Black Authors Research Articles

Bulletproof Diva and the Oral Tradition: The Work of Lisa Jones

It is argued that Lisa Jones9 work, comprised mainly of humorous essays and sketches originally published in New York papers, is in its own way worth more than the writings of some better known Black American authors. Her style is compared to that of other writers, and her influence on topics such as interracial marriage is noted.

Finding Langston by Lesa Cline-Ransome

Reviewed by: Finding Langston by Lesa Cline-Ransome Elizabeth Bush Cline-Ransome, Lesa Finding Langston. Holiday House, 2018 [112p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-8234-3960-7 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-8234-4110-5 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 3-5 Chicago is not kind to Langston, whose father abruptly moved the two of them out of Alabama in 1946 soon after Mama died. Maybe there were more opportunities for an adult, but the junior high newcomer in Bronzeville finds the city crowded, noisy, dirty, friendless, and utterly devoid of Mama. Langston sees an upside to his new home, though, when he discovers the Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library, a library that welcomes all residents and even celebrates Black authors in its collection and its programming. When Langston stumbles upon the work of Langston Hughes, he is promptly bitten by the poetry bug and touched by bluesy verses that reach into his heart and his migrant experience. The connection becomes more visceral still when Langston finds a ribboned bundle of letters secreted under his father’s bed that explain the connection between his and Hughes’ given names, and also allow him to understand his parents’ deep love and his father’s grief. This compact novel celebrates libraries and librarians but not at the expense of its real story; solid plotting, local detail, well-chosen poetry passages, and believable adolescent reaction to loss and forced relocation keep Langston’s tale grounded and [End Page 466] engaging. An author’s note offers additional information on the Chicago Black Renaissance and the George Cleveland Hall Branch Library. Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature by Daniel Hack

Reviewed by: Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature by Daniel Hack Hollis Robbins Daniel Hack, Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 304 pp. $35.00. Anyone who works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American literature knows how necessary it is to keep a bookshelf nearby of all of the works of classical, biblical, and British literature that African American authors have cited, critiqued, reworked, or simply alluded to since Phillis Wheatley began the practice in 1773, referencing Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and a host of others. Some writers provide a handy list of authors, as Frederick Douglass did in 1845, directing readers to The Columbian Orator (over two dozen, from Cicero to Franklin!), or as Charles Chesnutt did in 1900, in listing the Great Books on John Warwick’s bookshelf in The House behind the Cedars (a dozen more, including Milton, Cervantes, and Scott). The canon of African American literature is so very rich and was for so very long ignored by literature scholars outside of historically black colleges and universities (who have always read works by black writers now tagged as “little known”), that the work of excavating, uncovering, and republishing literature by African American writers—along with the work of reading these texts in conversation with other African American texts—has been the primary aim of African American literature scholars for the past several decades. As the bookshelves filled with African American literature have expanded, so too has that other bookshelf, the one holding Ovid, Burns, Scott, and other texts black authors have alluded to. The ongoing task of analyzing the ways that these bookshelves are in conversation with each other is increasingly daunting. Accordingly, Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New is warmly welcome, with its detailed readings of African American literary engagement with Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, [End Page 62] and others. Reaping Something New details so many of the myriad ways that African American authors throughout the nineteenth century read, drew upon, deliberately misread, toyed with, signified upon, contended with, dismissed, and admired Victorian works of literature that, perhaps unintentionally, Hack quickly ends up contradicting his own central argument that these engagements were “unlikely” (1). From Wheatley onward, African American literature has been in deep, playful, and abiding conversation with the broader literary canon as key scholars on the category of African American literature from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to Kenneth Warren have argued. One of Hack’s tremendous contributions, in fact, is to gather together the many strands of scholarship on African American literary engagement with (primarily) British texts and present them meticulously, systematically, and thoroughly, arguing for a process he calls the “African Americanization” of these texts. “African Americanizations,” Hack argues, “make newly salient the specific ways and ends to which Victorian novels and poems do or do not represent individuals of African descent (and members of nonwhite races more generally) . . . [and] can also call into question the importance of race in texts in which it has always seemed central” (3). Hack sees African American writers’ engagement with Victorian texts as “close reading at a distance” (3). He offers new ways to look at Victorian texts and new ways to understand African American literature from specific, granular examples. Hack’s chapters reflect his training as a Victorianist and his emphasis on the two-way street of African American and Victorian textual engagement. In his Introduction, he begins to demonstrate his method by looking at the first paragraph of Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892), in which Cooper inserts three lines from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), without attribution but with a provocative italicization: “An infant crying in the night, / An infant crying for the light; / And with no language—but a cry.” Closely reading this fruitful engagement yields a richer understanding of Cooper, of Tennyson, and of the various scholars and critics over the years who have seen, not seen, or misunderstood the allusion (though surely not “suppressed” [6]). Next, chapter one, “Close Reading Bleak House at a Distance,” offers an updated version of Hack’s 2008...

Pick your perspective: Racial group membership and judgments of intent, harm, and discrimination

How do people judge the intentions of a perpetrator and the harm experienced by a victim in cases of racial discrimination? How do these judgments influence attributions to discrimination? We examined these questions in 4 studies, predicting that Whites’ and Blacks’ judgments would reflect different group-based perspectives. Supporting our hypotheses, White authors describing an arrest denied intent and ignored harm relative to Black authors (Study 1). When judging whether an event was discrimination, Whites were influenced by intent, but Blacks were influenced by intent and harm (Study 2). Finally, instructing people to take the victim’s perspective increased Whites’ judgments of intent, harm, and discrimination (Studies 3 and 4), while Blacks’ judgments generally remained the same (Study 4). Our results demonstrate one reason why Whites and Blacks judge discrimination differently—they adopt different perspectives when evaluating intent and harm—and offer a way to increase Whites’ recognition of discrimination: perspective-taking.

Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights

Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights

The Horrifying Sacred: Hip-Hop, Blackness, and the Figure of the Monster

Abstract In this article, I examine the intersection of two trajectories of thought and practice regarding the relationship between the sacred and the monstrous. One trajectory includes authors like George Bataille who, contrary to those who define the sacred in terms of purity and order, associate the sacred with those forces and energies that can be horrifying and anguish-filled. The other trajectory includes Black authors and artists like Christina Sharpe who have responded to a white supremacist legacy of associating Black bodies with the monstrous, with excessive flesh, with that space between the human and the animal. Black bodies have traditionally been marked as “matter out of place,” as that dirt that resists form (like the monster). In this essay, I look at Black music, particularly hip-hop and reggae, as a space where the relationship between the monster figure and monstrosity is reexpressed and visualized.

The cost of being “real”: black authenticity, colourism, and Billboard Rap Chart rankings

ABSTRACT Research on black authenticity identifies “oppressive othering” and “white standards of beauty”, particularly lighter skin tone, as key components. Few studies disentangle which of these two theoretical components matter the most for a particular outcome. Rap music, whose lyrics are often categorized as authentic expressions of blackness, offers an intriguing case to compare the effects of “oppressive othering” (as alcohol and drug lyrics) and “white standards of beauty” (as the rap artist’s skin tone) on national music charts. Analysing artists’ skin tone and lyrical content of songs ranked on Billboard Rap Year-End Charts from 2007 to 2011, results show that lighter skin tone is significantly and positively related to higher chart rankings. Alcohol and drug lyrics, however, had a non-significant effect. Implications are discussed in relation to the effects of the commodified imagery of “authentic” blackness in the new digital era of music.

L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema

From the late 1960s through the mid-1980s, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) trained a pioneer generation of black filmmakers. Influenced by a wide set of models in global cinema, they experimented with and challenged Hollywood convention, both on-screen and behind the camera. They did not share a single aesthetic vision, but, as a whole, sought a vision of black authenticity, exploring themes and lives that revealed the worlds of poor and working-class people. Their ranks included about fifty artists. Many who made a lasting impact on film and its study, including well-known directors such as Charles Burnett and Julie Dash. In 1986 the writer and academic Clyde Taylor coined “L.A. rebellion” to describe this movement. For years, the rebellion received relatively scant attention from scholars. Then, in 2009, the Film & Television Archive at UCLA, began to gather and restore its films, most of which never received mass distribution. The project also archived filmmakers' papers, conducted oral histories, and staged a three-month-long film exhibition. In 2011 UCLA hosted a symposium of filmmakers, critics, and scholars, providing the foundation for L.A. Rebellion, a collection of scholarly essays that includes a comprehensive filmography and selections from the oral history project.

A Critical Look at Certainty Adverbs and the Essentializing Discourse of Black Female Identity in the Reality Television Show, Girlfriend Intervention

ABSTRACT“Trapped inside of every white girl is a strong black woman ready to bust out.” This is the tag line for Lifetime's new reality makeover show, Girlfriend Intervention. In the show, four Black women transform White women (who they call a BW for “basic woman”) from “a red hot mess” to a “bootylicious babe.” Throughout each episode, the girlfriends provide near-constant prescriptions for how Black women should behave and perform their femininity. This project examines the ways in which the girlfriends on the show dictate the boundaries of Black female authenticity. Specifically, the authors explore the ways the stars of the show essentialize Black womanhood as they provide viewers a sort of “hand guide” for how to be a Black woman. A critical discourse analysis of how the girlfriends use the certainty adverbs always and never will help highlight the presence of gendered and racialized essentialism found in the show. Lastly, the authors will discuss the possible implications watching Girlfriend Intervention may have, not only on Black women, but also on the entire viewing audience.

Translation Section

Translation Section

Room for debate (and derogation): Negativity of readers’ comments on Black authors’ online content.

Room for debate (and derogation): Negativity of readers’ comments on Black authors’ online content.

Highlighted & Underlined

A new national report on the teacher pension systems in all 50 states offers a grim picture of the amount of pension debt and teachers’ lack of access to flexible and fair benefits. A more positive school climate may be linked to higher academic performance, suggests a new study by two federal agencies. Column also offers links to lists of books by black authors and about black children.

East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

The Quest for Identity In Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man

رالف إليسون (1914-1994) روائي أمريکي أصل أفريقي، وناقد أدبي، تؤکد رواياته افتقار الأمريکيين السود إلى نظرائهم البيض للاعتراف بالهوية الزنجية (السوداء) کل تعقيداتها. تعد روايته الرجل الخفي الأکثر شهرة، والتي نشرت قبل ذروة الموجة الثورية الأمريکية للحقوق المدنية للأقليات. وقد أشاد النقاد بالرواية ليس فقط باعتبارها الأولى المهمة قبل مؤلف أسود تحصل على جائزة الکتاب الوطني المرموقة للرواية عام 1953، وإنما لتغييرها شکل الأدب الأمريکي. تقتفي الدراسة الرحلة البدنية والنفسية للبطل، وهو أيضـا الراوي الذي لم يفصح عن هويته، ذلک الشاب الزنجي الجنوبي، الذيتلقى تعليمـا جامعيـا، ويکافح أجل البقاء ومن أجل رسم هويته مجتمع منقسم عنصريـا يرفض أن يراه کإنسان. وتهدف الدراسة أيضا إلى فحص وتحليل موضوع بحث البطل الدؤوب مدى الحياة عن الهوية والمکانة المجتمع کرجل أسود بين الأمريکيين البيض، رحلة محفوفة بالمخاطر، الجهل المطبق إلى الوعي المستنير والتحرر الوهم وخيبة الأمل، أو وفقـا لما يقوله المؤلف: من الهدف للعاطفة إلى التصور والإدراک الثلاثية التي يقول عنها إليسون بأنها حفزت جهوده، کما يرى منظور ضمير المتکلم للراوي، ومن خلال سلسلة ذکريات الماضي أشکال الأحلام والذکريات. وتوضح الدراسة القوى الاجتماعية والسياسية القوية التي تتآمر لإبقاء الأمريکيين السود―کما يقول إليسون― في مکانهم، نافيـا عنهم حقهم الذي لا يمکن التنازل عنه ومصادرته الحياة والحرية والسعي لتحقيق السعادة والذي يضمن لجميع الأمريکيين. Abstract Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) is an African-American novelist, and literary critic. His fiction asserts the need for white Americans to recognize the Negro identity all its complexity. His most famous novel, Invisible Man, is published just before the crest of America’s revolutionary wave of Civil Rights for minorities. It is hailed not only as the first significant novel by a black author to receive the prestigious National Book Award for Fiction 1953, but to change the shape of American literature. The study traces the physical and psychological transformation of its hero, an unnamed narrator; a young Southern Negro, a college-educated, who is relentlessly struggling to survive and delineate himself a racially-divided society that refuses to see him as a human being. The aim of the study is to examine and analyze the theme of a man's lifelong quest for his identity and place society as a black man white America—a perilous journey from blind ignorance to enlightened awareness and disillusionment—or, according to the author, “from Purpose to Passion to Perception,” a triumvirate that Ellison says spurred his efforts, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, and through a series of flashbacks the forms of dreams and memories. It also illustrates the powerful social and political forces that conspire to keep black Americans, Ellison’s words, in their place, denying them the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness guaranteed to all Americans.

Flipping the Coin: Towards a Double-Faced Approach to Teaching Black Literature in Secondary English Classrooms

Critiquing two approaches that English teachers use to teach Black, or African-American, literature in the secondary classroom – one that centralises races and the other that ignores it – this article proposes a hybrid approach that combines both. This double-faced approach recognises the culturally specific themes that give the text and the Black author their unique voice while also recognising commonalities that bridge the text to others – despite the race of the authors. To demonstrate the feasibility of the double-faced approach, the article concludes with an examination of three texts through the lens of this ‘race both matters and doesn’t matter’ perspective.

The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction

392 CLA JOURNAL The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction Michael Hill, Jessica Welburn Paige, and Deborah Whaley Ta-Nehisi Coates commands varied attention. As 2017 ended, he provoked approval from Annette Gordon Reed, a pound from Walton Muyumba, and critique from Cornel West.1 These reactions not only hint at the range of opinions about Coates but also affirm his status as an intellectual celebrity. Determining the meaning of such affirmation requires a long view of black creativity. When James Weldon Johnson wrote about “black and unknown bards” whose routes to artistic expression caused “a wide, wide wonder,” he did not have 21st century writers in mind (769-770). Still, his focus on the circumstances under which black authors could “lift” their “voice and sing” clarify as much about Ta-Nehisi Coates as they do about Lucy Terry, David Walker, and Anna Julia Cooper. Johnson recognized that black art constitutes a reaction against anonymity. If Coates did not experience slavery and Jim Crow like earlier black authors, then he did confront an America that had a hard time seeing where blackness fit into national identity. Prior black writers addressed this problem by exploring tropes like invisibility, misnaming , and marginalization. While Coates’s work dialogues with these themes, his abiding preoccupation is racial reckoning in democracy’s shadows. His probing of this topic acquires greater significance because his most celebrated efforts coincide with the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States. In light of 2018, how should the public understand Coates? The editors of this special issue believe that he should be analyzed as a black writer.2 Although that label sounds satisfactory, it begs the question of whether Coates is best labeled a writer of fiction or nonfiction, a deft user of tweets, blogs, and comments or a savant of journalistic essays and memoirs. He defies easy characterization, yet his centrality remains a marker of a shift in the intellectual currents of black society. From a moment when the preacher,the politician,and,more recently,the academic 1 For the pieces where Gordon-Reed, Muyumba, and West offer their perceptions, see respectively “We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates review–On White Supremacy,”“Ta-Nehisi Coates Blazes a Singular Intellectual Path in We Were Eight Years in Power,” and “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle.” These three pieces offer but a sampling of the wide attention that Coates inspired. 2 Our approach in part echoes the sentiment of Jamelle Bouie who observed that We Were Eight Years in Power (2017), Coates’s most recent book, suggested that he should be evaluated “as a writer, nothing more and nothing less.” For a fuller account, see Bouie. CLA JOURNAL 393 The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction prevailed as signature figures in the arena of black public intellectual endeavor, Coates signals an extension and a customization of the ascendancy of the writer. To understand Coates and this development, we must relentlessly pursue context. After the Civil Rights era and the passage of legislation like the Voting Rights Act, the articulation of black cares and concerns increasingly migrated away from the moral milieu of the ministerial class and towards the realpolitik manipulations of mayors, city council members, and state/national legislators. This development did not occur all at once; however, gradually, the vital tasks of speaking on behalf of Black America fell to a class of individuals whose chief obligations dovetailed with governance. From the mayoral cohort that featured people like Carl B. Stokes, Maynard Jackson, and Coleman Young to the presidential candidates like Charlene Mitchell, Shirley Chisolm, and Margaret Wright, the presence of a robust black political class in the 1970s signaled the indisputable, if circumscribed, gains that greater integration delivered. If this group indicated one fairly quick harvest from civil rights activism, then the proliferation and the visibility of black academics suggest a slower, yet equally important emergence. The vital role that academics like Charles Johnson (sociology) and Charles Hamilton Houston (law) played in challenging segregation may have been obscured by the more conspicuous operation of black lawyers. While that situation may have prevailed...

Jesse Jackson’s Call Me Charley: Protesting Segregated Recreation in Cold War America

Jesse Jackson’s Call Me Charley:Protesting Segregated Recreation in Cold War America Amanda M. Greenwell (bio) Jesse Jackson began work on his first novel, Call Me Charley (1945), when Harper and Row editor Ursula Nordstrom said to him, “What I’m looking for is the story of a black boy growing up. Can you do it?” (Lanier 336). Invited to enter a publishing world dominated by white editors and writers, Jacksonjoined the ranks of the first African American authors to write about black childhood for both black and white audiences,1 and is rightly mentioned in histories of African American children’s literature as a breakthrough writer. Barbara Lowe, for instance, concludes her entry in The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature with, “Jackson’s novels and biographies paved the way for more explicit writing about race relations in children’s and young adult literature and gave African American writers an audience that had, in large measure, previously been denied them.” Rudine Sims Bishop specifically refers to Call Me Charley as a “pioneering book” in what she terms “social conscience” literature (Shadow 17), and notes that with this text, Jackson “introduced the African American children’s novel of racial conflict” (Free 60). Despite his foundational status, however, few critics have investigated Jesse Jackson’s work at length. Those who have argue that his early novels, especially Call Me Charley, emphasize interracial friendship as the means to overcoming racism (Lowe; Schmidt 78).2 Certainly friendship is the apparent focus of the text: Tom, a white boy who lives in an affluent suburb, befriends Charley, a black boy whose parents keep house for and chauffer the suburb’s resident doctor. Their relationship places the text firmly within the tradition of “race-liberal writing” as it manifested in 1940s children’s texts depicting African American children (Capshaw 6).Jodi Melamed argues that racial liberalism “promoted the idea of a racially inclusive US national culture as the key to achieving America’s manifest destiny and proof of American exceptionalism and universality” after World War II (58). Casting “racism as a problem of white attitude or prejudice” (61), the “official, state-recognized anti-racism” (x) of the early Cold War found a conduit in literature that could “enabl[e] changes in white attitudes that were presumed to have a leveling effect on racial disparity” (54). Melamed exposes how the [End Page 92] race novel’s focus on sympathy and friendship privileged “regulative concepts and discourses that produced and circumscribed acceptable [i.e., Cold War sanctioned] discourse on race” (71)—discourse that often marginalized or erased the role of economic and political systems in racial discrimination.3 Focusing on the “trickster” potential of such texts, however, Katharine Capshaw argues that despite “the narrowing of radical potential for critique in race-liberal articulations, subtle undercurrents of dissatisfaction and of civil rights demands still course through texts written by black authors and offered to black and white audiences” (7). And indeed, Jackson himself has acknowledged the significance of such undercurrents in his work. In a series of interviews with Ruby Lanier in 1977, he characterized his novel as a conscious and deliberate site of racial advancement: with Call Me Charley, “it was my aim to single out one black boy, to have him fight for at least the respect of being called Charles Moss. Charley had a game plan and the game plan began with recognize me as an individual and then we will go on from there and I’ll try to get into the boys’ club and try to win admission to the swimming pool and try to get a part in the school play” (Lanier 333). Of the racism Charley encounters as he attempts to do so, Jackson said, “We know these things exist. We know that black children have such experiences. We just do not write about them. We just do not talk about them. It was part of the invisible nature of the black at that time” (334).4Jackson’s mission, then, involved making visible and giving voice to that which had been hidden and silenced. Shifting critical attention to Call Me Charley away from the novel’s alignment with...

Notes on a Marxist Interpretation of Black American Literature

As its title Notes on Interpretation of Black American Literature indicates, this paper is tentative and suggestive. It aims to present some initial thoughts about subject, raise some relevant issues, and chart some possible directions that criticism of black could take. Perhaps first question to be confronted is this: What does phrase a interpretation of black American literature mean? As obvious as answer may at first appear to be, it is not. Even though Marx and Engels left large body of commentary about art, they did not devise an original, formal, Marxist aesthetic system. Therefore, as one writer has put it, the history of aesthetics has been history of unfolding of possible applications of ideas and categories to arts and to theory of art. This yields many approaches and critical possibilities. However, at base of them all is belief that writer and work are dialectical products of particular historical moment, conditioned by economic-class realities. With this conception of as starting point, one can move in many directions (tracing correspondences between art and class, arguing revolutionary function of art, demystifying existing artists and works, and so on) or adopt methodology of any number of critics (Georg Lukacs, Ernest Fischer, or Herbert Marcuse, to name only three). For general, introductory purposes of this paper, a interpretation of black American literature can be taken simply to mean looking at body of black American from perspective of Marxism to see what relationships exist between two. This would involve examining elements in literature, as well as critiquing from point of view. Specifically, investigation could encompass at least five different tasks: (1) compiling bibliography; (2) studying authors and their works; (3) studying works of non-Marxist authors which contain elements; (4) discussing according to categories of realism, modernism, and socialist realism; and (5) comparing critical tenets with literature. Undoubtedly, most basic service that scholar could provide would be making list of works which would be necessary and helpful to interpretation of black literature. While Baxandall bibliography, Marxism and Aesthetics, contains section on black writers, reference that goes beyond this is needed. 2 The bibliography should list black writers and works, secondary criticism of them and their productions, and other sources which provide historical, sociological, and literary background (for example, James 0. Young's Black Writers of Thirties and Harold Cruse's The Crisis of Negro Intellectual). Al works which concern blacks and Marxism-communism-even those which are not focused on writers and literature-would be valuable. The bibliography should also be annotated to provide maximum guidance and assistance, especially to beginning students. Many of books and articles included in it would have an anti-Marxist, anti-communist bias. (Notation would indicate this as well as identify strongly partisan works.) Consequently, critic could see opposing view (which bibliography would also supply) and/or study raw materials and basic documents personally in order to form his or her own conclusions. An obvious beginning approach to per se could certainly be study of black writers and their works. Looking at writer as whole would necessitate paying attention to both his Marxistoriented and non-Marxist-oriented works, but former would be of greater interest. Furthermore, many black authors were for only period of their careers, and when they ceased subscribing to philosophy, they usually stopped overtly presenting that world view in their writings. The list is impressive: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Amiri Baraka, to name some of them. The nature of criticism given these writers would, of course, vary according to volume and quality of their works, their general stature, and degree to which they express philosophy. Richard Wright, for instance, has been accorded great deal of this type of critical attention. One of poems which he wrote in first eager flush of enthusiasm, I Have Seen Black Hands, is fairly well-known, anthologized, and commented upon in terms of its political origin. The same thing can be said of two of stories in Uncle Tom's Children

“A Gentleman of Superior Cultivation and Refinement”: Recovering the Biography of Frank J. Webb

1043 African American Review 50.4 (Winter 2017): 1043-1054© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1043 1044 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1044 ERIC GARDNER 1045 Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1045 1046 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1046 ERIC GARDNER 1047 Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1047 1048 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1048 ERIC GARDNER 1049 Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1049 1050 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1050 ERIC GARDNER 1051 Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1051 1052 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1052 ERIC GARDNER 1053 Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1053 1054 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Gardner_Gardner 2/14/2018 5:45 PM Page 1054 ...

Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism by Paul Barrett

Paul Barrett. Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2015. Pp. vii, 240. CAD$29.95. Paul Barrett's Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism interrogates anti-black within multicultural Canada via an analysis black literature. According to Barrett, aesthetics blackening--as practiced by authors Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, and Tessa McWatt--challenge Daniel Coleman's notion Canadian civility and [Frances] Henry and [Carol] Tator's theory democratic racism found in public policy and news media (104, 106). Building on W. E. B. Du Bois, Rinaldo Walcott, and Lily Cho, Barrett describes as both a process invidious racialization and a set critical, practices. In other words, while blackening produces double-consciousness by racially discriminating against non-white subjects as foreign or criminal, its capacities for process, performance, and by black authors engender resistance to Canadian multiculturalism as a colour-blind discourse inclusion. It does so by resignifying time, space, and movement in (13), where whiteness is at centre and writers can inhabit [the nation] on their own terms (190). Barrett's introduction challenges commonplace assumptions that multiculturalism promotes diversity. Assessing government documents from 1960s onward, he shows how white supremacy undergirds Canadian multiculturalism by eradicating questions race (4). Arguing that Canadian multiculturalism promotes assimilationist premised on civility, Barrett rejects diversity discourses as a state strategy for managing and containing difference, emphasizing rather the significance histories in formation multicultural identities (5). Accordingly, Barrett calls for a rethinking literary criticism and its role in institutionalization Canadian multicultural literature. Barrett's opening chapters discuss works Brand and Clarke. Chapter One offers invigorating close readings Brand's A Map to Door No Return: Notes on Belonging (2002), thirsty (2002), and Bread out Stone (1994), discussing how her activist poetics challenge colonialist notions national time and unity. Where some critics find Brand's work pessimistic, Barrett suggests that Brand rejoices ... in unraveling fixed forms (64) with a focus on diasporic time and analepsis (41). Moreover, he finds that Brand's image door and actions leaning, delaying, and interrupting in her poetics help innovate Canadian long poem. Conversely, in Chapter Two Barrett finds Clarke's Sometimes, a Motherless Child (1992), The Origin Waves (1997), The Polished Hoe (2002), and More (2008) to be less optimistic. Focused on locations where blackening has and still occurs, Clarke rewrites the chronotopes ship, train, and automobile, revealing continuities between spaces plantation, colony, city, and nation (69); Canada becomes not site arrival or origins but a place of movement and transition within broader patterns (86). Although Barrett is careful to distinguish between two authors' works, he finds commonality in their commitments to blackening as voice, accent, idiom, diction, register, and genre (102). Chapter Three shifts focus and method to critique mainstream news media sources that reported on case Albert Johnson, a black Jamaican immigrant who was shot and killed by white Toronto police officers in 1979. While such an analysis is a welcome addition to study, it is altogether clear why Barrett focuses solely on Johnson rather than a broader history Canadian in relation to policing--except, perhaps, that both Brand and Clarke have responded to Johnson's life in their writing. Nonetheless, this chapter helps to ground work Brand and Clarke in realities Canadian anti-black racism. …