African American Writers Research Articles

XVI American Literature: The Twentieth Century

AbstractThis chapter has eight sections: 1. Poetry; 2. Fiction 1900–1945; 3. Fiction since 1945; 4. Drama; 5. Comics; 6. African American Writing; 7. Native Writing; 8. Latino/a, Asian American, and General Ethnic Writing. Section 1 is by James Gifford and Margaret Konkol; section 2 is by James M. Clawson; section 3 is by Mary Foltz; section 4 is by Sophie Maruéjouls-Koch; section 5 is by Orion Ussner Kidder; section 6 will resume next year; section 7 is by James Gifford and Lindsay Parker; section 8 will resume next year.

“I Ought to Know How Negroes Talk”

The African American actor, writer, and director Spencer Williams, Jr. (1895–1969) has been the subject of a range of academic studies in recent years. Scholars have explored his pioneering work in early black film and his problematic role as “Andy Hogg Brown” in the television version of the Amos 'n' Andy radio program as a means of interpreting representations of black life within the confines of the Hollywood culture industry. This new scholarship, however, has reflected a limited and often inaccurate understanding of Williams' remarkable career. As will be discussed in this article, major events in Williams' life that have been unknown until now strongly influenced his filmmaking and his strategies to make the movie and television industries more racially inclusive. Most significantly, Williams was at different times a soldier in a segregated army unit, a convicted felon, and a committed artist and activist in Hollywood. These experiences helped to shape the themes and subject matter of his films, which ranged from religious dramas and singing cowboy westerns to backstage musicals and the first African American horror movie ever made.

Post-Racial African-American Writing in Percival Everett’s Erasure

As the voice that America now entered the postracial era came out, race was more frequently discussed in literature field. The word post-race symbolizes a shift of African-American writers’ consciousness of race and their own racial identity in their novels in the post-racial era. This paper applies Ramon Saldivar’s definition of postrace to analyze the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, the African-American writer of new generation, revealing the meaning of race for the contemporary African-American writers.

Continuing Conjure: African-Based Spiritual Traditions in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

In 2016 and 2017, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing both won the National Book Award for fiction, the first time that two African-American writers have won the award in consecutive years. This article argues that both novels invoke African-based spirituality in order to create literary sites of resistance both within the narrative of the respective novels, but also within American culture at large. By drawing on a tradition of authors using African-based spiritual practices, particularly Voodoo, hoodoo, conjure and rootwork, Whitehead and Ward enter and engage in a tradition of African American protest literature based on African spiritual traditions, and use these traditions variously, both as a tie to an originary African identity, but also as protection and a locus of resistance to an oppressive society. That the characters within the novels engage in African spiritual traditions as a means of locating a sense of “home” within an oppressive white world, despite the novels being set centuries apart, shows that these traditions provide a possibility for empowerment and protest and can act as a means for contemporary readers to address their own political and social concerns.

B(l)ack home in the Middle Ages: Medievalism in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s ‘My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein’

This essay contends that the writings of Jessie Redmon Fauset, styled the ‘midwife of the Harlem Renaissance’ by her protege Langston Hughes, reveal that one of nineteenth-century medievalism’s ghosts is the utilization of the medieval European idyll for the radically creative ends of racial justice. Focusing on one of her early short writings and taking up the critical reception of her work, including its denigration in the mid-20th century, this article examines Fauset’s uses of popular nineteenth-century medievalist literature and contextualizes it within the medievalizing discourses of her contemporaries and interlocutors. The essay argues that Fauset’s work posits a literary modernism in which medievalism is a central component that underwrites African-American writers’ claim to equal ownership of the entire American literary canon, including its supposed homogeneously white English pre-history. The article concludes that Fauset’s literary medievalism offers valuable lessons for 21st-century medievalisms’ engagements with racial ideology.

A Study on African American Female Writers’ Writing beyond the Bounds of Race and Gender through Toni Morrison’s Writing

A Study on African American Female Writers’ Writing beyond the Bounds of Race and Gender through Toni Morrison’s Writing

The Brilliant Rebel, Rebelling Against Everything: The Nonfictional Writings of Langston Hughes

ABSTRACT Langston Hughes's nonfictional writings of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were far less polemical than his more radical writings of the 1930s, but they nevertheless reveal a consistent trajectory of political engagement and demonstrate his commitment to writing as a social and socially purposeful act. Whether he is protesting the dearth of opportunities for African American writers in movies and television, the brutality against people of color during the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, or the indignities of racial segregation, Hughes also retained in his nonfictional writings some of the same traits that first endeared him to readers in the 1920s: clear, unaffected language; imagery that vividly depicted the lifestyles and concerns of common, working-class people; subtle, witty, yet sharply pointed commentary on racism and prejudice; and, finally, a generosity of spirit that encompassed all people, a true sense of wonder at the infinite varieties and possibilities of humanity.

Justice Deferred: Legal Duplicity and the Scapegoat Mentality in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Jim Crow America

Although best known as a poet, African-American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) developed a unique voice in his fiction. This article explores the bifurcation Dunbar discerned between the law as an instrument of justice and as a stabilizer of the segregationist status quo in Jim Crow America. Dunbar creates characters who are systematically scapegoated for crimes they did not commit in order to expose the law’s precarious relationship to justice. His treatment of lynching as a paradigmatic manifestation of the scapegoat mechanism links this practice to a political theory of violence, whereby the innocent are punished for the crimes of the guilty, and society requires their sacrifice in order to redeem its guilt. Without relinquishing his faith in the law, Dunbar used prose narratives to expose the disjuncture between law and justice made manifest by the US Supreme Court’s rationalization of racial discrimination in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). While considering the light Dunbar’s fictions shed on the relationship between law and justice, I locate these interventions within a longer history of thinking about the role of the writer as a scapegoat who enables society to sin without experiencing guilt.

Self-Publication, Self-Promotion, and the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave

This article sketches the early history of self-publication by African American authors and focuses on the life and work of the formerly enslaved William Grimes, who published two editions of his Life in the antebellum period. A savvy self-promoter, Grimes appropriated the ballad "Old Grimes is Dead" and marketed himself as "Old Grimes" to garner customers for his barbering and clothes cleaning business and sell copies of his book. These efforts helped Grimes realize a measure of success as a businessman and author, but the unintended consequences resulting from his self-promotion and marketing strategies highlight some of the challenges attending entrepreneurial self-publication by African American writers.

Seduction's Offspring: Resisting Sentimental Violence from Wilson to Wells

Seduction's Offspring:Resisting Sentimental Violence from Wilson to Wells Sarah Sillin (bio) The story of American sentimentalism is one of literary bequest, wherein eighteenth-century seduction novels passed an aesthetic legacy down to nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Both pervasive genres relate stories about the need for American girls to restrain their passions and feel for others, punctuated by thick descriptions of characters' affect. Given this shared emphasis on how feeling shapes local and national communities, critics often interrogate sentimentalism's politics. Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins famously debated whether the mode's valorization of suffering and sympathy proves conservative or progressive.1 Further, critics have explored the political stakes of sentimentalism's turn from seduction novels to domestic fiction and what that turn suggests about American culture. Does the shift from seduction novels' unruly desire to domestic fiction's well-regulated sympathy signal that women were gaining power to foster national cohesion (Baym)? Or did antebellum fiction perpetuate demands that women subordinate their own desires to serve the community (Barnes)? Meanwhile, Laura Romero argued that sentimental texts often integrate "radical" views (for instance, on gender or class) with "reactionary" stances (say, on race); thus, we would do well to consider how sentimentalism's turn affected various groups, such as white and black women, in disparate ways (4). In response to these uneven effects, a number of nineteenth-century writers entwine conventions of both genres to offer divergent views on sentimentalism's legacy.2 This essay argues that tensions in sentimentalism proved generative for nineteenth-century African American women writers who rethink familiar portraits of the shift from the seduction plot to domestic fiction. Prior scholarship elucidates how African American writers blend genres to create space for black voices. Slave narratives often play on sentimental conventions to claim authority for and direct readers' sympathy to enslaved peoples (F. Foster; Carby). Likewise, midcentury African American novels interweave autobiography and fiction to question whose discourse readers recognize as authentic (Andrews 24). We can see this engagement with slave narratives and sentimentalism in one of the first novels by an African American woman: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). Scholars demonstrate that Wilson draws on sentimental conventions as rewritten in slave narratives (Carby 45) to fictionalize elements of her own life via a protagonist who resembles sentimental heroines and enslaved women (Peterson). Wilson found that the "sugar-coated, wealth-bestrewn happy endings" of "white sentimental novels," "did not match [her] … constant struggle" (Gates and Wilson lix). In other words, she participates in what Lauren Berlant calls postsentimentalism: work that rethinks the mode's conventions by refusing to sublimate "subaltern struggles into conventions of narrative satisfaction and redemptive fantasy" (655). Sentimentalism often conflates all forms of pain and then redirects sympathy toward the privileged (Berlant 641). In contrast, Wilson questions whether powerful white women merit sympathy, given that claims of white moral sensibility mask antiblack violence. Beyond suggesting that the critiques that would define postsentimentalism emerged alongside sentimentalism, Wilson demonstrates that comedy can play a [End Page 277] vital role in such affective resistance. By entwining sentimental conventions with humor, she unsettles this mode's fantasy that benevolence superseded intemperate feeling. Nina Baym argues that antebellum writers of "woman's fiction" rejected sentimentalism that expressed "private, excessive, undisciplined, self-centered emotionality" (as in the seduction novel), while celebrating sentimentalism that reflected "Enlightenment advocacy of philanthropy and benevolence" (xxix, xxx). Wilson, however, satirizes these forms for their shared narratives of white feminine virtue that obscure African Americans' pleasure and pain.3 The white fallen woman's desires foster violence, rendering her undeserving of sympathy; Wilson invites readers to identify instead with her irreverently funny African American protagonist.4 Although antebellum culture valorized well-regulated sympathy, the illicit desires of the seduction plot did not dwindle away; instead, they became a nest egg, accruing interest in the domestic sphere.5 Wilson suggests that the white fallen woman and republican mother spend their unruly feelings in violent displays of power as they project their sins onto an African American girl. This rewriting elucidates a criticism that African American writers would level at sentimentalism across the nineteenth century: the...

Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent

Reviewed by: Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent Kara B. Clevinger HER VOICE WILL BE ON THE SIDE OF RIGHT: GENDER AND POWER IN WOMEN’S ANTEBELLUM ANTISLAVERY FICTION, by Holly M. Kent. American Abolitionism and Antislavery. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2017. 216 pp. $55.00 cloth; $46.99 ebook. Was the nineteenth-century woman empowered by the ideologies of true womanhood and separate spheres, or was she confined within the home? This question has defined a persistent debate for scholars of nineteenth-century American women’s literature since it was proposed by Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Douglas’s critique of the anti-intellectualism of much of women’s literature, clustered under the broad term “sentimentalism,” and Tompkins’s reclamation of that literature and the cultural work it performs, as well as the opening up of the canon of American literature, have inspired countless critical studies of women’s writing that have spanned the range of women’s empowerment. At this point, scholars of the nineteenth century agree: it is complicated. Holly M. Kent’s Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction makes a significant contribution to this debate and the field of antebellum literary scholarship, as Kent explores how women writers intellectually and imaginatively considered the position of women as abolitionist activists and agitators in the United States between 1821 and 1861, arguing that white women writers conceived of gender, not race, as the most significant barrier to social justice and equality. Beginning with early antislavery fiction in the 1820s and the optimism of women writers’ belief that morally superior women could abolish slavery and de-corrupt men, Kent traces a decline in the hope for white women’s ability to effect change in a patriarchal society during each decade leading up to the Civil War. Much of the antislavery fiction Kent analyzes has received little attention from literary scholars, and thus her book is as much a recovery project as it is a compelling assessment of the productions of female antislavery fiction writers. Kent reads short and long-form fiction from well-known authors like Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Lydia Maria Child, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She also introduces readers to a valuable sampling of lesser-known and [End Page 453] anonymous authors, such as African American writer Sarah Mapps Douglass, who contributed fiction for young readers to The Liberator, including a piece in August 1832 in which she does not reveal that the virtuous young female protagonist is African American until the end, hoping her young audience will learn a moral lesson in shame for their racist assumptions. Kent places Douglass’s short story within a fascinating comparison of African American and white women writers of antislavery fiction to demonstrate how African American authors took up debates about what society might look like after emancipation, while white authors focused on the liberation plot and held back from writing what came after emancipation. One of the more intriguing conclusions Kent comes to is that white women authors became increasingly uncomfortable with relinquishing conventional ideals of white middle-class femininity and could only imagine African American female characters embodying or desiring these traits rather than portraying new and diverse models of womanhood. The triumph of Kent’s book is the valuable contributions it makes to a number of scholarly conversations about the nineteenth century: antislavery fiction and abolitionist activism, domestic literature and separate spheres ideology, theories of public and private spheres, and the historiography of women and authorship. Kent intervenes in each of these conversations, placing her magnifying glass over fiction and examining how women imagined antislavery action rather than speculating on women’s lived experiences at the time. The result is an insightful and pure literary studies monograph, which is thoroughly researched with expert attention to secondary sources and a rich array of primary sources that made use of wonderful collections at the Boston Library, Smith College, and the Historical Societies of Massachusetts and...

Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children’s Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane

Reviewed by: Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children’s Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane Michelle H. Martin (bio) Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children’s Literature before 1900. Edited by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. This fascinating anthology recovers and analyzes African American children’s literature prior to 1900, emphasizing a broad body of work integral to black family reading that sheds new light on the function of literature and literacy in black communities both before and after emancipation. Editors Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane acknowledge that lack of evidence from this time period and antiliteracy laws that made it illegal to teach slaves to read make it impossible to reconstruct the historical record of African American children and adults who actually read texts authored by black writers. Therefore, the contributors use various forms of evidence to identify these texts’ actual readers and the implied readers that early black authors had in mind. The editors proclaim the “power of the literate black child in both black and white abolitionist communities” (x) and lament the paucity of research on these early texts, attributing this phenomenon to the fact that authors in the nineteenth century as well as contemporary scholars would have needed to be able to identify black children both as children and as readers—roles “reserved for the white and the middle class” (x). Capshaw and Duane, therefore, offer these essays as a corrective to dominant portrayals of black children as victimized and invisible. The volume’s contents are organized into three different sections that speak to one another. The first section—divided into part 1, “Locating Readers”; part 2, “Schooling, Textuality, and Literacies”; and part 3, “Defining African American Children’s Literature: Critical Crossovers”—contains ten critical essays that focus on a geographically and historically wide range of material: poetry, letters, biographies, periodicals, and a novel. Next, part 4 offers two bibliographical essays on archival material, encouraging scholars to further explore the depths of these texts. Lastly, part 5 presents a variety of primary texts, giving educators access to archival pieces, many of which are discussed in the analytical essays earlier in the volume. Capshaw and Duane group their chapters generically, but my review will move from discussing texts that likely would have had a narrower audience to those with a broader one. I will begin with Angela Sorby’s opening essay, “Conjuring Readers: Antebellum African American Children’s Poetry,” which is foundational to the [End Page 103] project that this volume undertakes and serves as a critical touchstone within many of the other chapters. Sorby establishes that when white nineteenth-century authors depicted African Americans sympathetically in their poetry, they often portrayed them as “static objects of the gaze rather than as readers, learners, or consumers in their own right” (4). Therefore, white-authored poetry treated blacks as perpetual children incapable of developing voice or agency. While writers such as William Wordsworth could count on a vast audience of white children, supported by the publishing industry and institutionalized education systems, black writers could assume neither support nor audience. In fact, says Sorby, African American writers “addressed readers whose status—as children, as students, as citizens—was constantly threatened. Part of the hard work of their poems, then, was to somehow generate readers” (5). To understand how black authors did this, Sorby borrows terminology from James Edwin Campbell’s “Conjuh Man” to suggest that black poetry of the nineteenth century “conjured” African American child readers. “To conjure a child reader,” she writes, “is not to assume anything about that child’s preexisting agency but rather to create—partly through practical measures and partly through the imagination—the conditions that make literate agency possible” (6). This remains an important concept not only in Sorby’s essay on three black poets but also in several others throughout the volume. The fourth essay, Mary Niall Mitchell’s “Madame Couvent’s Legacy: Free Children of Color as Historians in Antebellum New Orleans,” focuses on recovered and compiled student letters from 1856 to 1863 written by free boys of color attending a private Catholic school—a...

The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages by Matthew X. Vernon

Reviewed by: The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages by Matthew X. Vernon Nahir I. Otaño Gracia Matthew X. Vernon. The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xiii, 266. $89.00 cloth; $69.99 e-book. Those of us who take a critical stance toward medieval studies as a field and the ways that it perpetuates white supremacy and expels people of color from its ranks are often asked, especially by scholars from other areas, why we are trying to save medieval studies. Why not move on to other fields of study that are more inclusive? Although the answers vary among medievalists, my answer has always been that medieval literature and culture do not belong to white academia, nor do they belong to white supremacists. Perhaps this is why I found Matthew X. Vernon's The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages to be one of the most important books on medievalism and the Middle Ages to date. Vernon's insightful archival work, the strength of his arguments, and the nuance he brings to discussions of the Middle Ages are but a few of the reasons his book is a must-read in medieval studies, nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalisms, and African-American studies. Vernon carefully integrates materials from both African-American and medieval studies, demonstrating that nineteenth- and twentieth-century African-Americans used the Middle Ages to reject their erasure from America's founding origin myths, in which the nation was often [End Page 427] presented as Anglo-Saxon in history and identity. The Black Middle Ages is divided into six chapters, and many of these chapters begin by deconstructing the ways that white writers and academics use the Middle Ages to equate the concept of the nation with a concept of whiteness. The chapters' substantive analysis, however, centers on the African-American writers and academics who create counter-narratives to this imagined white nationhood (shaped from a constructed white mythical past) by including African-Americans in national narratives of progress. It is difficult to do justice to the richness of the materials that Vernon brings to each chapter, and the plethora of African-American voices that he brings into the conversation. I can only say that if you can stop reading this review and simply read his The Black Middle Ages, then you should do so right now. The opening introductory chapter, "Reading out of Time— Genealogy, African-American Literature, and the Middle Ages," outlines the ways that political and literary figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—including Thomas Jefferson, John H. Van Eyrie, and Walt Whitman—drew on and helped create a fantasy of the English Middle Ages as racially pure (and white). These white intellectuals imagined the Middle Ages as a framework through which to construct a narrative of national progress, a narrative that simultaneously erased the voices of those who threatened its logic. At every turn, however, African-Americans challenged these medieval myths by exposing them as false, creating a counter-narrative of the Middle Ages that laid bare the fantasy of whiteness in arguments about citizenship and American belonging (18). W. E. B. Du Bois offers a case in point, with his Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920) clearly demonstrating how the United States and Europe used the Middle Ages to create ideologies that justified colonization and imagined a community of whiteness extending far back into the past (20). Chapter 2, "Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-American Scholarship and Curricula," shows how African-American intellectuals used the Middle Ages to renegotiate terms of belonging by rejecting the notion of the Anglo-Saxon period as an era of racial purity, instead describing a multicultural medieval England that supported the possibility of racial mixing as a means to reach political power. Vernon shows that African-American and abolitionist writers such as Frederick Douglass; Lydia Maria Child, author of the short story "The Black Saxons" (The Liberator, 1841); and William Day, who wrote the poem "The [End Page 428] Black Saxons: A Tale of America" (1850), had a...

Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State by Ira Dworkin

Reviewed by: Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State by Ira Dworkin Eric M. Washington CONGO LOVE SONG: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State. By Ira Dworkin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2017. In Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State, Ira Dworkin, assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University, presents a rich text about Black transnationalism building upon the important theoretical contribution of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993). In this well-structured and well-argued book, Dworkin argues that African-American anti-colonialism found a straight channel to the Congo that also flowed to criticism of the whole of European colonialism during the twentieth century. The work begins with the writings of historian George Washington Williams and Presbyterian missionary William Sheppard, who both arrived in the Congo in 1890, thirteen years after Leopold II of Belgium claimed the Congo as his own personal real estate. Both men wrote of the atrocities committed under Leopold’s personal rule, namely the extraction of rubber using cruel means and punishment: chopping off of Congolese hands. The writings of Williams and Sheppard are the origins of African-American anti-colonial writing on the Congo. From this starting point, Dworkin masterfully analyzes Booker T. Washington’s protests of colonialism in the Congo, the translation work of missionary Edith Edmiston, the literature of Pauline E. Hopkins, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the African-American publication of the writings of Patrice Lumumba, and the speeches, interviews, and letters of Malcolm X. These sources all substantiate his argument that African Americans possessed transnational sensibilities when it came to protesting against colonialism in the Congo, and even the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in early 1961. One weakness in this study is Dworkin’s tentative engagement with Ethiopianism. In his chapter on Pauline E Hopkins, Dworkin discusses her use of the Ethiopian trope that reflects a tradition in African-American writing dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. Dworkin fails to define this literary tradition, though he relies somewhat on Wilson Jeremiah Moses’ The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, which includes a robust discussion of Ethiopiansim. The strengths of this work far outweigh the weakness. Quite significant is Dworkin’s treatment of Washington’s transnationalism. Not only did Washington write in protest to the atrocities committed in the Congo, but he envisioned the expansion of the “Tuskegee Model” there. These insights challenge recent scholarship that has argued that Washington’s interest in Africa was “secondary” to his Southern concerns. Dworkin provides convincing evidence that Washington’s Southern commitments and African concerns worked symbiotically. Another strength of the book is the chapter on Langston Hughes that centers on his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Dworkin painstakingly engages a rich trove of evidence that leads to the conclusion that this famous poem contains anti-colonial references. This work adds to existing scholarship on African-American connections to Africa such as Campbell’s Songs of Zion and Middle Passages, and Kevin Gaines’ African Americans in Ghana. What this work does that is different from those historical monographs is that Dworkin is able to construct a corpus of African-American writings dedicated to the Congo crisis. This work should spark more scholarship on African-American discourse, both cultural and political, on Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [End Page 120] Eric M. Washington Calvin College Copyright © 2019 Mid-America American Studies Association

Matthew X. Vernon, The Black Middle Ages: Race and Construction of the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, xiii, 266 pp.

When I agreed to review this book, I had not paid enough attention to the subtitle, which reveals that the author is primarily concerned with the issue of Medievalism. In essence, Vernon is examining how Black or African American medievalists and writers have viewed the Middle Ages and what the study of the medieval world might mean for the struggle of Black Americans against racism and colonialism today. He argues that the examination of the Middle Ages mattered deeply for those intellectuals because many issues in that past are still mirrored in the present. This could be of relevance especially for those who are interested in the history of scholarship and the particular approach to that period from a specific ethnic perspective. Of course, then we would also need books about Asian American medievalists, Hispanic American medievalists, etc., which seems to be valid in political terms, but does not really do justice to the subject matter. At any rate, I cannot examine and evaluate the major portion of this book because it falls into the category of modern Medievalism.

Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism ed. by Eric D. Lamore

Reviewed by: Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism ed. by Eric D. Lamore Daniel Stein Eric D. Lamore, ed. Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2017. 296 pp. $74.95. The genre of autobiography, or life narrative, to use a more inclusive term, has perhaps been the most crucial mode of public self-fashioning for African Americans as well as one of the most effective means of documenting the humanity and essential Americanness of black folk from the moment the first Africans set foot on North American soil. As pioneering scholars like Rebecca Chalmers Barton, [End Page 315] Sidonie Smith, Stephen Butterfield, Frances Smith Foster, James Olney, Robert B. Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William L. Andrews have argued, the very existence of life narratives by African Americans, especially when published in book form or presented as oral testimony, constitutes one of the most powerful arguments against reigning racist ideologies of black inferiority. In light of the centrality of the genre in African American literary and cultural history, it is not surprising that the emergence of African American Studies was fueled in part by an extended academic investment with the study of black autobiography. It is within this scholarly trajectory that recent essay collections in the path-breaking Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography series, edited by William L. Andrews, such as Angela A. Ards's Words of Witness: Black Women's Autobiography in the Post-"Brown" Era (2015) and Eric D. Lamore's Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism (2017) must be placed. Lamore's excellent volume combines a number of revised essays that originally appeared in a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies in 2012 with additional pieces solicited for the present publication. As Lamore suggests in his introduction, the goal is to take stock of the current state of African American autobiography and expand the analysis beyond the canon and the printed word (3-4). The purpose of the book, he writes, is "to embrace newly recognized African American life writers from a wide range of historical periods, to widen the field's understanding of the myriad ways in which African Americans have engaged in examining the self, to analyze the more contemporary routes of dissemination that have been used to circulate autobiographical acts, [and] to trouble the 'texts' that have been traditionally housed in the canon of African American life narrative" (4). Recognizing the vastness of autobiographical materials, Lamore wisely foregoes any attempt at comprehensiveness and chooses a chronological order instead, beginning the volume with Lynn A. Casmier-Paz's close reading of one of the earliest existing examples of African American life narrative, The Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man; Who Was Executed at Worcester, October 20, 1768. For a Rape Committed on the Body of One Deborah Metcalfe, and concluding with Kwakiutl L. Dreher's analysis of the feminist perspectives in actress Pam Grier's Foxy: My Life in Three Acts (2010). Lamore positions the book as "an 'age of Obama' assessment of African American life narrative" (10) in response to Robert B. Stepto's A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama (2011). While this is an intriguing endeavor, it also marks the book as an assessment from what already seems to be a bygone era when a postracial society seemed to be at least a distant possibility for some. What's more, the book's potential to shake up established interpretations of the history and current state of African American autobiography remains largely confined to the individual chapters. Lamore gestures toward this potential when he speaks of the centrality of archival work for future investigations and encourages more "multilingual, transnational, and transatlantic" (11) perspectives on the genre, but it is ultimately left to the reader to draw larger conclusions (and there are several) from the book. Three thematic clusters inform the volume as a whole. First, all of the chapters acknowledge and investigate what Casmier-Paz calls "the limits and the possibilities of life writing" (19) for black Americans. If autobiography is understood as a textually or...

Women Warriors: The Impact of the Maternal on Racial and National Identity in the Work of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen

During a time in which African Americans fought for civil rights, many African American writers rose to literary prestige. Many of these authors’ works address the search for identity — both individual and national — as a way to cope with their lack of societal rights. Two novels exemplify this theme by exploring the impact of the maternal on an individual’s identity: Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing. This paper argues that these works stress the importance of motherhood in finding one’s place in a hostile environment, focusing particularly on the way in which mothers stand as warriors for the maintenance of their cultural communities. Although many scholars have argued that the characters presented in these narratives are negatively impacted by family and community, the novels show the positive impact maternal figures can have on the upkeep of African American culture. By presenting this impact in their works, Fauset and Larsen exhibit how African American identity can be fostered through maintaining a

“Our racket’s within th’ law, ain’t it?”: Miscegenation and Literary Form in the Plessy Era

A rhetoric of strangeness marks so many of the texts of the African American literary tradition written during the Plessy era, a strangeness inextricably tied to the law’s effort to maintain the fiction of “separate but equal.” Anti-miscegenation laws, perhaps the most emotionally charged of the many legal attempts to police the color-line, were also some of the most difficult to parse and yet also the most entrenched. And so, it is no surprise that the illogic of the legal predicament in which blacks found themselves was often articulated in literary texts in two related ways: first, through the figure of the miscegenated baby; and second, through the narrative structure of the absurd. This article argues that while the possibility of a baby is usually read to reveal the anxiety of a text’s passing protagonists, in fact many Plessy-era works by African American writers deploy the combination of a troubling black baby and the farce of racial taxonomies as a kind of reductio ad absurdum, satirizing the law’s doomed attempts to protect the “purity” of the white race. An assessment of the law’s affective attachment to whiteness reveals the formal mode of the absurd—read through George Schuyler’s 1931 novel Black No More—as a pointed challenge to the rationale underlying segregation as the law of the land.

Genealogies of horror: three stories of slave-women, motherhood, and murder in the Americas

ABSTRACTThis article examines three cases of infanticide committed by slave women in the Americas – Margaret Garner (1856) of Ohio, Ignácia (1868) of Paraná, Brazil, and Justina (1878) of Rio de Janeiro. The article argues that each woman sought to dislodge their own as well as their children's place in what I term slavery's ‘genealogy of horror’, making the act of killing their children into an expression of black female agency, love, and insurgence against slavery. The cases of Justina and Ignácia's, I argue, provide a counternarrative to the myth of Brazil's genteel and harmonious slavery, propagated throughout the nineteenth century, by exposing the violence and desperation in which slave women and their progeny lived. In the second half of the article, I examine how cases of infanticide were depicted and used in the nineteenth-century abolitionist poetry of Brazilian poet Castro Alves and noted African American writer Frances Harper.

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism