional practices were radically flawed because they did not take into account the developments in Black metafiction. Second, she argues that rumors of the death of metafiction are premature given the vitally robust quality of metafictional texts in contemporary African American literature. The study falls into five parts, Jablon demonstrating how African American artists since the sixties have written about the “thematization of art,” revised the trajectory of the künstlerroman, practiced and shown the limits of intertextuality, employed the oral tradition to exemplify the play of voice in written texts, and transformed popular genres such as science fiction and detective novels. After an introduction in which she draws on the mainstream theories of metafiction formulated by Linda Hutcheon, William Gass, Patricia Waugh, and Mikhail Bakhtin, and then shows in what ways these theories are reconfigured by African Americanists like Deborah McDowell, Henry Louis Gates, Gwendolyn Mae Henderson, Donald Gibson, and Houston Baker, Jablon turns to extended readings of ten novels that exemplify the five techniques of Black metafiction. She reads Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and Alice Walker’s Temple of My Familiar as expressions of artistic self-consciousness in which the characters who are artists represent “black metafictionists” and the artistic process itself becomes a metaphor for African American self-fashioning. Rita Dove’s Through the Ivory Gate and Arthur Flower’s [End Page 503] Another Good Loving Blues are texts that redefine the künstlerroman’s conception of who can be an artist and what constitutes conflict. Taking as her exemplary texts Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, Jablon shows how contemporary African American texts revise and rewrite their predecessor texts (for A Lesson it is Native Son, for Tar Baby, the mythic folktale and Their Eyes Were Watching God). Charlotte Watson-Sherman’s...

Blacks and Jews in literary conversation

Introduction 1. Mutual textual criticism of Black-Jewish Identity 2. Crisis and commentary in African-Jewish American relations 3. Race, homeland, and the construction of Jewish American identity 4. Cultural autonomy, supersessionism, and the Jew in African American fiction 5. 'The anguish of the other' On the mutual displacements, appropriations, and accomodations of culture.

Chesnutt’s Piazza Tales: Architecture, Race, and Memory in the Conjure Stories

Chesnutt’s Piazza Tales: Architecture, Race, and Memory in the Conjure Stories William Gleason* (bio) Architecture is not simply a mechanical contrivance but an essay in the art of communication, a complex web of memories and messages. —J. Mordaunt Crook, The Dilemma of Style 1 When Charles W. Chesnutt surveyed his literary prospects in the fall of 1889, he had every reason to be optimistic. In the previous two years Chesnutt had placed three of his conjure (or “Uncle Julius”) tales in the Atlantic Monthly, becoming the first African American fiction writer to be published by such an influential arbiter of national taste. During the same period, he had struck up fruitful correspondences with Albion Tourgée and George Washington Cable, prominent white authors and social reformers who read and commented favorably on Chesnutt’s work. New stories, including the beginning of a first novel, were flowing from Chesnutt’s pen, and a fourth conjure tale was about to appear in the Overland Monthly. Feeling sure of his talent and connections—but also ambivalent about the imaginative and professional constraints that continuing in the Uncle Julius “plantation school” vein might impose—Chesnutt plotted the next steps of his career. First, he would publish a collection of his stories, gathering the Atlantic tales together with a selection of his non-dialect work to make a book. Then he would stop writing conjure tales altogether and concentrate instead on more up-to-date representations of the American [End Page 33] color line. As Chesnutt explained to Tourgée that September, “I think I have about used up the old Negro who serves as a mouthpiece, and I shall drop him in future stories, as well as much of the dialect.” 2 Uncle Julius would thus help facilitate Chesnutt’s arrival as a book author—and then disappear. But the book that Chesnutt proposed never materialized. As critics like Richard Brodhead have shown, in the wake of that optimistic fall of 1889, Chesnutt encountered a period of “literary blockage,” not consolidated success, as white editors—even at Houghton Mifflin, the parent house of the Atlantic—rejected not only Chesnutt’s proposed collection but more signally (and despite multiple revisions) the new color line story into which he poured much of his post-1889 energy, “Rena Walden.” 3 It was not until 1898, nearly ten years later, that Chesnutt would finally strike his “entering wedge” into the literary world, although not in precisely the fashion he had imagined. For after reading through yet another of Chesnutt’s story collections, Atlantic editor Walter Hines Page decided in March 1898 to commission more “‘cunjure’ stories” to fill out a possible book of North Carolina dialect tales. Chesnutt quickly complied, hammering out six tales in seven weeks, four of which Page then matched with Chesnutt’s original Atlantic stories to make The Conjure Woman, which would appear to strong reviews in 1899. The irony here, of course, as Brodhead has aptly remarked, is that Chesnutt’s success would come only through a return to the same plantation genre—and its “preferred fictions of racial life”—that he had earlier sought to leave behind. 4 Chesnutt would have his collection, but he would have to resurrect Uncle Julius to do so. But in fact, Chesnutt had not stopped writing Julius tales at all. Three times during his “blocked” decade—and well before Page’s commission—Chesnutt turned of his own accord back to the plantation tale, to dialect, and to Uncle Julius. Why would the calculating author revisit a supposedly “used up” genre? Not, as one might imagine, in anticipatory deference to a proposition like Page’s. Chesnutt did so, I argue, in order to explore in more detail what he found he had not “used up” in the earlier Julius stories: what we might call (following Dell Upton) the “social experience” of American architecture. 5 For what we discover when we look closely at the second phase of Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius stories—the three pieces written between his 1889 letter to Tourgée and the 1898 summons from Page—is that the meticulously framed conjure tales offered Chesnutt a surprisingly versatile form through which to [End...

"Nothing Was Lost in the Masquerade": The Protean Performance of Genre and Identity in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale

As many times as we reopen slavery's closure, we are hurtled rapidly forward into dizzying motions of symbolic enterprise, and it becomes increasingly clear that cultural synthesis we call slavery was never homogeneous in its practices and conception, nor unitary in faces it has yielded. But to behave as if it were so matches precisely telos of African persons in United States.... The collective and individual reinvention of discourse of slavery is, therefore, nothing other than an attempt to restore to spatio-temporal object its eminent historicity, to evoke person/persona in place of shady ideal. (Spillers, Changing Letter 29) In his novel Oxherding Tale (1982), Charles Johnson reopens slavery's closure through his reclamation of nineteenth-century slave narrative. In so doing, he undermines static formulations of literature, history, and identity: Viewing each account as potentially mutable rendering of and being, he limns their transformative through performative poetics. Just as Spillers posits slavery's closure as point of departure for recovery of that institution's complex historicity, Johnson deploys seemingly fixed categories of identity and genre in order to overturn deterministic models of being. Specifically, his enslaved, biracial protagonist Andrew Hawkins can only achieve emancipation by comprehending his own subjectivity as multiple, as heterogeneously constructed out of interstices between house and field, and white and black. In keeping with this new understanding, Andrew in his role as narrator must also transcend perspective and confines of traditional autobiography in order to enact first-person universal. By extension, Johnson forces his readers to confront limitations of conventional, realist reading method (as he calls it, a heavily conditioned seeing), proposing as an alterna- tive more liberated mode of readership (Being 5). Thus, Johnson seizes discursive aspect of slavery's displaced person(s)/persona(s): Refusing to fix subject, he instead conceives of personhood as effect of reiterative and citational practice, as palimpsest of performances. In both Johnson's philosophical fictions and his philosophy of fiction, he interrogates questions of subjectivity in relation to language and literary form. As he states in his phenomenological treatise on African-American fiction Being and Race (1988), he reserves his greatest respect for the protean writer, performer . . . who slides from genre to genre, style to style, leaving his or her distinctive signature on each form lovingly transfigured and pushed toward new possibilities (53). Here, Johnson challenges orthodoxy that impels black writers to adhere to realism as primary literary mode. Rejecting what he deems calcified vision, Johnson cautions writer against adopting preestablished models . . . for our experience, or for any experience (7). Instead, he calls for African-American writer to grapple with perceptual flux of that characterizes black world - and all worlds - to originate new meaning (15). In Johnson's view, then, good fiction should not only transgress generic boundaries, but it should also strategically stage these traversals in service of liberty for benefit of reader and writer. Using his principles to guide my own critique, I read Oxherding Tale as text which performs myriad versions of genre and identity in order to attain ontological and narrative freedom. As post-modern subversion of classical American slave narrative with resonances of an Eastern parable, novel exemplifies Johnson's own protean dictate[middle dot] By reiterating and mimicking these disparate literary traditions, Johnson invents his characters through complex citational process which allows him to critique notions of authenticity and essentialism and to negotiate new constructions of personhood (Parker and Sedgwick 2). …