African American Texts Research Articles

The Literary Theory of American Afro-centrism

The Literary Theory of American Afro-centrism Xiomara Santamarina (bio) For those new to Henry Louis Gates’s landmark monograph, the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of The Signifying Monkey offers a bewildering editorial apparatus. The anniversary edition includes two prefaces, one original and one new; an original introduction and a new one; and finally, an epilogue—really an imprimatur—by W. J. T. Mitchell, the editor of Critical Inquiry, a journal for the academy’s all-stars. If this overdetermined layering of commentary doesn’t offer an example of “signifyin(g)” it’s hard to see what does. Representing classic Gates virtuoso volubility, the editorial material ranges across many genres: a conversion narrative, a bildungsroman, a memoir of institutional enterprise, and an aesthetic manifesto. Planting his explorer flag with zeal and conviction, Gates reaches the heights not of the North Pole but of formalist race theory. Signifying Monkey broke new ground when it appeared in 1988. It made visible a wide historical range of early, unknown texts by African American authors along with extensive readings of more familiar authors, like Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. Gates’s linking of early authors to modern authors was highly generative: building on the earlier work on slave narratives by Frances Smith Foster, Robert Step-toe, and others, he challenged the omission of nineteenth-century texts from discussions of black literature by putting these in conversation with twentieth-century African American literature and theory. In so doing, Gates sought to carve a new route in literary criticism, intending to sail clear of the Scylla and Charybdis of competing Eurocentrist and Afro-centrist literary theories of race difference. The “blackness of black texts” he asserted, was indigenous to and constitutive of a “tradition” anchored in the vernacular of black wordplay, parody, and critique known as “Signifyin(g)” (132). By yoking a distinct, black vernacular to then-prominent deconstruction theory Gates appeared to bridge the divide that kept black [End Page 855] literary theory invisible to the academy at large. If theory, according to Jonathan Culler, can be described as “[the] pugnacious critique of common sense” (4), signifying appeared to be a classic application of the practice. But Gates’s effort to theorize black authors’ Bloomian anxiety about earlier African American texts points tellingly to his own anxiety about his role during the prominence of critical literary theory in the 1980s and ’90s. As he recalls about the institutional culture of English departments at that time, “Our burden was that we had to represent the tradition, in our writings and in our persons, in our comportment and in our demeanor, as members of the faculties of English and American studies departments, to show skeptics that ‘our’ literature was just as complex as theirs, the literature that had been created by white males” (xiv). This imperative to personally represent the race—as “complex,” no less—extended to the conditions of entry for the study of black literature. If African American literature was devalued and seen as transparent, it wasn’t because the methods and ideologies of literary study in the academy were founded in structures of white race privilege (and class); Gates attributed the invisibility of a black literary tradition to a “lack of sophisticated scholarly attention to it” (xxii). His was a rectifying effort “to lift the discourse of Signifyin(g) from the vernacular to the discourse of literary criticism” (xxi). With this formulation Gates invoked a key metaphor from the late nineteenth-century black elite ideology of “uplift” that was the backbone of a middle-class black Talented Tenth’s “civilizing mission” (Gaines 14). Notwithstanding these conservative class politics it did appear that African American literary critics had to be inside the academy in order for black literature to be respected. As to his motivation, in his new introduction Gates recalls wondering “if [Africans] had been theorizing about their aesthetic practices and principles all along, as Europeans had” (xi). Notwithstanding the discovery of an African trope of origin narrativized outside of Western time, the search for a “signifying” trope remained ironically anchored to an Anglo-European consensus that inescapably figured African Americanist theory in relation to its belatedness. Today we could describe...

Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature by Jodi Eichler-Levine (review)

Reviewed by: Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature by Jodi Eichler-Levine Amy Fish (bio) Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature, by Jodi Eichler-Levine. New York: New York UP, 2013. Biblical tropes in American literature are so frequent and well established that they may fade into the critical background. Jodi Eichler-Levine’s book reevaluates the persistence and implications of biblical narratives, particularly stories of chosenness and redemptive sacrifice, in stories told to children. Suffer the Little Children emerges from a question posed by Jewish American author Maurice Sendak: “We were the ‘chosen people,’ chosen to be killed?” (qtd. in xiii). Narratives of chosenness give suffering a telos; they turn senseless killings into redemptive sacrifice. Since children are the telos of a community, stories for [End Page 286] children play a key role in narrating violence as chosenness—even as those stories turn the children lost along the way into sacrificial offerings in an Abrahamic mode. Eichler-Levine’s book locates this dynamic in best-selling and prize-winning contemporary children’s books, along with a few influential and still popular postwar texts; while occasionally touching on illustrations, her analysis focuses on written evidence. She argues that “Jewish Americans, African Americans, and black Jews all claim American chosenness by structuring their children’s literature into redemptive, sacrificially driven narratives” (xiii) that conform to “white Protestant mythologies of pilgrim voyages, pioneer crossings, and pseudo-Abrahamic sacrifices of children” (xvi). Explicitly and implicitly religious framings of violence use children, dead and alive, to reconcile racial or ethnic strangeness with US civic belonging, presenting identities “that can be understood according to overarching white Protestant notions of properly contained religiosity and domestic respectability” (xiii). Comparing and connecting Jewish American, African American, and black Jewish texts—these intentionally loose labels referring to the identities of authors or characters—Eichler-Levine applies existing literary and historical scholarship on black-Jewish relations and comparisons to the field of children’s literature. This study builds on work on the racial politics of childhood innocence, seeing the “discourse around young people and their literatures” as “full of attempted harmony” and suppressed differences (xix). Eichler-Levine also asserts the importance of a biblical perspective on American children’s texts and the inherent religiosity of a genre that represents children to remember the past as it speaks to child readers to build the future. The first chapter, “Remembering the Way into Membership,” opens with stories of the American Revolution to establish that “a willingness to sacrifice one’s own life for others’ becomes a way for minorities to remember their way into civic membership” (1). The pairing of Crispus Attucks biographies from 1965 and 2003, both focusing on Attucks’s childhood and celebrating the equating of his childhood enslavement with “taxation without representation,” drives home not only the persistence of figuring citizenship through sacrifice but also the retrenching of that idea through post-9/11 military patriotism. Similarly, both 1950s and contemporary Hanukkah stories present the Maccabees as the ultimate freedom fighters and thus ideal citizens, even proto-Americans. Stephen Krensky’s Hanukkah at Valley Forge (2006), in which George Washington encounters a Jewish soldier lighting candles, learns [End Page 287] about Hanukkah, and deems it suitably Revolutionary, exemplifies the American children’s book as “literary loyalty test” (10). This pattern extends to stories of African American and Jewish American sacrifices in the two world wars. Sacrifice and suffering can also tie communities to each other, as in Jewish American participation in black civil rights struggles. As Good as Anybody: Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom, by Richard Michelson (2008), roots the two leaders’ activism and cross-racial understanding in their parallel experiences of childhood suffering. At the same time, As Good as Anybody, which “is written by a Jewish author and has garnered its greatest attention from the Jewish community” (17), exemplifies for Eichler-Levine the tendency of Jews, more than African Americans, to show nostalgia for past black-Jewish friendships and longing to, in Michelson’s words, “heal the rift...

Transcultural Theory and Black Males

Non-American readers perceive canonical American texts differently than do Americans. This is especially true in the Chinese and Indian perceptions of African American texts from the 1960s. Some big-name critics I have been reading over the past few years assert that as an area of English studies is dead - pointless in its own solipsism - or ended, as Jonathan Culler and others have written. Houston Baker, in his latest book Betrayal, seems to express that, while theory is not dead, it is pointless unless it embraces key current social issues. Baker, as an original member of the New Black Aesthetic Critics, should be expected to posit a humanistic center to his theories; to his credit, he has not changed that opinion in fifty years. Indeed, the positing of the human and human concerns at the core of original and New Black Aesthetic Criticism is one of the key reasons this school of criticism was shunned by Yale and its Structuralism at the same time (early 1970s). English studies were not only controlled and garrisoned by Anglophiles and Francophiles, they were desperate from 1965 (J. L. Austin's Speech Act theory) to 1979 (the high water years of Structuralism (especially Giroud) and Deconstruction (especially Foucault)) to turn itself into an algorithm so that it could compete with its affiliates in the hard and applied sciences for funding. To say that academic theory failed miserably in its attempt to become relevant and funded by a government that could not spell deconstruction, much less understand the theories, is telling only the more obvious part of our last fifty years of theory in the Academy.

Sara Baartman and the “Inclusive Exclusions” of Neoliberalism

Abstract This essay examines three African-American feminist texts—Elizabeth Alexander's “The Venus Hottentot,” Barbara Chase-Riboud's Hottentot Venus, and Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus. In their nuanced critiques of the sovereign power of neoliberalism as both a sociopolitical and a discursive condition, that is, as what Foucault calls a biopolitics, these texts represent a feminist cultural activism that challenges the hegemonic forms of neoliberalism and transnational market relations. Despite their apparent focus on African-American women's bodies and their exploitation and instrumentalization, what is additionally meaningful in these texts is that the more recent history of globalization to which women are subjected under late capitalism—a history within and on which these texts and their writers work—is shown to be coextensive (although not homologous) with the history of imperialism that made it possible in the first place to mark out a place for a Sara Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus) in nascent capitalist relations and forces of production and in the early colonization of southern Africa. In their nonreferential literary representations of twentieth-century neoliberalism, Alexander, Parks, and Chase-Riboud give readers a marginal subject, “Sara Baartman,” who serves not simply as an icon of sexual difference between white and black, as some critics have argued, but as an economic placeholder for these interrelated nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic and social histories.

Reading Will Make You Queer: Gender Inversion and Racial Leadership in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem

Reading Will Make You QueerGender Inversion and Racial Leadership in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem Charles I. Nero (bio) In her neo-slavery novel72 Hour Hold, the popular and best-selling writer Bebe Moore Campbell included a subplot about a character PJ, a brainy, reclusive middle-class African American teenager who reads constantly and excels at word games.1 Other characters worry that PJ is harboring a dark secret. Eventually, PJ “comes out” and announces to his family that he is gay! What grabbed my attention about this subplot is absence—Campbell’s novel contains neither a scene in which the teenager has sex with another male nor one in which she reveals the character’s homosexual desire through dreams or furtive crushes on other boys. I am intrigued by the fact that Campbell used a preoccupation with reading to signal to her readers that this character was harboring a secret that would cause turmoil within his family. Campbell’s strategy that “reading” is related to or a sign of being queer is what I address in this essay. Reading in African American literature and culture can make you queer. My use of queer follows definitions such as Michael Warner’s in the introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet where he positions queer in relation to regimes of heteronormativity that have the benefit “of pointing out a wide field of normalization” as a site of conformity and oppression that includes, yet goes beyond gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender inquiries.2 Anne Herrman reaches a similar conclusion in Queering the Moderns when she comments that “[q]ueerness is less about object choice than about the recognition on the part of others that one is not like others, a subject out of order, not in sequence, not working.”3 Queerness indicates a wide range of nonconforming and nonnormative behaviors in which sexuality, gender, and race intersect. [End Page 74] Blacked Out, a study about racial identity and academic success among high school students in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, provides a useful example of the belief among African Americans that reading can make you queer. In Blacked Out, Signithia Fordham revealed that it was fairly typical among high school boys to fear being labeled a “brainiac,” the guy more comfortable with books and studies than with his fellow peers. One student who admitted to being a brainiac felt a strong need to delineate the difference between those like himself and so-called “pervert brainiacs,” whom he defined as homosexuals. Fordham explains that in the adolescent perspective of the African American students at Capital High, the homosexual is the figure for the queer because homosexuality is perceived as a “loss of gender integrity.”4 Student’s careful delineation of “brainiacs” and “pervert brainiacs” reveals, Fordham continues, that “one of the central reasons why the male students at Capital [High School] are fearful of the pursuit of academic excellence . . . [is] they fear being labeled gay,” an identity beyond the boundaries of acceptable African American masculinity.5 For the male students at Capital High, being gay means a complete loss of racial and gender identity, or to rephrase Anne Herrman, one is a black male lacking the racial and gender components that make up an identity as an African American man. A focus of my research has been to find a language for talking about male queerness in black and African American texts. This essay continues that discussion of theorizing about queer masculinity in literary texts by paying attention to sex theories of the early twentieth century and considering how African American writers used them. This essay explores, more specifically, gender inversion in Home to Harlem (1928) by Claude McKay. Gender inversion was the precursor to modern homosexuality; medical science of the time explained that same-sex desire was the result of an individual having the psyche or soul of the opposite gender.6 In this essay I explore how McKay used gender inversion as a marker for becoming a man of culture and a race leader. In McKay’s Home to Harlem, the Haitian student Ray spends his time reading books, elicits erotic desire from the...

The Cartography of Memory: An Ecocritical Reading of Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

As reader, I have traveled with Toni Morrison. I have gone to Shalimar, Virginia, to Lorain, Ohio, to Ruby, Oklahoma to Danville, Pennsylvania. I have journeyed to City, Bottom, Sweet Home, Isle des Chevaliers, Solomon's Leap, and Up Beach. I have visited 124 Bluestone Road, One Monarch Street, Not Doctor Street, Lenox Avenue, Convent, L'Arbe de la Croix. And in summer of 2008, I went with Toni Morrison and The Toni Morrison Society to Sullivan's Island. We journeyed to Low Country to place commemorative bench on shore where nearly half of all those who survived middle passage first set foot on American soil. The Society's by Project was sparked by Morrison's contention that nation is bereft of African American monuments: There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower, there's no small bench by road (A Bench by Road 4). That Society chose Sullivan's Island as first inscription of that vision--the bench facing Atlantic with Africa behind it--elucidates coastal Sea Islands as an where place, water, and memory converge. In ceremony where libations were poured and wreaths offered to Charleston harbor, Morrison claimed: It's never too late to honor dead. Responding to Morrison's call by creating an outdoor memorial, Society implicitly recognized natural world as repository of African American cultural and literary history, an important gesture insofar as ecocriticism defined broadly as study of relationship between literature and physical environment (Glotfelty vxiii)--has routinely excluded African American history and texts. Ecocriticism was initially confined to Romantic poetry, wilderness narrative and nature by British and American authors (Garrard 4). As Deming and Savoy aver, [b]oth scientific and literary writing about nature, as traditionally defined, have not emphasized cultural difference as tool for seeing nature, place, and environment (5), and thus ecocritical analysis has largely been circumscribed to work of Anglo writers. By contrast, African American literary tradition situates place as politically charged topography, recognizing interwoven fabric of nature and culture (Deming and Savoy 14). (1) Including African American texts in canon of environmental literature expands contours of nature writing by reflecting natural world in culturally specific ways: Contemporary nature writing has moved beyond narratives of solitary encounter in wild to explore how people and cultures have been shaped by and have shaped (Deming and Savoy 6). This current trend finds an earlier analogue in work of African American writers, who persistently attended to their physical environments; indeed, slave narratives are deeply situated in place, for geography was definitive factor in determining free and slave status. In this way, navigation of environment--woods, swamps, and rivers constitutes major narrative event. Thus, encounters with nature--whether in form of rivers marking Mason-Dixon line, cosmos guiding way to freer landscapes, migrating birds flying north in summer, or moss growing on north side of tree trunks--underscore complex interweaving of freedom and slavery, as mapped onto social and physical topographies in slave narratives. Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is illustrative of contemporary African American ecocritical narrative insofar as memory, in novel, is written on water, humans, and land. In this way, representation of nature in novel is not as a pristine external scene but marriage of place with lives that have lived in it (Deming and Savoy 4). Specifically, Shange turns to environment--the Atlantic Ocean, Sea Islands, plants, and herbs--in her characterization of Indigo, central character in novel who is repeatedly elided with Southern coastal climate: she is sapling who is embraced by weeping willows; the land and salt-winds moved her through Charleston streets, and she has tough winding branches growing from her braids, deep green leaves rustling by her ears (4). …

Confronting The Stone Face : The Critical Cosmopolitanism of William Gardner Smith

In one of key moments of William Gardner Smith's 1963 novel The Stone Face, African American expatriate Simeon Brown passes near Odeon metro station in Paris when he is hailed by a man speaking in thickly accented English. Hey, stranger shouts, How it feel to be a man? (Stone Face 55). Simeon is startled at this outburst, and by laughter of shouter's companions. After all, he is visibly black, and four men who are heckling him are light-skinned Algerians. However, although label seems absurd to him, he recognizes almost instantly that it is true: here, in Paris of early 1960s, he is indeed enjoying, in spite of his skin color, privileges of a man, and it is Algerian minority that takes place of, as one of them puts it, the niggers (57). Simeon is deeply shocked at this realization, which at once destroys illusion of a racial paradise with which Paris so far seemed to present him. The fate of Algerians in France, he suddenly understands, is different but at same time similar to fate of African Americans in segregated United States; while he himself, as a black American, might be safe and free in Paris, others are not. Simeon's painful recognition about omnipresence of racism and oppression mirrors that of novel's author, who made similar experiences and came to similar insights as a black American expatriate in France during 1950s and '60s. Once believed to be on verge of a great literary career, William Gardner Smith faded into obscurity after his death, and his work has received very little attention over years from scholars of African American literature. His biographer LeRoy Hodges noted in 1985 that Smith was--unjustly--considered a minor writer with a marginal creative output (i), and despite Hodges's efforts, little has changed since then. However, Smith's work--and particularly his fourth and final novel The Stone Face--deserves more scholarly attention, as Michel Fabre, Paul Gilroy, and Tyler Stovall all have pointed out. (1) Not only is novel one of few African American texts dealing with complicated relationship of black U. S. community in Paris to so-called Algerian question; it is also an impressive exploration of difficulties and complexities of intercultural understanding, and of ways that cosmopolitan sentiments and attitudes are produced and expressed. Smith's protagonist Simeon starts out as a man habituated to American patterns of racism, haunted by his memories of violence and abuse, and rather oblivious to French racialization and discrimination of Algerians. In course of story, however, and as a result of his encounters with people he learns to care for, Simeon comes to understand that inhuman stone face of racism--which gives novel its title--is universal, even if its colors and features vary as much as those of its victims. Simeon's reaction to this realization is to change his understanding of France as a racism-free space and to give up his privileged position as a white man. Newly politicized, he begins to actively support Algerian liberation struggle, and, at end of novel, decides to return to U. S. to support civil rights movement there. This final moment of homecoming, Simeon's apparent abandonment of a political conflict in exile in favor of what seems to be a more domestic national struggle, is what Paul Gilroy, in Against Race (2000), has termed a capitulation to demands of a narrow version of cultural kinship (323). In Gilroy's view, Smith's choice to send his protagonist home to African America significantly damages what is otherwise a powerful story about cosmopolitan personal expansion and universal political commitment. For this reason, Gilroy insists, novel does not measure up to best historical examples yielded by actual black Atlantic itinerants whose lives might be used today to affirm other, more timely and rewarding choices (324). …

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative

Reviewed by: American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative Matthew Teutsch (bio) Martin, Robert K., and Eric Savoy, eds. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1998. In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, editors Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy attempt to, as Martin points out in the introduction, construct a book that “approaches the persistence of the gothic in American culture not by seeking historical comprehensivity or even critical consensus but . . . by providing a composite of ‘interventions’ that explore specific issues . . . in order to advance particular and distinct theoretical [End Page 301] paradigms” (vii). To this end, the essays found in American Gothic draw upon psychoanalysis, revisionist historiography, and other theoretical schools; these various methods converge to create “the matrix of ‘work’ on the gothic in the postmodern moment” (ix). This intermingling of theories creates some enlightening chapters on the historical framing of the gothic, psychoanalysis, race, gender, and the postmodern gothic. Before examining the psychological, racial, gender, and postmodern aspects of the American gothic, the book contains a section of three essays that work to outline the gothic: “Framing the Gothic: Theories and Histories.” In “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic,” Savoy traces the critical history of the American gothic from Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel through the works of Maggie Kilgour, Anne Williams, and Louis S. Gross; Savoy’s path eventually leads him to argue that the American gothic is “a tropic field that approaches allegory: the gothic is most powerful, and most distinctly American, when it strains towards allegorical translucency” (5–6). The American gothic, as Williams says, is ultimately “complex,” drawing upon history, psychology, language, and architecture. The other two essays in the introductory section, William Veeder’s “The Nurture of the Gothic, or How Can a Text Be Both Popular and Subversive?” and Maggie Kilgour’s “Dr. Frankenstein Meets Dr. Freud,” both focus on the psychological aspects of the gothic. Veeder centers on the gothic’s “commitment to the simultaneous exploration of inner and outer, the psychological and the social” (22), and more importantly, explores the ideas of sexual repression put forward by Foucault. In her essay, Kilgour argues that the gothic and analysis both “reveal the dark truth that the autonomous subject is not a unified whole but fragmented and dismembered, internally ruptured so that it is alienated not only from nature and others but from itself” (41). Kilgour works this doubling out and uses it to examine the novel and movie adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs. The framing essays do an adequate job of centering the essays that follow throughout the rest of the book, providing a historical discussion of the gothic, which could be more in depth, and an investigation of specific psychological ideas that have been, and are, used to examine gothic texts. While the essays collected in American Gothic provide insights into the gothic in American literature and culture, the collection fails to cultivate fertile ground within the discussion of race. The back matter states: “Special attention is paid to the issues of slavery and race in both black and white texts, including those by Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner.” Essays do focus on “slavery and race”; however, African American texts make up a miniscule amount of the overall work. No essays focus on the works of Ralph Ellison; in fact, he only appears twice in the book. Otherwise, the discussion of race in the American gothic focuses on works by Poe, Hawthorne, and Faulkner. The only in-depth examination of a “black” text comes courtesy of George Piggford’s “Looking into Black Skulls: American Gothic, The Revolutionary Theatre, and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman.” Piggford’s essay justifies reading Baraka’s play as a gothic text by confronting three reasons why it would not be read as a gothic work: the inversion of Leslie Fiedler’s trope of blackness, Fiedler’s view that only fiction elevates the American gothic to a high cultural level, and critics’ arguments that Baraka’s play has a strong “emphasis on polemics over aesthetics” (144). Ultimately, Piggford asserts that in...

New World A-Coming: African American Documentary Intertexts of the Federal Writers’ Project

In the twentieth century prior to the Depression, Harlem was defined by turns as the incubator for cultural uplift and the launching pad for black nationalism, a separate sphere for African Americans and the playground of both white and black leisure classes. At the end of the 1930s, however, a new set of contradictory terms emerged reflecting the uncertain future of Harlem. New Deal cultural programs portrayed the neighborhood as a slum, shaping a growing narrative of ghettoization that would be advanced in texts like Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) and St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945). This portrayal somewhat ironically paved the way for New Deal texts to invoke Harlem's reform as the keystone for an emergent progressive national community. The New Deal's Federal Writers' Project (FWP) guidebooks to New York City offered a powerful image of African American inclusion in the national community through New Deal-initiated urban reform. In so doing, they promoted Harlem as a showcase for their efforts. Although the overall framing of the guidebooks worked to ensure that the reader would see New Deal housing and social initiatives as markers of an inclusive community, the materials on Harlem, written primarily by black authors, suggested no small degree of worry. In the final words of one FWP essay on Harlem, of tragic premonition hovered over the African American experience, intimating the skepticism many African Americans felt about the actual likelihood of social and economic inclusion in this modernized national community (FWP, Panorama 151). These shadows would emerge more clearly still in the 1940s legacy of the FWP, as documentary texts by black writers who had formerly worked for the Writers' Project questioned both its hopeful vision and the national government's resolve to address racial injustice. Several African American documentary texts written for a public audience in the 1940s, including Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices and Roi Ottley's New World-A-Coming, explored national welfare through a consideration of Harlem as the New Deal made way for wartime priorities. These texts lay at the intersection of several discussions of New Deal culture: the relationship between federal arts patronage and other cultural projects of the era, the growth of the documentary aesthetic, the politics of spatial and racial representation, and African American views of New Deal nationalism. However, critics have not given them enough attention to draw out the relationships among these discussions. Ottley and Wright drew on narrative strategies and textual elements of New Deal documentary projects to discuss Harlem's problems. However, they advanced competing understandings of urban culture and community, drawing on the growing discourse of racial nationalism to clarify the stakes of lingering injustice. (1) Wright rejected Harlem's status as a unique enclave and contested the New Deal's futurological discourse of state-sponsored spatial and community reform with an imagined cross-class community, foregrounding racial nationalism as an important marker of blacks' claim to justice. (2) Ottley, on the other hand, presciently mapped the undercurrents of racial nationalism within Harlem politics and social life as a coherent force that threatened national stability. As intertexts of the FWP guides, these documentary texts offer modern readers concrete examples of the politics of New Deal spatial representation, showing us how rhetorical battles over particular spaces contributed to national debates over community and social justice. Critics have suggested that the FWP influenced African American literature, particularly in fostering a generation of young black writers, but few have explored this legacy in depth. (3) One approach to this issue is through a consideration of African American documentary texts. …

Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class , and: "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films , and: Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, and: "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films, and: Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture Jessica Petocz (bio) Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class by Lisa B. Thompson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009, 200 pp., $40.00 hardcover. "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films by Stephane Dunn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 192 pp., $50.00 hardcover, $20.00 paper. Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture by L. H. Stallings. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007, 334 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $9.95 on CD. Some of the most astute, moving, and well-known work in the Black feminist tradition revolves around the "problems" of Black women's sexuality—namely, the problem that others use it to play out battles over race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality and the subsequent lack of attention to their actual sexual experiences, desires, and subjectivities. Their scholarship demands that we recognize this displacement and the machinations it hides, but that we also create spaces for the enunciation and appreciation of the diversity of Black women's sexualities. Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, Tricia Rose, Cheryl Clarke, E. Francis White, Barbara Christian, Angela Davis, Cathy Cohen, Patricia Hill Collins, Ann DuCille, Evelyn Hammonds, Darlene Clark Hine, bell hooks, … their names recall incisive intellect, beautiful words, and powerful stories. Drawing upon these rich sources, three new books by emerging scholars give a sense of the depth and breadth of a field that has grown into its own. In their work, Black feminist thought is anything but provincial—instead, their attention to the lives and work of Black women revises widely held ideas about race, gender, and sexuality and their relationship to our shared social context. Rather than revise theories that do not account for race and/or gender, these books begin with a sophisticated intersectional approach as developed with Black feminist thought. Through an analysis of representation and lived experience, each author dispels hegemonic conceptions of Black women and their sexualities. They employ nuanced argumentation, historical contextualization, interdisciplinary sources, and commitment to multiple politics in order to portray sexuality as a dynamic social and psychological force. Furthermore, they refuse to privilege theory, representation, or experience, opting instead to integrate these methods. In doing so, each author makes insightful claims without erasing the contradictions within the cultural representations and lived experiences of Black women. These texts present a needed opportunity to engage with popular cultural studies from politicized perspectives without denying the pleasure they provide. In these analyses, sexuality emerges as a transfer point between different axes of [End Page 274] power and demonstrates the inextricability of the material and the discursive. As teaching texts, these books provide challenging yet accessible intersectional analyses in interdisciplinary contexts that can be incorporated into courses as diverse as visual literacy, hip-hop, social movements, performance studies, historical studies, folklore, literature, action films, and queer theory. For readers within these fields, the books reinvigorate longstanding debates with new questions and fresh ideas. In Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, Lisa Thompson explores the powerful role that sexuality plays in contemporary African American middle-class women's lives. Thompson situates the Black lady in an environment of impossible and disempowering demands that demonstrate "how her sexuality stands in for a host of other concerns, anxieties, and fantasies in the minds of others" (7). Against this backdrop, Beyond the Black Lady presents an affirmative account of contemporary African American women's cultural texts that present new narratives of sexual agency. As Thompson explains in the introduction, several forces align so as to elide or diminish our attention to middle-class Black women's sexuality (6–11). Yet, Beyond the Black Lady is more than straightforward restoration of their voices, for it also aims to reconceptualize how race, class, and gender are represented, performed, and lived. The book shows that, stereotypes and social pressures notwithstanding, Black middle-class women's cultural production...

Hearts of Gold (review)

Reviewed by: Hearts of Gold Phyllis Wilson Moore (bio) J. McHenry Jones, Hearts of Gold. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2010. 306 pages. Trade paperback, $22.95. One of the earliest novels published in the United States and written in English by a male African American is Hearts of Gold: A Novel. Self-published in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1896, it has been reissued by West Virginia University Press, as part of the series Regeneration: African American Literature and Culture; a dynamic series instituted primarily to reprint significant African American texts now out of print. Jones, an erudite scholar and savvy, politically-inclined educator, created his cast of characters from the black middle class, a departure from the slave narratives and biographies common in the day. His characters came in many hues, but all are intelligent, prospering, professional, educated, cultured, Afro-Americans (Jones' term). Fond of quoting Shakespeare and the Bible, they use perfect grammar and diction and posses elaborate vocabularies. The Ohio-born Jones, then a young school principal in Wheeling, West Virginia, a state below the Mason-Dixon Line, took a risk by highlighting the severe problems faced by his people in these precarious times. The novel recognizes the post-Reconstruction Era weakening of civil rights laws, persistence of unpunished lynchings, proliferation of Jim Crow laws involving voting and transportation, false imprisonment of blacks, slavery-like conditions in the penal coal mine system, and sexual harassment. The four main characters are young members of a tightly-knit community of Afro-Americans living comfortable lives in the North in an Ohio-like location a few miles from Canada. At the beginning of the novel, they attend church, help the less fortunate, join lodges, worry about racial issues, enjoy lake cruises, and fall in love. Jones goes to great lengths to describe the various skin colors of his characters. Some could pass for white (but choose not to do so), one is a red head with skin "as free of pigment as an albino's," another is a transparent shade of brown produced from "a century of miscegenation of the best blood of the Caucasian." A frequent topic of their conversation is the "race outlook" and how to influence it in a positive way. They discuss the notion, popular with some, of Africa as a homeland. In the end they agree: they are Americans, and America is their home. The beautiful heroine, Regenia, is the orphaned daughter of a mulatto slave (who escaped to Canada) and a wealthy young white woman (who followed him). Raised by her wealthy white grandmother, Regenia holds [End Page 99] a Normal School teaching certificate and is proud of her Afro-American heritage. Circumstances force her to move to Irondale, a steel mill town in "Deep Dixie," to become a teacher. Dr. Lotus Stone, an admirer, relocates there to set up his practice. They grapple with the poverty of the formerly enslaved, the lack of health facilities, and lack of school supplies. Both face daily racial discrimination. Regenia faces sexual harassment from a villainous white physician, Dr. Leighton, who has Dr. Stone falsely imprisoned and leased to a coal mine owned by a millionaire senator. In this mine, foremen work the laborers to death as it is cheaper and easier to replace dead convicts than provide care, meals, housing, and clothing to prisoners. Prisoners too weak to work are suspended by their thumbs, beaten, and endure water poured down their throats until they pass out or die from the distention. Young Dr. Stone faces a brutal existence and certain death. In true melodrama style, the story twists and turns. With Regenia's help, Clement St. John, an albino-like young editor, uses personal connections, political savvy and the power of his own newspaper in his attempt to free Dr. Stone and incite public outrage regarding the evils of the prison leasing system. Upon its publication, Heart of Gold received few reviews, and there is no indication it caused much comment. After its publication, Jones' career as an educator and political activist, already impressive, gained momentum. He became a significant figure: lodge officer, national and international speaker, highly successful president of the college that is now...

Van Thompson, Carlyle, Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption in African American Literature and Culture

Eating the Black Body is inspired by Carlyle Van Thompson’s “intellectually tenacious students at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York”, and his classes on African American Literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present (pp. v, ix). The book reflects expansive seminar discussions with critical discussions of four African American texts, Richard Wright’s “Between the world and me” (1935) in chapter two, John Oliver Killen’s Younglood (1954) in chapter three, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975) in chapter four, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) in chapter five. Chapter six finds Van Thompson turning his attention to an example of police brutality publicized in the media—the rape of Abner Louima, a Haitian-American, by two New York City police officers (Justin A. Volpe and Charles Schwarz) in Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct bathroom in 1997. Last but not least, Eating the Black Body is filmended with extended readings of Monster’s Ball (2001) in chapter one and Supernova (2000) in the conclusion. Van Thompson tries to tie together his diverse sources with a thesis that confronts the “enduring effects of the transgenerational transgression of trauma associated with some white people’s enduring desire for the Black body” (p. xi). And, when he is not summarizing his work in a tone reminiscent of Michel Eric Dyson, Van Thompson invokes the opinions of other canonical figures in African American studies such as Toni Morrison (Eating the Black Body does not have an index but the reader can find references to Morrison on pages 63, 78, 160 and 169. Morrison also has nine texts J Afr Am St (2010) 14:378–379 DOI 10.1007/s12111-010-9128-z

Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice (review)

Reviewed by: Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice Teresa A. Goddu (bio) Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice. Philadelphia March 18–20, 2010. Organized by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein and cosponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Temple University Libraries, and the University of Pennsylvania Center for Africana Studies, the conference “Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice” brought together scholars from the fields of African American literary and cultural studies and print culture studies to theorize and to map the emerging field of African American print culture.1 In joining together two “vibrant areas of American Studies scholarship” that “are rarely considered in relation to one another,” the conference explored what the questions of print culture studies—questions of the materiality, production, dissemination, and consumption of print forms—could teach us about early African American literature and how the particular examples of African American literature have “the capacity to transform our understanding of print culture.”2 While the conference focused more on the new interpretive frameworks that print culture studies can offer African American literature rather than the reverse, the conference’s uniformly strong papers (which were precirculated) and its intimate setting (all the participants attended all the sessions) allowed for a complex and wide-ranging conversation to develop over the course of the meeting. The conference—and the volume of essays that will emerge from it—mark a watershed moment in the field. Frances Smith Foster opened the conference with a keynote address that articulated the particular challenges that African American literature poses to print culture studies. Part of the reason that print culture studies has been slow to embrace African American literature is because of its incomplete and often uncertain archive. Foster noted, “With African-American [End Page 733] texts, as with other cultural materials produced by and for other devalued groups, so much has already been lost, gone astray, or been stolen that complete restoration is impossible.”3 The African American print archive is full of gaps, traces, and frustratingly partial inventories and histories. It is marked, as Joanna Brooks argued, by the “conditions of chronic discontinuity and disruption endemic to communities of color by reason of political and economic exploitation.”4 Scholars, Frances Smith Foster maintained, need to be cautious—but not stymied—when facing this fragmented archive. Rather than rush to judgment naming a text as the “first” or “the only,” scholars need to practice patience. They should also create collaborative models of scholarship that lead to cooperative ventures among themselves as well as with wider communities (everyone from the information specialist to the church secretary) and diverse archives (the online archive as well as the attic). A model of consultation, Foster contended, is crucial not only for working productively across the gaps in our communal knowledge about African American print culture and for weaving together its bits and pieces but also for processing and assimilating the rapidly mounting documents that digital archives (such as the African American newspaper collection available through Accessible Archives) are making readily available. As the conference papers made clear, the African American print archive, despite its gaps, is also robust and rich, offering a diverse body of works. Conference papers focused on a wide array of textual, visual, and material forms: poems, letters, journals, narratives, convention proceedings, and newspapers; broadsides, graphic pictorials, and wood engravings; paper, type, and book. By taking a print culture approach to African American texts, and thereby troubling the stricter category of the literary, the conference papers produced, in Eric Gardner’s words, a “wider and more varied sense of Black letters.” Most important, the conference papers moved beyond the book, the privileged form of literary studies, to address a range of textual expressions and forms. As Gardner observed, “Bound books of poetry and autobiography. . . were only part of the story of the beginnings of African American literary cultures.”5 By categorizing newspapers as nonliterary, for example, critics ignore the cache of short-form genres (everything from letters and editorials to travelogues, poetry, and historical essays) they contain. When books were addressed, the papers [End Page...

The Spirit and the Word: A Theory of Spirituality in Africana Literary Criticism, by Georgene Bess Montgomery

Reviewed by: The Spirit and the Word: A Theory of Spirituality in Africana Literary Criticism Christopher Joseph Odhiambo The Spirit and the Word: A Theory of Spirituality in Africana Literary Criticism Georgene Bess Montgomery Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, 2008. xvii + 243pp. ISBN 1-59221-567-X paper. In this project of privileging African-oriented critical paradigm, Georgene Bess Montgomery takes recourse in bricolage, reverting to Ifa divination, a spiritual ritual rooted in African cosmology mainly of the West African people. Instructive [End Page 193] to this critical reading is the realization that literary texts are a function of multiple meanings. But more significant is the author's caution that the Caribbean and African American texts subjected to this paradigm can as well be analyzed using other critical approaches: Marxism, feminism, and various inflections of postcolonial theories. However, Montgomery argues that it is only through the use of African-aligned critical paradigms such as found in Ifa divination that one can experience the more enchanting meanings of these texts. Thus, for Montgomery the history of colonialism and displacement must only be confronted through a reconnection with spiritual elements that abound in much of African and its Diasporan writing. As a bricoleur, Montgomery envisages this exploration in terms of literary archaeology—where the primary essence of her project is to excavate the African presence, survivals, and continuities in Caribbean and African American works of fiction, a quest that in some way echoes Foucault's idea of subjugated knowledge. The deployment of Ifa as a critical paradigm on Caribbean and African American texts, according to Montgomery, is not arbitrary: such texts lend themselves to its deployment through certain signatures, including use of ancestors, African traditions, religion beliefs, colors, numbers, conjures, signs, myths, legends, landscape, symbols, divination, initiation, ritual, and magic. Structurally, this book has five main chapters, excluding the introduction and conclusion. Chapter one is arguably the "soul" of this book, as it introduces and theorizes the Ifa as an emergent critical paradigm. It also rationalizes the privileging of a paradigm such as Ifa, arguing fervently that engaging with African Diasporic texts based on Western-oriented modes of spirituality hinders readers from sensing the African spirituality in such texts. The chapter, using Rosario Ferre's short story "The Youngest Doll" provides a template of how to deploy this critical paradigm. The subsequent four chapters each deploy the template variously to read Edouard Glissant's The Ripening; Merle Collin's Angel; Tina McElory Ansa's Baby of Family, and Arthur Flowers's Another Good Loving Blues. In reading these Caribbean and African American texts, Montgomery stresses that readings like these should be firmly grounded on Diaspora theory originating and informed by the "black tradition" of spirituality (3) and by the African perspective based on Braithwaite's categorization of the Diasporan literature in addition to some inflections of New Historicism. What is profound about Montgomery's book is that through the application of the Ifa paradigm, alternative ways of reading Diasporic texts that might be more illuminating are provided outside the orbit of the more "orthodox" critical paradigms. To echo Merle Collin in the introduction to the book, Montgomery's serious appreciation of the African voice and the African sensibility in the literature of the African Diaspora is welcome and a much needed addition in corpus of critical theories. It is a significant continuum of works by African and African Diasporic scholars such as Wole Soyinka, Harry Garuba, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Edward Kamau Braithwaite. [End Page 194] Christopher Joseph Odhiambo Moi University Department of African Literature, Wits University cjodhiambo@hotmail.com Copyright © 2009 Indiana University Press

Teaching Asian America in Europe: Race, Pedagogy, and Inter-Cultural Engagement

Teaching Asian America in EuropeRace, Pedagogy, and Inter-Cultural Engagement Helena Grice (bio) As a white, British woman who teaches the work of Asian American women writers, I address the two separate but interconnected questions of ethnic and racial differences, and national and cultural differences, both of which intervene in my and my students' contact with Asian American literary and cultural forms and formations, on a daily basis in the classroom. This article reflects upon the manner in which race enters pedagogy, in relation to the specific racial and geographical circumstances outlined above. Many explorations of American cultural forms by European teachers from across the Atlantic fail to explore the problematics of their own involvement and approach, and the consequence is often a lack of cultural specificity. In 1994, Asian American critic Sau-ling Wong claimed that "it certainly helps to be Asian American when one is interpreting Asian American literature," but conceded "the theoretical possibility that non-Asians can manage to do excellent criticism on Asian American literature," adding, however, that "I haven't seen a whole lot of these scholars yet." Since then, coinciding with the cultural moment that has seen a surge of interest in ethnic literatures beyond the geographical boundaries of the US, Asian American literature has been a focus of increasing interest for non-Asian, as well as non-American, scholars and teachers, myself included. Concern has been voiced in certain ethnic quarters, though, about the appropriation of ethnic literatures by Anglo teachers and critics, as well as the perils of misreading such texts. An important difference in the positions of Asian American and Anglo/European critics and readers respectively vis-à-vis Asian American studies is that the Asian American critic/reader will always be in a position of noticeable advantage in the study of Asian America. S/he possesses an easy familiarity with particular linguistic and cultural nuances and idioms, and is likely to be able to draw upon a "fund" of comparable daily experience. Indeed, and as one would expect, the literary representations and traditions of Asian America are firmly rooted in the lived experience of Asian Americans. Ethnic and racial differences operate through highlighting divisions between some individuals and by stressing connections with others. Any attempt to read and reach across these differences entails a recognition and understanding of these dynamics. Within the field of African American studies, Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Patricia Redmond have offered an especially useful discussion of the politics of white participation in the study of African American texts. They posit the necessity of "earned participation" of white critics in what is still an "evolving work." Such earned involvement would include the development of the disciplinary field through "laborious research, ample scholarly production and demonstrable commitment" in such a way as to "keep alive always both the community itself and questions of its definition at any given moment." Elizabeth Abel puts this well: If we produce our readings cautiously and locate them in a self-conscious and self-critical relation to black feminist criticism, these risks, I hope, would be counterbalanced by the benefits of broadening the spectrum of interpretation, illuminating the social determinants of reading, and deepening our recognition of our racial selves and the "others" we fantasmatically construct—and thereby expanding the possibilities of dialogue across as well as about racial boundaries. Abel's model of self-reflexive reading includes the recognition of our "racial selves" and the avoidance of implicit "othering" produced by a white reading strategy which fails to acknowledge the importance of race in white reading. The ways in which race enters into white reading are complex, and Abel concludes that there is no unproblematic grounding for white readers which displaces the politics of race, so self-reflexivity is necessary as a means of recognizing whiteness as both a standpoint and as a set of cultural practices. Yet, I would contend that white self-criticism may be able to offer a useful contribution to the study of black and ethnic texts by serving to endorse the racialization of whiteness and to emphasise the role of race in the reading process. One Asian American critic who has broached this subject at some...

Callin’ out around the world: Isaac Julien's new ethnicities

This essay addresses the role of African American culture in the work of filmmaker and installation artist Isaac Julien. Focusing on the films Looking for Langston: A Meditation on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance (1989) and Baadasssss Cinema: A Bold Look at 70s Blaxploitation Films (2002) and the installation Baltimore (2003), I look at the ways that Julien's excavation of African American texts and traditions underwrites his eclectic auto/biographical – auto-ethnographic, auto-genealogical – project. First, I discuss the representation of Langston Hughes and the recovery of the interracial queer eroticism of the Harlem Renaissance in Looking for Langston. Next, I examine the treatment in Baadassss Cinema and Baltimore of 1970s blaxploitation cinema as a genre that resists the sanctioned versions of African American history and culture canonized in the Civil Rights movement, on the one hand, and Baltimore's Great Blacks in Wax Museum, on the other. Throughout, I suggest, Julien finds in the lives and work of African American writers and artists a prefiguration of his own enterprise. Yet, rejecting confinement in restrictive notions of race, nationality, and sexuality, Julien represents not only African Americans such as Hughes, but also Robert Mapplethorpe, Quentin Tarantino, and the Italian Renaissance painter Fra Carnevale, among others, as symbolic parents and surrogate selves. Refashioning the work of his precursors, I argue, Julien elucidates – and queers – what Stuart Hall identifies as “new ethnicities” and fashions himself as a cosmopolitan, diasporic, postimperial British subject.

Punked for Life: Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle and Radical Black Masculinities

After a moments I'd relax and settle into a barely acceptable, simple side-to-side step, dubbed by the locals the white boy shuffle. I wasn't funky, but I was no longer disrupting the groove. (Beatty 123) I was beating Godzilla into the sea with a powerful stream of radioactive turtle piss when I awoke to find Yoshiko's index finger worming its way toward my prostate. Punked for life. (Beatty 173) Though the words of Gunnar Euripides Kaufman, the reluctant race-man protagonist of Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle, appear to be about a simple dance step meant to make the rhythmically handicapped look cool, they allude to a critique of masculinity and culture that is repeated throughout the novel. Further, as Gunnar speaks to his wife Yoshiko's wandering hand, it seems obvious that Beatty may be using his novel to suggest that black males confront and embrace alternative models of gender for their black bodies, lest they and the remainder of black America, continue to be manipulated and destroyed by the psychological impetus to claim a patriarchal legacy embedded within white supremacy. Almost a decade before Patricia Hill Collins and Mark Anthony Neal critically engaged audiences about the new and the Black Man in Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism and New Black Man, Paul Beatty hipped us to the new and radically different black masculinities with the publication of The White Boy Shuffle. Whereas Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin created twentieth-century literature invested in the fights of sons, that is, disenfranchised black male characters who sought to be a part of the U. S. by relying on tropes and privileges of masculine identity defined by white men, Paul Beatty takes a decidedly different approach with his novel The White Boy Shuffle. Beatty's novel, written at the end of the twentieth century, rejects the trajectory of native sons and masculine privilege for a postmodern option of dismantling gender hierarchies and binaries on which those trajectories relied. Notably, in the same way that Ishmael Reed utilized jes grew, mumbo jumbo, jazz, and Afrocentricity m discuss the dominance of black culture in the West, Beatty turns to suicide poems, basketball, hip hop, and the failures of black political rhetoric to highlight fundamentally different black sexual politics that could potentially disrupt the groove of white supremacy and patriarchy, save the sometimes tempting benefits of commodified blackness. In doing so, Beatty helps establish a new foundation for African American literature for the twenty-first century, one that depends upon reconsidering the importance of gender and sexuality in African American texts by and about black men. This essay argues that Paul Beatty accomplishes this feat by revisiting the traditional black public sphere and updating it in ways vitally important to contemporary black people by acknowledging the queerness of black male bodies in the U. S., and by challenging past, present, and future black political agendas that would ignore the importance of class, gender, and sexuality for a unilateral focus on race. Satirizing the Race Man: The Black Public Sphere and Masculinities Beatty's use of satire, his chosen means of critiquing gender hegemonies, is as important as the critique itself. As will be shown, satire is a vital part of the contemporary black public sphere. Darryl Dickson-Carr, in African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel, places Beatty's work alongside the likes of George Schuyler, Rudolph Fisher, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Ishmael Reed, John Oliver Killens, and Cecil Brown. Despite the differing historical politics and the stylistic ruptures and revisions of each author and their work, Dickson-Carr assesses that the commonalities and continuities of the fiction stem from a few essential characteristics: unremitting iconoclasm, criticism of the current status of African American political and cultural trends, and indictment of specifically American forms of racism (16). …

Toward a More Anatomically Complete Model of Literacy Instruction: A Focus on African American Male Adolescents and Texts

In this article, Alfred Tatum argues that the current framing of the adolescent literacy crisis fails to take into account the in-school and out-of-school challenges confronting many African American male adolescents today, particularly those growing up in high-poverty communities. Using the metaphor of literacy instruction as a human body, he argues that in the absence of sound theory about the importance of texts for African American male adolescents, even the best instructional methods will fall flat, like a body without a head. He offers a more anatomically complete model in which instructional methods are governed by theories about how literacy can help young men of color respond to their immediate contexts, and in which professional development gives legs to these methods by preparing teachers to engage all students. Finally, in a case study of one Chicago youth, Tatum illustrates both the power that relevant texts can hold for young men of color and the missed opportunities that result when students do not encounter such texts in their schools.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright: Toward an Ecocriticism of Color

W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright:Toward an Ecocriticism of Color Scott Hicks (bio) Scholars working in the field of ecocriticism in American literary studies have come to see that their most important task in the coming years is to take up and engage the cultural productions of peoples of color, especially African Americans. Such a transformation entails exploring and theorizing not just African American fictional and nonfictional narratives, but also African American critical and theoretical works that undergird and explicate other forms of cultural production. Currently, the forebearers of ecocriticism—"the study of literature as if the environment mattered" (Mazel 1)—seem to be an unassailable who's who of American nature writing: Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Rachel Carson. To this pantheon I here would like to add a couple unlikely characters—W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. For as Kathleen Wallace and Karla Armbruster rightly point out, it now behooves literary critics to "question . . . why so few African American voices are recognized as part of nature writing and ecocriticism" (2). To ignore African American voices is to risk the field's ultimate demise, as Paul Tidwell argues: In short, ecocriticism was founded on a too limited canon of writings based on too narrow a definition of nature writing . . . Ecocritics who continue to resist or reject African American concepts as foreign to their concerns risk a hardening of their developing discourse into a reactionary and racist defense of an essentialized idea of nature. ("The Blackness of the Whale") Not only must ecocritics reread the fiction of African Americans ecocritically; they must also reread African American critics and thinkers ecocritically, so that all might begin to reformulate the questions and revise the assumptions that undergird the field. Any ecocritical methodology of African American literature must necessarily entail an ecocritical analysis of foundational African American critics and thinkers—not just, and not merely, white American ones. To do so offers the potential to reread literature as if the environment mattered differently. To recuperate or claim Du Bois and Washington as environmentally conscious thinkers symbolizes an important step in beginning that transformation. Regardless of what one thinks of Washington or Du Bois, it is undeniable that these two men, in myriad ways, have framed America's twentieth-century discourse of race relations. [End Page 202] Consequently, an ecocritical analysis of Washington's Up From Slavery (1901) and Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) offers a means of deepening critical understanding of their relationship to environmental awareness, in that such consciousness participates in ecocritically reimagining subsequent African American texts. As a "case study" for such a reimagining, I turn to the prominent fiction and nonfiction of novelist, essayist, and memoirist Richard Wright. This essay begins to reconstruct a genealogy of African American ecocriticism, putting Du Bois, Washington, and Wright into creative tension in order to begin to sketch a portrait of an early twentieth-century ecocriticism of color. In so doing, it asks critics to be conscious of various environments (urban, rural, and suburban, and the miscegenation and marginalization therein) as well as be attuned to the political ramifications of social justice, justice not just for the clichéd redwoods and spotted owls, but for communities and cultures as well. The problem for ecocriticism, say some of its leading practitioners, is its fealty to what today are restrictive definitions and premises, particularly in regard to concerns of race and ethnicity—though its attention to environmental concerns in the late 1970s and early 1980s sounded a much-needed alarm about the health of the planet. As scholars such as Robert D. Bullard and Carolyn Merchant have shown since, though, environmental crises reflect, and cohere along, racial and gender lines, thus demonstrating the importance of "intersectional" ways of thinking "green"—with race and racism a critical axis. Such an attention to race demands a reconfigured consciousness of both the cultural and the political expressions of environmentalism—and such a reconfiguration requires ecocriticism's practitioners to rethink their conceptualizations of environmentalism. Said John Elder at the 1995 conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, "Just as...

Pauline Hopkins and Psychologies of Race

Over the last decade, scholars of American cultural studies have taken as one of its central tasks identification of the ways in which Anglo-American writing is bound up in the African American tradition against which it had historically tended to distinguish itself. This project has involved, on the one hand, deconstructing distinctions between Afro-American and Anglo-American literary traditions and, on the other, affirming the distinctiveness of an Afro-American literary tradition by reclaiming lesser-known African American literary texts, such as Pauline Hopkins'sOf One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self. Indeed, the wealth of recent critical analyses of Pauline Hopkins's now almost canonical 1902 serial novel has engaged these two distinct lines of inquiry. By using the second half of her title as a way of understanding the first — that is, by assessing how William James's popular 1892 essay forScribner's Monthly, entitled “The Hidden Self,” operates as an organizing principle for Hopkins's fictional account of bloodlines — scholars have charted a series of interconnections between Afro-American and Anglo-American traditions even as they have made a case for the value of Hopkins's sensation novel. Familiar with James's contention that there is a “hidden self” within the individual, Hopkins, in these accounts, appropriates James's term to express the social condition of the African American after Reconstruction. Just as James's student, W. E. B. DuBois, declares in an 1897 essay for theAtlantic Monthlythat the African American experiences an inevitable “double-consciousness” proceeding from “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,” so too does Pauline Hopkins, in these accounts, use James's description of a “consciousness split into parts which coexist” as a way of expressing the psychosocial condition of late-19th-century African Americans.