Black Authors Research Articles

Introduction

Introduction:BlacKkKlansman, "On the Right Side of History"? Delphine Letort (bio) Loosely based on former police officer Ron Stallworth's recollections of his infiltration into the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, BlacKkKlansman (dir. Spike Lee, 2018) exploits the paradoxical situation of its black author passing for a white supremacist to integrate the "Organization" as a powerful source of humor and critique. Director Spike Lee uses the autobiographical narrative as a source text to trace the roots of the Trumpian rhetoric in a history of nativist activism, embedded in the history and the images of Hollywood. BlacKkKlansman uses intertextual references to depict a racially divisive culture, which undergirds films that produce 'whiteness' and 'blackness' for antithetical audiences. Excerpts from The Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith, 1915) and Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) underpin the mythology of white supremacy whereas those from Blaxploitation films nostalgically evoke the activist atmosphere of the Black Power era. Situated at the crossroads of black and white cinemas, BlacKkKlansman is a title that connotes the color line as a space of encounter and separation between two communities who find themselves trapped by a history of violence, which the film shows in its final photograph of Heather Heyer who died during a Black Lives Matter protest. In an interview with the New York Times on January 22, 2019, Lee declared: "And I feel that many years to come, when historians search for a piece of art that clearly shows what is happening today, BlacKkKlansman will be one of the first things they look at because this film is on the right side of history."1 This Close-Up takes those words at face value and considers BlacKkKlansman as a unique film deserving attention for its intervention in the contemporary political and racial polemics. Like every Spike Lee Joint film, BlacKkKlansman is controversial and at the epicenter of debates about cinema and politics. Some reviews celebrated Lee's film as: the "best nondocumentary feature in more than a decade and one of his greatest," [End Page 203] "a hellraising masterpiece," and a "hot-damn triumph—one of the year's best films," as well as "a major comeback."2 Yet the filmmaker's provocative political style—"the impassioned work of a cinema giant who has again found his voice and the power to make it heard" and "this admirably, unruly filmmaker back at the height of his provocative powers"—also drew a number of criticisms regarding form and content.3 Some French critics, for example, recommended the film while expressing some uneasiness about the mixture of politics and entertainment that is nonetheless characteristic of Lee's filmmaking. For example, Le Monde explained that "Spike Lee is overdoing it. Some gags are a little long. It may not have been necessary to accumulate so much hate speech in the mouths of racist whites. The filmmaker probably chose the caricature style to hammer home his point."4 Libération ambiguously argued that "the author of Do the Right Thing (1989) has not lost any of the rage that goes hand in hand with a certain heaviness—that of militant leaflets and incisive rap slogans. In other words: the fact that Lee has not learned to be subtle over time also proves that he has not given up his fights in any way."5 Télérama was no less ambiguous with the following statement: "Lee has regained his bite, his humor as a dirty kid militant for this anti-racist and anti-Donald Trump charge."6 Lee's racial politics obviously raised some discomfort among these reviewers, who disapproved of the blend of politics and humor in BlacKkKlansman, whereas other critics considered it not an efficient means of critique: "Yet the point of BlacKkKlansman seems to be that laughing at the KKK, dismissing them as an irrelevant group of backward morons, is what got us Donald Trump";7 and "BlacKkKlansman is the rare American film that doesn't treat the KKK as a joke. … The racism on display isn't exactly funny, not unless you find social discomfort humorous."8 The four articles composing this Close-Up relinquish the controversy and examine...

Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning by Rafia Zafar

Reviewed by: Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning by Rafia Zafar Ashley Rose Young Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning. By Rafia Zafar. Southern Foodways Alliance: Studies in Culture, People, and Place. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. x, 137. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5367-8; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5366-1.) In the late nineteenth century, Black community members in Austin, Texas, enjoyed tables laden with barbecue, fried catfish and chicken, cornbread, cakes, and ripe watermelon to celebrate Juneteenth. These foods—their ingredients and preparation—embody generations of culinary traditions and the ingenuity created and enacted by Black cooks. They have importance far beyond sustaining the body. In Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, Rafia Zafar demonstrates the power of food to feed both the body and soul of Black community members as they fought, and continue to fight, oppressive and violent conditions within the United States. In this book, Zafar presents seven case studies of Black authors using food as a mechanism of empowerment. She aims to provide an alternative understanding of Black culinary history and culture that emphasizes the long tradition of using food to uplift and celebrate Black communities while at the same time defying and breaking down harmful racial stereotypes. The chapters highlight many kinds of literary sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including slave narratives, hospitality manuals, cookbooks, memoirs, and novels, among others. This monograph builds on foundational scholarship in Black culinary history by authors such as Judith Ann Carney, Jessica B. Harris, and Rebecca Sharpless and can be placed in conversation with recent works by Marcia Chatelain, Kelley Fanto Deetz, and Kelly Kean Sharp that examine the agency embedded in food labor and entrepreneurship. Zafar’s work is [End Page 158] not a history of African Americans in the kitchen but rather a meditation on the meanings of food. Zafar’s opening chapter on Black men’s hospitality books articulates a close reading of three published works that go beyond the literal to reveal the Black entrepreneurs’ advice on how to navigate interracial relationships. Particularly compelling is her analysis of Tunis Campbell’s Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters, and Housekeepers’ Guide (1848); she argues that hospitality work established Black men’s credibility, enabling them to occupy public roles as cultural tastemakers. Zafar’s fifth chapter is equally persuasive, contending that Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and Carole and Norma Jean Darden participated in a “culinary Black Reconstruction” in the post–civil rights era through the publication of their cookbooks (p. 57). Zafar notes that in Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family (New York, 1978), the Darden sisters transcribe, catalog, and share historic recipes to reclaim their Black heritage and build a new Black identity around it. In the subsequent chapter, Zafar makes a similar observation of Edna Lewis’s cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking (New York, 1976). This chapter, however, strays somewhat from the rest of the book as Zafar draws comparison between Lewis’s work and that of Alice B. Toklas, who wrote a self-titled cookbook delineating her experiences as a white American living abroad with her partner, famed writer Gertrude Stein. The juxtaposition of Lewis’s and Toklas’s work is somewhat jarring in a book that otherwise privileges and foregrounds the writings of Black authors. That being said, Zafar’s exploration of cookbooks as elegy, or a literary form that memorializes or mourns the loss of a person or place, is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Zafar questions the genre’s historical dominance by white men and encourages a more creative, inclusive study of elegy that incorporates cookbooks authored by women. Through these case studies, Zafar accomplishes her goal of sharing an alternative perspective on the culinary history of Black communities in the United States, one that has emerged at a pivotal moment in modern U.S. history. Today, both scholars and the broader public are looking to the past to understand the diverse ways Black intellectuals and professionals have fought for equality. Zafar’s work is a testament to the pivotal role of food in this effort. Ashley Rose Young Smithsonian’s National...

El imaginario racial y la literatura estadounidense

El objeto de estudio de este trabajo es el imaginario racial en el discurso literario estadounidense. El objetivo es determinar cómo el discurso de actantes ilocutivos y sujetos valoradores femeninos negros refleja el imaginario racial del sujeto de la enunciación. Se desarrolla la base teórica de la investigación, que incluye el discurso, el Análisis Crítico del Discurso, los imaginarios y la ideología. Para ejecutar las tareas se utilizaron los métodos de revisión de la literatura especializada, el histórico-lógico, el inductivo-deductivo, análisis literario, Análisis Crítico del Discurso, y analítico-sintético. Se estudiaron varias obras de la literatura estadounidense con temática racial escritas por autores blancos y negros para entender sobre las dificultades para escribir sobre el “otro”. Finalmente, se escogió como muestra el discurso de sujetos valoradores femeninos negros de la novela The Help, que ha sido objeto de controversia desde su publicación. Se realizó un análisis dimensional que demostró que efectivamente el imaginario racial tiene un gran impacto en la descripción de los personajes, aunque la novela comparte elementos positivos con algunas obras de la literatura afroamericana.

Gender and ethnic differences in publication of BMJ letters to the editor: an observational study using machine learning

ObjectivesTo analyse the relationship between first author’s gender and ethnicity (estimated from first name and surname), and chance of publication of rapid responses in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). To...

Racial Trauma and Dissociated Worlds within Psychotherapy: A Discussion of “Racial Difference, Rupture, and Repair: A View from the Couch and Back”

The accounts of three Black authors (also patients and therapists), Matee, Jwili, and Vilakazi, offer a unique opportunity to expand understandings of racial trauma and racial dynamics in psychotherapy, and call for systemic change in psychoanalysis toward racial equity and inclusivity. This commentary elaborates on the issue of racial trauma within our profession, and the persistent disconnection between the experiences of BIPOC and White people in practice and training. I focus on the pervasiveness of racial trauma, the dissociative worlds of the therapist and patient, and how psychotherapy offers an ambivalent, and yet critical space for healing from racial trauma.

Bruce D. Hayes, The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 192–194 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.20 Book Review Bruce D. Haynes, The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America (New York: New York University Press, 2018) Judith Weisenfeld Princeton University, Princeton, USA In December of 2019 American news media covered two stories featuring Black Jews. Black Hebrew Israelites, some of whom had been in the public eye the previous summer for their clash in Washington, DC, with white Catholic students from Covington High School, again made news when a former member of an Israelite congregation murdered four people in a kosher market in Jersey City, New Jersey. That same month, comedian Tiffany Haddish held a “Black Mitzvah” on her fortieth birthday to affirm her Jewish identity, embraced in adulthood after meeting her Eritrean Jewish father and studying Torah to prepare for the ceremony. These two quite different public representations of Black Judaism highlight the range of communities, experiences, and complex histories sociologist Bruce D. Haynes examines in The Soul of Judaism. Haynes presents his primary goal as exploring the “racial projects” of Jews of African descent. Using the concept sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant defined as linking race as representation to social structures that organize everyday experience through race, Haynes argues that Black Jews challenge hegemonic understandings of Judaism and offer “competing racial projects” that help to expand conceptions of Blackness and Judaism. Far from “the first volume to detail racial projects emerging within the context of religion” (22), as Haynes Judith Weisenfeld 193 claims, the book nevertheless contributes to our understanding of the complexities of interactions among religion, race, and ethnicity in American history. The book’s first four chapters provide broad historical background about the racialization of Jews and of Blacks and explores aspects of the history of Black Judaisms in Africa and the Americas, discussing the Beta Israel, the Church of God and Saints of Christ, the Commandment Keepers, and the Chicago-born African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Haynes’ account of Black Judaisms in the US synthesizes the work of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, including Jacob Dorman, Tudor Parfitt, Edith Bruder, and John L. Jackson, among others. Haynes offers a useful sense of theological and political variety among the groups that have their origins in America, considers how the labels of Hebrew, Israelite, or Jew support different identity claims, and provides insight into how members of different groups evaluate the religiously grounded racial projects of other Black Hebrew, Israelite, or Jewish groups. The book’s original contributions come with the next two chapters that highlight Haynes’ method of “retrospective ethnography” and feature interviews he conducted in the late 1990s, a period in American history he frames as transformative in terms of the representation of Jews of African descent, situated within the broader context of the emergence of discourses of multiculturalism in the United States and the rise of the internet and its ability to connect people in new ways. In these chapters, he explores religion, race, and ethnicity among Black converts to Judaism and biracial Jews of African descent, offering a rich thematic portrait of identity construction and expression in the context of families and broader racial and religious communities. The variety of voices of Jews of African descent represented in Haynes’ study is the book’s great strength and he allows experiences that represent distinctive and evolving positions to come to the fore, revealing the sometimes-fraught nature of individual identity constructions that challenge prevailing racial and religious norms. The final chapter on “Black-Jewish relations” makes the most explicit use of the fact that the interviews featured in the book were conducted in the late 1990s to examine how Black converts to Judaism, biracial Jews, and Hebrew Israelites “negotiate black anti-Semitism and Jewish racism” (168). Although the context Haynes sets focuses more on public conflicts over antisemitism in Black communities than on discourses of anti-Blackness or expressions of racism among Jews of European descent, the interviewees highlight often difficult negotiations of relationship to Jewish and Black authenticity given the intra-community tensions that were prominent in the period. In the conclusion, Haynes...

The Wings of Atalanta: Essays Written along the Color Line

The Wings of Atalanta: Essays Written along the Color Line

MULHER NEGRA NA LITERATURA: A PALAVRA COMO INSTRUMENTO DE LUTA E RESISTÊNCIA

O presente artigo pretende discutir como a literatura tem sido utilizada enquanto mecanismo de luta e resistência por mulheres negras, de modo a evidenciar diferentes caminhos e temáticas que permeiam tal utilização. Nesse âmbito, propomos uma reflexão sobre as vozes que se fazem presentes na escrita literária a partir do lugar de fala das escritoras, de suas experiências individuais e coletivas. Em seguida, realizamos uma análise de como as autoras, em suas produções, abordam questões relacionadas às identidades, ao empoderamento, às lutas e resistências da mulher negra. Historicamente, a mulher negra foi colocada à margem das ordens estabelecidas pelo sistema patriarcal, desse modo, o movimento para dar visibilidade a textos literários de mulheres negras é fundamental para desconstruir o discurso dominante e para o reconhecimento das potencialidades femininas negras. Assim, o crescimento de autorias femininas negras contemporâneas na esfera literária evidencia a busca pela “descolonização” da literatura, utilizando-a como meio de existência identitária e de busca pela igualdade de direitos. Como metodologia para a escrita, realizamos pesquisa bibliográfica, a partir de diferentes autores como: Chimamanda Adichie (2009); Evaristo (2014); Davis (2016); Soares (2006) Osana Zolin (2009); Candido (2002); Facina (2004); Cercas (2020); Ribeiro(2017); Zolin (2009); Guimarães(1998); Jesus( 2000); Rufino( 1988) e Santana(2015).

Getting “Uppity” with Milton; or Because My Mom Politely Asked: “Was Milton Racist?”

ABSTRACT This article serves as a wake-up call for more early modern critics to pursue a new cultural mode of literary criticism in Milton studies. In examining select racialized moments in Milton's works, the author acknowledges the present moment as an acceptable time for responsibly and forthrightly interpreting race and blackness as a metalanguage and intertext of marginalizing Otherness throughout the canon of one of English literature's most revered poets. The author contends that unorthodox receptions of Milton by black authors such as Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison can help to theorize race in Milton's writings.

Onde estão os autores e autoras negras? A literatura afro-brasileira nos acervos das bibliotecas públicas brasileiras

As bibliotecas públicas são instituições sociais que têm como missão atender a todos da comunidade onde elasse inserem. Pensando na realidade brasileira (composta por maioria parda e negra), na importância da leitura literária para a formação do leitor e na representatividade dos acervos das bibliotecas públicas, esta pesquisa adentrou aos acervos das bibliotecas públicas estaduais brasileiras a fim de verificar as presenças dos autores e autoras negras de literatura afro-brasileira.

Colonialidade e política do esquecimento

O artigo busca refletir o silenciamento da intelectualidade negra brasileira. Reporto-me às estratégias para silenciar homens e mulheres negros cuja prática social consiste naquilo que denominamos por política do esquecimento e cujo mecanismo consiste em se apagar da memória das novas gerações a contribuição de autores negros e negras. É nesse sentido que o dilema da intelectualidade negra no Brasil reside na herança racista do campo intelectual brasileiro - um duplo vínculo – ordem científica e ordem social. Em discordância do que diz a teoria bourdiana, presume-se que o acúmulo de capital específico não pode justificar a ausência de autores negros e negras no campo intelectual brasileiro. Tudo leva a crer que, no Brasil, o que determina a posição no campo intelectual vai além da incorporação de um tipo de capital específico – classe, escolaridade, origem – transferido para o campo intelectual de um espaço social circundante: raça, gênero, classe.

Silence is not an option

Day, S., Silence is not an option. Geoscientist 30 (6), 5, 2020 https://doi.org/doi: 10.1144/geosci2020-090, Download the pdf here I’ve been doing a lot of reading over the past few days. As protests against police brutality and racial injustice have swept across the world, so many of us have been wondering what we can do. It’s felt more important than ever to listen, to educate ourselves and try to understand. Reading isn’t nearly enough – it’s barely a beginning – but it’s where I’ve started. I’ve been reading about Marguerite Thomas Williams, the first African American geologist to gain a PhD in the United States. After completing her dissertation, ‘A History of Erosion in the Anacostia Drainage Basin’, in 1942, she was appointed a full professor at Miner Teacher’s College – an institution of learning and training for young African American women. Alongside, she taught night classes at Howard University, an institute whose students regularly protested at local cafeterias that refused to serve them due to their race. I’ve been reading about the appalling racism, prejudice and links to slavery in the biographies of some of geology’s most famous figures – Louis Agassiz, who commissioned humiliating photographs of Black slaves to support his belief in their inferior biology. Henry De la Beche, a slave owner vocally opposed to abolition. And I’ve been reading about how our science has profited from slavery and colonialism, supporting White scientists, collections and institutions whilst Black lives suffered. Many people have asked what we do about this; how we reconcile these aspects of our science’s history, and honestly, I don’t know. I just know we can’t ignore it. I’ve been reading people’s testimony of their own experiences of racism in academia, industry and society. #BlackintheIvory, which documents the experience of being Black in academia. #BlackinNature; accounts of Black people feeling unsafe and unwelcome in outside spaces. #BlackinSTEM; people all over the world sharing their stories and offering support. I’ve been reading statistics which paint a bleak picture of diversity in our science and in academia more widely: 10% of UK geology undergraduates are from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background. Just 2% of UK geology undergraduates are Black, and 1.2% of UKRI studentships are awarded to Black students. I’ve been reading the numerous messages of support and a commitment to change from universities, institutions and employers and wondering how they will translate into action, hoping that this isn’t both the beginning and the end of the conversation. Others have also been researching and learning: on 10 June, thousands of academics and many organisations stopped work as part of #ShutDownSTEM, a global stand against racism in science designed to give time for reflection and planning. It will be interesting to see what changes emerge in the coming days and months as a result. Reading is a silent process. It’s not enough, unless we use it to make noise. We need to be loud and unafraid in our outrage. We need to be vocal in our rejection of racism, bias and discrimination, and in our affirmation that Black Lives Matter. This magazine should be a part of that. If you have thoughts and ideas you’d like to share, we’re listening – whether you want to contribute an article, tell us what you’d like to see more of, or simply share your frustration and your anger. We stand in solidarity with our Black authors, readers and colleagues. Geoscientist magazine is for everyone, and we know we have a lot of work to do. Further reading and sources: You can read more on Marguerite Thomas Williams at https://trowelblazers.com/marguerite-thomas-williams/ For more on Louis Agassiz’s daguerreotypes, and a subsequent lawsuit over their ownership: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/us/slave-photographs-harvard.html For more on Henry De la Beche’s links to slavery: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146633718 Data on Higher Education student enrolment by subject and ethnicity is available at https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/table-8 UKRI studentship statistics taken from Leading Routes’ report, ‘The Broken Pipeline’, available at https://leadingroutes.org/launch-the-broken-pipeline-report

Experimental Evidence on Teachers’ Racial Bias in Student Evaluation: The Role of Grading Scales

A vast research literature documents racial bias in teachers’ evaluations of students. Theory suggests bias may be larger on grading scales with vague or overly general criteria versus scales with clearly specified criteria, raising the possibility that well-designed grading policies may mitigate bias. This study offers relevant evidence through a randomized Web-based experiment with 1,549 teachers. On a vague grade-level evaluation scale, teachers rated a student writing sample lower when it was randomly signaled to have a Black author, versus a White author. However, there was no evidence of racial bias when teachers used a rubric with more clearly defined evaluation criteria. Contrary to expectation, I found no evidence that the magnitude of grading bias depends on teachers’ implicit or explicit racial attitudes.

“It is to a great extent, a new book”: Josiah Henson, John Lobb, and the challenges of white editorship of Black texts

ABSTRACT Formerly enslaved African American Josiah Henson is well-known for his association with the character of Uncle Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Published in 1852, the literary phenomenon sold millions of copies throughout the nineteenth century, and also made a hero of Henson, who marketed his connection with the novel to great acclaim. However, Henson’s visit to Britain in 1876–1877, his revised edition of his narrative, and the accompanying book The Young People’s Illustrated Edition of Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life (1877) has received scant attention from scholars. This study will be the first to focus on The Young People’s Edition in detail, and how John Lobb, Henson’s benefactor, marketed Henson and his literary work, which demonstrated not only the struggles Black authors faced in a white supremacist environment, but also how activists like Henson managed to retain some sense of authorship over their work.

Hybridized Black Authenticity: Aspirational Lifestyle Ideals and Expectations of the Self-Disciplined Black Woman in Essence

ABSTRACT This research explores how popular media content promotes hybridized black authenticity – consisting of controlling images, expectations, and ideals – through aspirational lifestyle advice for black women. Through a content analysis of Essence, we examine tensions between meanings of authenticity (true self) and black authenticity (social constructions of being legitimately black). We find integrations of race-specific expectations with culturally dominant “raceless” ideals, so that hybridized black authenticity extends intersectional authenticity standards through themes of pursuing the true self, embracing natural beauty, and regulating black lady professional respectability. Advice promotes individualized responses of self-responsibility and surveillance to systemic issues while acknowledging racialized and gendered tensions.

On Shaky Ground: Black Authenticity at Predominantly White Institutions

This study investigates the ways in which social context affects processes of black authenticity, resulting in shaky ground for authentic blackness among black college students at predominantly white institutions (PWIs). Because of normalized whiteness, black PWI students are negotiating authentic blackness in social contexts that limit black expression and identity through external pressure from nonblack students, in addition to experiencing intraracial pressures from black peers. These students must walk a thin line: they have to avoid being labeled as either “too black” or “inauthentically” black by nonblack students while simultaneously working to be seen as “black enough” by black peers, which highlights the precarity of black authenticity at PWIs. I use interviews and qualitative surveys of 44 black students at two PWIs and one historically black university (HBCU); the data from the HBCU are used to highlight contrasts between two school types. Results indicate that, as a result of tighter boundaries around blackness drawn by both black and nonblack peers, black PWI students experience behavioral constraints, limited options for ethnic identification, and believe that HBCU students see them as less authentically black. Conversely, HBCU students did not describe similar behavioral constraints or ethnic exclusion, and made no claims of inauthentic blackness for black PWI students. Overall, results suggest that the social contexts of PWIs significantly affect black students’ experiences with black authenticity.

Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley's Papers

4 CLA JOURNAL Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers Agnieszka Tuszynska In May 1947, a new novel of urban naturalism, Knock on Any Door, appeared in the bookstores and book stands across Chicago and the nation and was soon off to a smashing success. The name of the author, Willard Motley (19091965 ), rang few bells, but that fact did not prevent sales from soaring, with 300,000 hard-cover copies selling in the year of the publication alone (Klinkowitz xviii). Many critics responded enthusiastically to the story of a sweet Italian American altar boy who transforms into a thief and eventually a killer under the pressure of poverty and violence in Chicago’s slums. Despite a few critical voices, most reviewers—including those writing for the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine—lauded the novel for its psychological realism and social commentary (Fleming 59-60). Critics compared it to works by Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell, and were joined in singing Motley’s praises by Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote, “Reading this book made me walk around my neighborhood with a more curious eye, and it made me wonder just what I would find if I‘knocked on any door”(Roosevelt). The novel’s success led to a film version starring Humphrey Bogart in 1949 and put the name of Willard Motley in the literary spotlight for the next couple of years. All the hype Knock on Any Door generated may seem odd to many an enthusiast of American literature who likely never heard of Motley. In fact, the author of Knock fell into obscurity just a few short years after the novel’s publication and was only temporarily and posthumously resurrected by a few academics who were the first to study his papers in the late seventies. 1 I argue that the reason for this lack of recognition lies in Motley’s status as an African American author who became defined early on as a “raceless” writer. 2 Knock, which was Motley’s first novel, places him in the ranks of other black writers, including Frank Yerby, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston, who penned novels featuring nonblack protagonists and centering on non-black experience.As Gene Andrew Jarrett has argued in Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (2007), such writers “play truant” from the school of literary racial realism that demanded that “black authors . . . write authentic literature” that portrays “the 1 The year 2019 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Northern Illinois Press University’s publication of its edition of the book, which was also the last. 2 The term “raceless” as it was originally applied to Motley by early reviewers and critics, and as it is consequently used in this essay, refers specifically to the supposed lack of focus on black experience in Motley’s writing. CLA JOURNAL 5 Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers black race in accurate or truthful ways” (1). To an extent, Jarrett’s study of such black literary “truancy” finds an ancestor in Claudia Tate’s reading of African American novels that resist what she calls “racial protocols” in her 1998 book, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. Such protocols “demanded that a black text explicitly represent their lived experiences with racial oppression” (Tate 3). While Tate’s focus lies in novels that evade this racial “formula” (5) by either centering white characters or conflicts hinging on something other than racial oppression, she points out that these texts are considered marginal as opposed to “consistently venerated” works that offer “the typical racial story” (10). Jarrett makes a similar observation when he writes that black writers’ challenge to “the essentialist paradigms of ethnic authenticity . . . is marginality or exclusion in the academic and cultural marketplace” (5). Motley’s illustrative case seems to have been additionally exacerbated in that respect by the fact that he had no significant capital as an “authentically” black writer or a “race writer” before the publication of Knock. Hence, the supposed “racelessness” of his debut novel defined him and resulted in the absence...

Integration and Inequality: Mid-1900s Midwest American History, As Told by Modern Youth Literature

Integration and Inequality:Mid-1900s Midwest American History, As Told by Modern Youth Literature Heather J. Matthews (bio) Cline-Ransome, Lesa. Finding Langston. Holiday House, 2018. 112 pp. $10.99 pb. ISBN 9780823445820. Cline-Ransome, Lesa. Leaving Lymon. Holiday House, 2020. 208 pp. $17.99 hc. ISBN 9780823444427. Cutler, Jane. Susie Q Fights Back. Holiday House, 2018. 112 pp. $6.99 pb. ISBN 9780823439935. As I approach reviewing three children's texts on the subject of race and representation, many Americans are taking to the streets to protest lifetimes of brutality and inequality that stifles Black people and a legal and judicial system that continues to be unequal and unfair. Racism, however, is not just an issue for adults—children are affected by issues of racial and ethnic inequality, and yet many adults are unwilling to talk about these realities with children. In reviewing Susie Q Fights Back, Finding Langston, and Leaving Lymon, it became clear to me that texts such as these need to be available to young readers to facilitate discussions with them about race. Adults must be willing to have difficult and uncomfortable discussions about race and inequality with children, and it is my belief that the above texts can be tools to aid in this discussion. These three middle-grade texts tackle difficult topics with effective and appropriate writing and without minimizing the harsh realities of the American Midwest in the mid-1900s. These fictional, first person novels feature brave and realistic characters doing their best in a system that privileges white children over children of colour. The main characters must come to grips with the fact that they are forced into a place within society, and each must decide for themselves what concepts such as equality, justice, and fairness truly mean. Despite any number of odds stacked against them, such as systemic racism or generational poverty and trauma, each main character struggles and perseveres to create a space for themselves. [End Page 188] Jane Cutler's Susie Q Fights Back, published in hardcover as Susan Marcus Bends the Rules, tells the story of Susan Marcus, a young white girl who has just moved from New York City, New York, to Clayton, Missouri, with her mother and father. Set in the year 1943, Susie is thrust from the diverse northern city she calls home to a small midwestern town where Jim Crow laws are still strictly enforced. Readers learn that Susie is Jewish, and she befriends a young white Christian girl in her building named Marlene as well as a young Black girl who lives close by named Loretta. Susie, Marlene, and Loretta quickly develop a friendship based in the indignation that Loretta is not treated the same as Susie and Marlene, and the three girls set out to "defy" Jim Crow. The girls take a stand together, finding a legal loophole in the segregation rules that allows them to elude legal restrictions and celebrate their friendship in public. The author, Jane Cutler, modelled some of this story on her own experiences as a young white Jewish girl who moved from New York to the American Midwest as a child. Susie Q Fights Back, a PJ Our Way book, was promoted by the PJ Library, which—along with the middle-school branch of PJ Our Way—sends books with Jewish content to families in Canada and the US free of charge ("What Is"). As a PJ Our Way book, Susie Q Fights Back was a promoted title distributed to young readers. Lesa Cline-Ransome's Finding Langston and Leaving Lymon exist in the same universe as one another and thus share some settings and characters. Cline-Ransome, a Black author, first wrote Finding Langston, which tells the story of Langston, a young Black boy who has recently moved from a small town in Alabama to Chicago with his father. The impetus for their move, the recent death of Langston's mother, haunts both father and son, as both miss her in their own ways. Compounding this fact, as he is still wearing his Alabama "country clothing" and speaking with his Alabama accent, Langston finds socializing in school difficult. Adding to Langston's school troubles is his...

Espelho de Narciso ou de Oxum? A poesia erótica negro-brasileira antologizada

This article discusses the representation of sexuality and eroticism in the poetry made by black Brazilian writers, having the anthology Pretumel de chama e gozo (2015), organized by Cuti and Akins Kintê, as its subject of study. What’s the point of producing a black erotic writing when the conservative and excludent political environment demands from black activism the fight for racial equality and black people’s insertion in several social instances? Isn’t eroticism in the service of violence and sexual exploitation of black bodies? How is it possible to think about a different kind of eroticism, that mitigates the stigma inherited from a slave society? The discussion undertaken here wants to point to investigative routes in black authorship eroticism more than answer the questions above.

“Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell

CLA JOURNAL 25 “Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell Trent Masiki The Field Negro’s Lament In his 1963 speech “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm X tells a parable about the house Negro and the field Negro, two male slaves who hold opposing views on the merits of escaping their life in racial bondage. Paralyzed by the creature comforts of his relative privilege, the house Negro is satisfied with the status quo. When approached with the idea of running away, the house Negro balks, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” Fearing neither uncertainty nor the unknown, the field Negro replies, “Any place is better than here” (Malcolm X 11).The field Negro’s lament epitomizes how African Americans have, from the nineteenth century to the present, theorized and practiced emigration as a response to US racism and racial terror. Because they demonstrated the capacity to imagine and effect a liberated future for themselves, fugitive-minded slaves like the allegorical field Negro were, loosely speaking, afrofuturists. In his 1993 article “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” Mark Dery coined the term afrofuturism,1 defining it as an aesthetic mode of expression that focuses on African Americans and their relationship to advanced science and technology in the near or distant future (Dery 180). Since the 1990s, afrofuturism gained a host of proponents in literary and cultural studies because it advances the idea that African American speculative culture should promote African American social, political, and cultural agency. Scholars and writers like Alondra Nelson, Sheree R. Thomas, Nalo Hopkinson, Reynaldo Anderson, Kodwo Eshun, and Jeffery Allen Tucker were key in promoting the critical study of speculative literature by writers of African descent and defining afrofuturism as a Pan-African aesthetic rather than an exclusively African American one.2 Although afrofuturism is ethnocentric in its content, it is racially ecumenical in its authorship. Just as anyone can sing the blues, play 1 “Black to the Future” was first published in South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 4, 1993. For a twenty-five year scholarly retrospective on afrofuturism, see Barber et al. 2 Each of these scholars and writers has written seminal texts about afrofuturism and African American science fiction, see Nelson; Thomas; Hopkinson and Nelson; Anderson and Jones; Anderson; Eshun; Tucker. 26 CLA JOURNAL Trent Masiki jazz, or perform hip hop dance, Dery suggests that anyone, regardless of race, can produce an afrofuturist text.3 Afrofuturism’s ethnoracial pluralism is essential to its efficacy as an antiracist cultural technology, argues literary scholar DeWitt D. Kilgore. Afrofuturism, contends Kilgore, “can be viewed as less a marker of black authenticity and more of a cultural force, an episteme that betokens a shift in our largely unconscious assumptions about which histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we might imagine” (“Afrofuturism” 564). On one hand, afrofuturism’s racial pluralism poses the threat that speculative literature and media about people of African descent will be produced by people who have no existential investment in the history and condition of being a person of African descent. On the other hand, afrofuturism’s pluralism encourages all people, regardless of their race, to consume speculative literature, film, music, and art that centers and/or features people of African descent.4 The rich tension between afrofuturism’s ethnocentrism and its racial pluralism invites one to analyze understudied racial themes in Ray Bradbury’s “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) and Derrick A. Bell’s “The Space Traders” (1992). Since 2003, scholars in African American literary studies have been reinvestigating “Way in the Middle of the Air” and “The Space Traders” because these stories directly address science fiction’s evasion of the history of slavery, segregation, and racial terror in the US. In his book Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, André M. Carrington notes that Bradbury is a significant science fiction writer because he explicitly engages racial...