Black Authors Research Articles

Decoding Anti-Blackness in Children’s Literature

This dissertation critically examines the representation of Black authors and themes within the John Newbery Medal canon from its inception in 1922 to 2023. It explores how this literary award has mirrored or challenged societal perceptions of race, particularly in children’s literature. Utilizing a thematic content analysis methodology, the study investigates the works of the six Black authors who have won the Newbery Medal, using a priori coding to critically examine the racial narratives, themes, and authorial diversity presented in these titles. Despite the noted increase in diversity within children’s literature, this research identifies a persistent underrepresentation of Black authors and Black cultural themes in Newbery Medal recipients. The study highlights a significant gap in racial inclusivity, with a mere six Black authors receiving the Newbery Medal in over a century. This underrepresentation is not only a marker of racial disparity but also reflects broader systemic biases within the literary and publishing industries. This dissertation engages with theories from critical race theory and critical librarianship to interrogate the structural barriers that sustain this racial homogeneity. In examining the implications of these findings, the research advocates for a more equitable literary landscape, emphasizing the need for librarians, educators, and publishers to foster inclusivity in children’s literature. The ultimate aim is to ensure that young readers encounter a more representative spectrum of narratives that celebrate racial diversity and promote inclusiveness.

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

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

Pioneers and Populists: Sutton E. Griggs, Oscar Micheaux, and Independent Black Publishing at the Turn of the Century

Abstract: Recent scholarship on Black print cultures has paid close attention to self- and independent publication. These studies tend to center writer-publishers from the antebellum and Harlem Renaissance periods, arguing that Black authors published their works out of either financial necessity or desire for editorial independence. However, the causes and meanings of Black independent publishing changed during the postbellum, pre-Renaissance period. In this essay, I focus on Sutton E. Griggs and Oscar Micheaux, two early twentieth-century novelists who labored outside of and in opposition to both the Black press and white, mainstream publishers. Ultimately, I argue that Griggs's and Micheaux's use of commission presses carved new paths for Black writers to dissent against emerging trends in political and literary culture: US expansionism and the early corporatization of literary publishing. This essay urges scholars to treat turn-of-the-century commission presses as neglected archives of radical texts.

Narrativas de Dança de um Artista Negro em Espelhamento a Saberes e Conceitos de Autoras Pretas

ABSTRACT Dance Narratives by a Black Artist Mirroring the Knowledge and Concepts of Fe-male Black Authors – This article presents aspects of the life and professional narratives of a Black dance artist, Rubens Oliveira, and how his sensitive, poetic and creative experience as a Black man op-poses stereotypes of hegemonic masculinities. The aim of this article is to highlight the life story of a Black Brazilian man who makes dance his profession. Issues concerning the process of being a Black man in Brazil are problematised, using Conceição Evaristo’s (2020) concept of escrevivência (writexperi-ence)and Lélia Gonzalez’s (1988) concept of amefricanidade (Amefricanity). The article, mostly based on Black authors, highlights Black epistemologies as a form of representation.

(Mis)Recognition of Post-blackness through Crossings in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

Post-blackness emerged as a reaction against the commonly old-fashioned and restrictive representation of blackness to enhance for a more fluid, flexible and fruitful representation of blackness. It is a shifting discourse for securing a multidimensional consideration of black identity that most contemporary African American women aspire to attain. Nevertheless, the pernicious influences of black authenticity and racial essentialism cast serious doubts on the premises of post-black rhetoric and complicate the recognition of post-black identity for African American women within and across geo-racial borders. Danzy Senna is one of the post-soul writers who shed light on this critical problem in her first novel Caucasia. She depicts the tiring journey of her female protagonist Birdie Lee who keeps crossing color and geographical borders in an endeavor to resist the grips of black authenticity and racial invisibility and to recognize the fluid form of post-black identity. The possibility of Birdie’s (mis)recognition of post-black identity throughout her crossing journey is the central issue at stake. The present paper tends to illustrate the dilemma of her migrating female protagonist who is torn between the pressure of authentic blackness and the desire for post-blackness, between the influence of invisible blackness and the quest for black visibility. Interestingly, it investigates the extent to which she succeeds in recognizing a space of post-blackness through crossing practices.

A cor dos textos: possíveis indícios intertextuais de categorização racial

This study investigates intertextual clues of the role of racial categorisation in the (dis)alignment of the meaning attributed by opinion articles’ authors to the hashtag #SomosTodos-Macacos. The hashtag #SomosTodosMacacos was posted on the Instagram social network by Neymar Júnior on April 27, 2014, in response to a racist incident that occurred on the same day against his then-teammate Daniel Alves during a football match. The study is grounded in socio--cognitivist studies of Textual Linguistics and a socio-historical-cultural perspective on racial categorisation. The methodology involved analysing intertextual features in 10 opinion articles published between April 27 and May 3, 2014, regarding #SomosTodosMacacos. The study’s findings suggest that black authors tend to adopt a critical stance toward the implicitly racist meaning attributed to the #SomosTodosMacacos through intertextual forms of disalignment and other textual constructions.

"A Person Like Me": Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, Gender, and Racial Immunity in the Twentieth-Century United States.

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disorder that affects mostly women and disproportionately Black women. Until the 1940s, SLE was rarely diagnosed in Black Americans, reflecting racist medical beliefs about Black immunity. In the 1940s and 1950s, SLE and its treatment were part of a patriarchal narrative of American industrialization. By the 1960s, newer diagnostic techniques increased recognition of SLE, especially among Black women; medical thinking about SLE shifted from external causes like infection or allergy to autoimmunity, which emphasized biological, genetically determined racial difference. In the 1970s and 1980s, an advocacy structure crystalized around memoirs by women with SLE, which emphasized the experiences of able-bodied, economically privileged white women, while Black feminist health discourse and SLE narratives by Black authors grappled with SLE's more complicated intersections. Throughout the twentieth century, SLE embodied immunity as a gendered, racialized, and culturally invested process.

Indian Removal and the Plantation South: Cherokee Present-Absence in Three Neo-Slave Narratives

Abstract This article contends that we must understand a constitutive, interactive ontogenesis between modern Indigenous Americans and African Americans that is irreversibly shaped by the dominance of racialized slavery and the plantation economy. Building on the work of Gina Caison and Kevin Bruyneel, I argue that the present-absence of the Cherokee in prominent African American neo-slave narratives—Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003), and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016)—illustrates the imaginative function of Removal in the South. I slightly modify Bruyneel’s “absent/present dynamics” to show how the Cherokee persist as a constitutive Other used by these Black authors to expose the racial logic of the Plantationocene. I assert that the three novels imagine Black and Cherokee characters not where they are “supposed” to be in order to authorize Black fugitivity, demonstrating a triangulation of the power and racial formations of Blackness, whiteness, and Indigeneity in relation to the plantation.

Exploring Black Writers’ Literary Strategies for Interdependence and Global Solidarity

This paper seeks to explore the techniques and strategies used by African and Afro-American writers to disseminate a sense of Black interdependence and solidarity on a global level. It will examine how Black authors are unceasingly using a planned strategy in their literary works to encourage Black people to envision a sustainable future for themselves. We contend that Black authors and critics are incessantly using the literary medium to inspire Black audiences to self-heal themselves from the trauma associated with European colonization of Africa in the bygone days and this issue is yet to receive a noteworthy observation in the literary field. Hence, this paper will examine various dimensions associated with the Black literary genre to explore more about the philosophies and strategies imbibed by Black writers to encourage their people to self-heal from their past while comprehending the significance of mutual interconnectedness. The select works this paper seeks to study comparatively are Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (2010), Alice Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple (2014), Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes’s fantasy fiction The Deep (2020), and Nnedi Okorafor’s science fiction Lagoon (2014). The frameworks used for this study are Postcolonialism, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, and African feminism which are treated as the vantage ground for this reading.

RESEARCH NOTE: Citation Bias and the Economics of Race and Crime Literature

This research note investigates citation bias using probabilities of zero citations, total citations, and citations per year since publication from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for all 759 articles on the economics of race and crime as extracted from EconLit for the period 1970–2020 and reported in previous work by Mason et al. Our citation analysis considers two main variables of interest: (a) whether the article was published in the Review of Black Political Economy and (b) whether one or more of an article's authors were Black. We report the results of linear probability models of zero citations and negative binomial models of total citations and citations per year since publication. We also estimate the average marginal effects for publication in the Review of Black Political Economy and Black-authored articles on racism or racial discrimination findings. The results of this research note validate and reconfirm the findings of Mason et al. We find evidence of systematically lower citations of articles published in the Review of Black Political Economy. In addition, we find that articles with Black authors are more likely to include findings of discrimination or racism. Articles published in the Review are also more likely to find racial discrimination, but these journal effects are not always statistically significant at the 5% level. These findings are consistent across citation engines, model specifications, and estimation techniques.

Ethnicity and gender trends of UK authors in The British Medical Journal and the Lancet over the past two decades: a comprehensive longitudinal analysis

While gender equity among academic authors has been extensively investigated, there is a significant gap in our understanding of racial/ethnic authorship trends, despite the recognition of barriers to authorship along both ethnic and gender lines. Leveraging the meta-data for all articles published in The British Medical Journal (The BMJ) and the Lancet and between 2002 and 2022 (inclusive), we explore demographic trends among UK academic medicine authors in two of the world's leading British medical journals. We systematically searched PubMed's MEDLINE for all articles published in The BMJ and Lancet between January 1st 2002 and December 31st 2022. Filtering for articles with a UK affiliation, we predicted gender using a publicly-validated name-to-gender dictionary, while data was analysed to explore and investigate ethnicity using the Consumer Data Research Centre's (CDRC) Ethnicity Estimator. Data was analysed to explore and investigate: (a) the proportion of female/male author publications, (b) the proportion of the various UK author ethnicity groups, and (c) the overlap/intersection between gender and ethnic identities among first and last authors. This comprehensive longitudinal analysis was conducted on 82,143 articles (51,209 from The BMJ and 30,934 from the Lancet) which represents >97% of all published articles between 2002 and 2022. As we sought to understand how academic authorship reflects the diversity of the UK population, we limited our analysis to first and last authors who had a UK affiliation and excluded "news" and "comments" pieces (16,736 articles for The BMJ and 4678 articles from the Lancet). The main outcome measures were the trends in first and last authorship demographics of academic medicine, focusing on the proportion of female/male authors, ethnicity and their intersectionality. Our findings show that, while women have made substantial headway towards equity among first and last authorship in The BMJ (peaking at 42% and 43%), they remain under-represented in the Lancet (35% and 27%). In both The BMJ and Lancet, Black authors have remained severely under-represented as both first and last authors (below 1% for most of the two decades), while Asian authors have increased proportionally to match their fraction in the general population (ranging from 2 to 10%). Analysis over the past two decades has shown that the gender author gap is decreasing quickly in The BMJ and Lancet. However, despite the two journals' growing focus on structural inequalities in medical academia, little progress has been made in rectifying the large gap between White British authors and other ethnic groups, especially Black authors. Without more awareness, diversity initiatives which have resulted in positive gains for White women do not seem to translate well for authors of colour. None.

(Self)Censored at Home and Away: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Spanish

Native Son (Harper & Brothers, 1940), by Richard Wright (1908, Roxie, Mississippi–1960, Paris, France), contained a scene rewritten by the author to satisfy the Book of the Month Club, which had selected a Black author for the first time. In the censored scene, the main character, Bigger Thomas, engages in a lewd sexual act; other potentially offensive contents, however, were not subjected to the same treatment. The first Spanish translation, Sangre negra (Sudamericana, 1941), was banned in Spain twice (1944 and 1953) when the Argentinian publishers attempted to import it into the strongly autocratic country ruled by Francisco Franco from 1939 to 1975. The translation, by Pedro Lecuona, was finally published in Spain in 1987, under the literal title Hijo nativo (Ediciones Versal and Círculo de Lectores), with a revised text for the European-Spanish readership. The state censorship that banned this translation from Spain, the self-censorship that the Argentinian translation contains, and the Iberian revisions are all examined closely. In 1991, the Library of America published an uncensored edition which restored the unexpurgated text. However, Lecuona’s (revised) translation circulated until 2022, when an unexpurgated text, Hijo de esta tierra (Alianza Editorial) by Eduardo Hojman, was made from the restored text of this hugely significant example of African-American literature. This edition restores all previously (self)censored segments and also contains the first Spanish version of the epilogue “How Bigger Was Born”. Book reviews and social media reception pinpoint the importance of Wright’s contribution but are neglectful of this retranslation’s fascinating history

Two Trains Running Oyununda Hayatta Kalma Mücadelesi

August Wilson’s play, Two Trains Running is the seventh play of his Century Cycle which chronicles black people’s experiences in American society. Since the structure and dynamics of each society are distinctive, the experiences of individuals belonging to that society are naturally shaped by these factors. The complicated relationship between societal norms, values, and power structures play a pivotal role in shaping the individual and collective experiences in society. In that respect, the social practices of black people in American society are notably outstanding as they have been subjected to slavery and segregation through systematic racism. Ideologically, racism has been used as a strategic tool to control the black people, who were pushed out of social boundaries because of their skin color and to sustain the white dominance for economic and politic reasons. Significantly, black authors have tried to be the voice of the oppressed black people on the literary arena and considered the theater as a way of resistance. Based on the societal awareness aroused by black authors, this study analyzes the struggle of black people in Wilson’s Two Trains Running. Drawing attention to the significant fact that black people are the members of the white society with their loyalty to their own cultural values and their African-American identity, Wilson is an antiracist playwright. Relatedly, the central focus of this study is the ways of coping with the unequal, unfair and discriminative practices of the white supremacy.

Non-White scientists appear on fewer editorial boards, spend more time under review, and receive fewer citations

Disparities continue to pose major challenges in various aspects of science. One such aspect is editorial board composition, which has been shown to exhibit racial and geographical disparities. However, the literature on this subject lacks longitudinal studies quantifying the degree to which the racial composition of editors reflects that of scientists. Other aspects that may exhibit racial disparities include the time spent between the submission and acceptance of a manuscript and the number of citations a paper receives relative to textually similar papers, but these have not been studied to date. To fill this gap, we compile a dataset of 1,000,000 papers published between 2001 and 2020 by six publishers, while identifying the handling editor of each paper. Using this dataset, we show that most countries in Asia, Africa, and South America (where the majority of the population is ethnically non-White) have fewer editors than would be expected based on their share of authorship. Focusing on US-based scientists reveals Black as the most underrepresented race. In terms of acceptance delay, we find, again, that papers from Asia, Africa, and South America spend more time compared to other papers published in the same journal and the same year. Regression analysis of US-based papers reveals that Black authors suffer from the greatest delay. Finally, by analyzing citation rates of US-based papers, we find that Black and Hispanic scientists receive significantly fewer citations compared to White ones doing similar research. Taken together, these findings highlight significant challenges facing non-White scientists.

The Race for Appropriation: Blackness, Authorship, and Ligon on Mapplethorpe

Abstract Where can we locate race/whiteness in theories and practices of appropriation—that defining practice of the “postmodern” moment of the 1980s? This article approaches the question through a close reading of Glenn Ligon's installation Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991–93). In this work, Ligon restages Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of (mostly nude) Black men alongside textual quotations that discuss Mapplethorpe's work and the politics of interracial homo-erotic desire in the United States. Here, citation and annotation function as alternatives to appropriation's possessive strategy. The essay asks, if appropriation is a white avant-garde device for negating liberal notions of authorship, are citation and annotation its counterpoint for Blackness and Black authorship? The answer is sought through the interrogation of the different ways in which French and US copyright laws addressed authorship and Black subjectivity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Reconstruction of black identity in Toni Morrison's Beloved

This paper explores Morrison’s post-emancipation perspectives regarding the Black people’s movement and explores their identity deconstruction and reconstruction based on the reclamation of their authority and ownership to form their black identity in Beloved. Considering how these people were physically and emotionally exploited, Morrison sees the fundamental solution of black liberation through the recovery and reclamation of authentic blackness. To examine the relations between the black and white people in Beloved, this paper refers to the works of Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon to merge hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence concepts. Considering Fanon’s black problem in the facts of blackness and Bhabha’s hybridity and resistance theories, this paper traces Morrison's Beloved and debates how and where she locates the liberated black identity. Reconfiguring the experiences of a black slave woman who murders her baby, the author unfolds how black people attain liberty and self-authority at the center of an oppressive system. Eventually, Morrison concludes that the black identity is constructed on the socio-political ground where cultures are hybrid, and these black people are recreated as resistant individuals.

Destroyed Documents and Racial Vulnerability in the Literature of Slavery’s Legal Afterlife

AbstractThis article argues that Black writers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a critical knowledge of how legal documentation functions to produce racialized structures of power and Black vulnerability at law. In literature that reckons with slavery’s legal afterlife, particularly antebellum slave narratives, post-Reconstruction novels, and neo-slave narratives, Black authors frequently represent legal documents as pivotal to legal personhood and theorize how these documents produce vulnerability to violence and dispossession. The adversarial relationship with contract law that Black people have experienced throughout US history has uniquely positioned Black writers to produce a critical knowledge of law’s structures of power. These writers reveal the mechanisms by which legal authorities manipulated the legal contracts that as texts stipulated protections for Black subjects yet in practice failed to accomplish those protections when white legal authorities refused to carry them out. Building on critical race theory and law and literature scholarship, this article proposes a heightened awareness for how race interacts with legal procedure, particularly during the material processes involved in a document’s creation and execution. Focusing on law’s materiality, this article uncovers an understudied literary vein in which Black authors represent documents as materially fragile and vulnerable to destruction in order to theorize law as a series of practices enacted by persons inhabiting bodies marked by race.

Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Notation, Performance, and the Significance of Print in the Music of Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729–1780)1

AbstractThe posthumously published correspondence of the Black British writer, butler, musician, and shopkeeper Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729–1780) has received extensive critical attention in recent decades, especially because it contributed to opening a space for Black authorship in the Atlantic world. Absent from discussions of Sancho's negotiation of orality, writing, and print have been Sancho's books of musical compositions—the volumes published during his lifetime, apparently with his involvement and oversight. Consideration of his instrumental dance music within the context of the genres in which he wrote reveals that he navigated the boundary between orality and print deliberately and meaningfully. His musical notation engages with the sentimental style, and his explicit use of French horns—extremely rare or perhaps unique among eighteenth‐century publications of dance music for small ensembles—refers to the presence of Black musicians in Britain. By engaging with and subverting conventions of musical notation and print, Sancho's music points beyond itself, guiding the reader or listener from the notated scores to the ineffable, transient sounds of the eighteenth‐century Black experience.

Black Reels Film Festival

Black Reels Film Festival