Black Fiction Research Articles

“These are our children and we got to set them free”: A public health approach to reading reproductive justice in black literature

This paper explores reproductive justice themes in different works of Black literature and juxtaposes that literature with modern scholarship to consider a reproductive justice agenda for public health researchers. Incorporating multiple disciplines including public health, critical geography, and anthropology, this paper goes on to suggest that public health researchers would benefit from engagement with works from beyond academia. Specifically looking into Black fiction, nonfiction, and autobiographical writing, this paper traces reproductive justice themes and suggests that attention to these themes will bolster academic public health scholarship aligned with the reproductive justice movement

Monstrous “Elsewheres”: The Horror Spatial Imaginary in Black Fiction and Film

Monstrous “Elsewheres”: The Horror Spatial Imaginary in Black Fiction and Film

Reparative Reading and the Drug Wars’ Queer Children

This article posits that recent reparative responses to the opioid crisis are consistent with a longer history of reparative hermeneutics conditioned by the drug wars in the Americas, ones that attempt to repair but often reinforce the biopolitical logics produced by the artificial divide between licit and illicit drugs, a distinction that facilitates both racial and imperialist policing and racial capitalist profiteering. The humanities’ postcritical reorientation, and particularly the turn toward the reparative, is underwritten by such relations between state, capital, and drug policy. To investigate the reverberations of such contemporary political and academic investments in drug-war-fueled repair, the article focuses on a recent wave of black fiction and film that reenvisions the 1980s War on Drugs in the era of the opioid epidemic, with particular attention to Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight (2016) and James Hannaham’s novel Delicious Foods (2015).

Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon

Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon

Peace and Division: The Black Novel in South Africa

This analysis of black South African fiction, translated into English, pivots on a century-old aberration, the Natives Land Act of 1913, which assigned 90% of the land to a white minority. The fallout of this destructive legislation remains with us today. Indeed, landlessness, I argue, is the fundamental root of South Africa’s continued ills. Whether conceived under colonialism, apartheid, or the post-apartheid moment – our phantom democracy – the fiction gathered under the moniker, Africa Pulse, is fundamentally concerned with a relation to land, or a divorce from it. A complex of problems – economic, political, cultural and psychological – emerge. Two novels span the century-old conflict, BW Vilakazi’s No Matter When and MJ Mngadi’s Home is Nowhere. The first is a romantic, egalitarian, and inclusive vision, the latter starkly and brutally dystopian. As bookends, they mark an unrequited desire for a sense of home, and the pathological consequence of its obliteration.

Re-Inscription of Black History/Body in Morrison's Beloved and Paradise

This article contends how Toni Morrison has used her black fiction to reject the dominant conceptions of reality and truth constructed by the white pahllogocentric discourses that tended to perpetuate white power interests. The poststructuralist assumption that knowledge and reality are socially constructed phenomenon provides useful insight into Morrison's narrative strategies and helps understand how, on one hand, she represents the ways the history of the black Africans had been badly disfigured in the white discourse resulting in the construction of the negative stereotypes of the black people as barbarians, savages, and uncivilized people whose mythical history and social values were invalidated as inauthentic and savage that needed the enlightening intervention of the white Europeans and, on the other hand, apart from revealing the discursive facts that control reality formation, she disrupts and displaces dominant and oppressive white knowledges.

The Outside of the Inside: Blackness and the Remaking of Canadian Institutional Life

This paper reads Black Canadian literary fiction for what it reveals about the ironic place of blackness in Canadian universities. It weaves together this literary analysis with the author’s first-person account of classroom practice in order to illuminate the risks involved for Black scholars and students currently teaching, learning, and producing knowledge within Canadian institutional structures.

Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground. KinohiNishikawa. U of Chicago P, 2018. 305 pp. $27.50 paperback.

Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground. KinohiNishikawa. U of Chicago P, 2018. 305 pp. $27.50 paperback.

Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-visioning History, Memory, and IdentityHow to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of InterpretationBlack Aesthetics and the Interior Life

Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-visioning History, Memory, and IdentityHow to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of InterpretationBlack Aesthetics and the Interior Life

News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945 by Rachel Galvin

 Reviews work Fading Cloth, which he likens to a trompe l’œil. e oscillation between the materiality of the work (a collection of bottle caps or trash) and the illusion of gold created by the bottle caps is the relationship between artwork and reality that he hopes to unfold. In Part  he links these findings to innovative suggestions for understanding how Black Studies approaches its objects through its archives. Equally important to Best’s thesis is his reading of James Baldwin’s ‘e Dungeon Shook’, which forms the opening of e Fire Next Time () and takes the form of a letter to Baldwin’s nephew. Best observes that Baldwin’s work ‘inspires the difficult leap that a knowledge of belonging disarticulated from the collective requires’ (p. ). Graing together Benjamin and Baldwin, Best establishes a crucial aspect of his thesis, which is that there is something impossible about blackness, ‘that to be black is also to participate, of necessity, in a collective undoing’ (p. ). Deeply researched, from established theorists in a number of fields as well as contemporary critics, from queer theory to Black Studies, the book reads nonetheless as an open conversation with the myriad of scholars, artists, and thinkers with whom Best engages. He explores the works of artists such as Anatsui, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Morrison in order to consider the ‘black radical imagination’ which might lead to a critical turn in Black Studies. At the root of his project is a desire to rescue the discipline from an insistence on trying to use the archives of slave narratives and black fiction as a way of recovering a ‘we’ at the point of ‘our violent origin’ (p. ). e book is accordingly arranged into two parts. e first includes a close examination of the artists and authors mentioned above and how to think about their work through thinking ‘like a work of art’. e second part explores the use of suicide and rumour in the archives of slave narratives, as constructed through the rhetorical concept of metalepsis (a figure of a figure). Best relies upon the work of Gérard Genette (especially the idea of the paratext), and the Derridean reading of a palimpsest, to argue for innovative ways of reading the archives. Responsibly argued and impressively confessional, Best offers thoughtful ways of reconfiguring Black Studies. e questions he raises are adroitly suspended for the reader to ponder, thus reinforcing the importance of performativity, both on the part of the work and on the part of its audience, as a necessary component in the reconfigurations he suggests. A U  P A M C News of War: Civilian Poetry, –. By R G. New York: Oxford University Press. . x+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. News of War contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to include civilian writing in the canon of twentieth-century war literature. Specifically, the book represents an intervention in the field of war poetry that centres the work of ‘civilian poets’ of the s and s—poets who wrote about war without firsthand experience of combat. Unlike the trench poets of the previous generation, these were no soldier poets, but individuals who felt a keen responsibility to write MLR, .,   about war while fully aware of the ethical dilemma of ‘making verse out of other people’s bodily experiences’ (p. ). Situating the book during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, Rachel Galvin signals how aerial bombing campaigns meant that the boundaries between civilian and soldier were blurring: ‘war’ could no longer be ‘understood as confined to the battlefield’ (p. ). Nevertheless, when it came to having the authority to write about war, a deeply embedded cultural assumption held sway: that bodily experience of combat was a prerequisite to writing about it. Drawing on Yuval Noah Harari’s concept of ‘flesh-witnessing’, Galvin explores how this assumption was negotiated in the writing of six international poets: César Vallejo, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Queneau, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. While none of these poets sought to diminish the authority of the ‘flesh-witness’, Galvin demonstrates how their war poems decentred the notion that somatic experience offered the...

A History of the African American Novel by Valerie Babb

Reviewed by: A History of the African American Novel by Valerie Babb Robert Butler Valerie Babb. A History of the African American Novel. New York: Cambridge UP, 2017. 486 pp. $44.99. This is a much-needed comprehensive survey of the history and practice of the African American novel from the 1853 publication of William Wells Brown's Clotel to work done by contemporary writers such as Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Olympia Vernon. A special feature of the book is its detailed analysis of important fictional genres such as the neo-slave narrative, detective fiction, pulp novels, novels of the diaspora, and the speculative novel. Also included is an illuminating chapter that examines how African American novels have been adapted into films. Babb's work compliments and surpasses previous studies with its fresh insights and encyclopedic understanding of the roots and branches of the African American novel. She expertly surveys major trends and carefully explores the work of an extraordinary variety of major and minor figures. Her study is not limited by abstract theories that might narrow its scope and distort its findings. No monolithic vision of the African American novel is offered but, rather, a fair, balanced, and nuanced exploration that pays close attention to the rich diversity of forms, styles, and themes developed over time by a broad range of novelists. Moreover, the book is exhaustively researched and fluently written in a crystal-clear style that is happily free of jargon. Another attractive feature of the book is its elaborate bibliographies of primary and secondary sources. The early chapters provide important new insights into how African American newspapers and journals, along with black Protestantism and evangelicalism, helped to shape the work of early novelists in a fruitful process of "cross-fertilization." Babb also stresses how a "black canon" (69) was beginning to form in the first part of the twentieth century, and during the Harlem Renaissance a distinctively African American novelistic tradition was being shaped by using uniquely black folk forms and music. She regards the period spanning the 1940s to the 1970s as particularly significant because of the growing influence of the civil rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements as well as the development of independent black presses. This time also witnessed the flowering of the work of African American women. Black writers of the 1970s became strongly involved in the culture wars of the period and brought the black novel from the "margin" to the "center" of American literature. Babb characterizes the contemporary period as employing "a growing use of satire and experimentalism" (195) that has opened up new spaces for black fiction. Although the book does not lay a great deal of emphasis on the importance of individual "seminal" writers, stressing instead the steady, organic growth of a black novelistic tradition, it does point out the crucially important influence of a few pioneering writers. Richard Wright is credited with fostering "Chicago's emergence as a literary center" (195). And his masterwork, Native Son, is viewed as "the novel that would define the standard of what the black novel should be for years to come" (99), creating a "Wright School" in its own time and continuing to influence several generations of future writers. Zora Neale Hurston is seen as bringing a [End Page 61] "fresh narrative voice" (76) to black fiction, which would establish "the validity of black vernacular culture as a medium for novelistic form" (75). In this way, she exerted a strong influence on a wide range of writers that included Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Morrison and Walker, in turn, helped create new possibilities for female African American writers by creating "black female perspectives" that "shed new light on cultural attitudes toward race and gender" (159). Throughout the book Babb draws significant attention to nearly forgotten writers such as John Edward Bruce, Zara Wright, and George Wylie Henderson. And she gives very positive assessments of underappreciated novelists like George Schuyler, whom she regards as "One of the foremost black satirists of the twentieth century" (86). Dorothy West, all but forgotten until the publication of The Wedding very late in her life, is praised for her ability to "shed light on a...

Politics and Affect in Black Women's Fiction by Kathy Glass

Politics and Affect in Black Women's Fiction by Kathy Glass

Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground by Kinohi Nishikawa

Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground by Kinohi Nishikawa

Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground

Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground

A "Cipher Language": Thomas W. Talley and Call-and-Response during the Harlem Renaissance

A "Cipher Language":Thomas W. Talley and Call-and-Response during the Harlem Renaissance Patrick S. Bernard (bio) The first known study of the black musical form of call-and-response and its immense significance in African American oral and literary practices is "A Study in Negro Folk Rhymes" by Thomas W. Talley (1870-1952) in his book Negro Folk Rhymes Wise and Otherwise: With A Study (1922), a collection of black secular folksongs, unquestionably the first such compilation by a black scholar. Belonging to collections on black music and poetry published during the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement,1 Talley and his text do not appear in studies about the period. They are absent from The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (2004) and Harlem Renaissance Lives (2009), two compendiums about the era. Moreover, studies of antiphony in African American oral and literary discourses fail to credit Talley's pioneering work. Two anthologies on the subject, Call & Response (1998) and Call and Response (2011), and a study of the form in African American fiction, Call-and-Response in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction (1988, 2001), fail to acknowledge Talley's "Study." It is unmentioned in works on black poetics and prosody.2 Indeed, Talley's book has been so thoroughly ignored that it is currently listed on the Forgotten Books website.3 Although this listing does not necessarily imply scholarly neglect, it is useful to note how major scholarly bibliographies, for example the MLA Bibliography, also demonstrate the range of scholarship that fails to acknowledge or discuss Talley.4 The neglect of this central text in the black oral and literary traditions deserves examination. The son of former slaves, Talley was a chemistry professor, who also taught biology and science, at Fisk University. He chaired the chemistry department for twenty-five years (1902-1927). However, his groundbreaking work on antiphony best captures his indelible contribution to the Harlem Renaissance specifically and to African American oral and literary studies generally.5 His "Study," occupying some hundred pages (228-326), brilliantly analyzes black folklore practices with call-and-response as their basis. It is also the first original study of the praxis of prosody in black folk utterances. Although unacknowledged in black oral and literary studies today, such was not the case when Talley's book was published, as contemporary reviews of it show, beginning with the Introduction, which was written by a Vanderbilt professor of literature, Walter Clyde Curry. Unsurprisingly, Curry laces his assessment with racist condescension; he nonetheless applauds the book for "being a pioneer and practically unique in its field" (v), specifically describing Talley's "Study" as "illuminating" (x). In his review of the book in The Sewanee Review, another white writer, J. H. Nelson of Trinity College (now Duke University), muses that (after exhibiting condescension similar to Curry's) "[t]he student of folk literature should welcome the book as a distinct contribution to [Talley's] source material. Moreover, the compiler has included a valuable study of the material and, among other things, has performed a real service in explaining 'call' and ''sponse'" (369). The Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Redmon Fauset states: "Professor Talley seems to have done for the Negro Folk Song what Mr. [James Weldon] Johnson has done for poems by Negro authors, and like Mr. Johnson's preface not the least valuable part of Professor Talley's service lies in the 'Study'" (68).6 Another Harlem Renaissance [End Page 121] writer, Walter F. White, states in his review in The Nation that an "interesting part of the book is the author's lengthy treatise [the 'Study'] on the origin and development of these rhymes, and the study of the musical scores to which these verses are sung" (694). In his review in The Southern Workman,7 Julian E. Bagley writes: "There is a second part of the book which is a painstaking and illuminating treatise on the use, origin, and evolution of the Negro rhymes. Certain it is that this hitherto unrecorded discussion will prove a valuable source of information to persons interested in this particular phase of folklore" (248). The review in the Georgia Historical Quarterly asserts that Talley's collection of African American...

Against the law: Arthur Maimane’s pioneering hard-boiled black detective fiction in Drum Magazine

ABSTRACTThis article sets out to re-examine, and recover, South Africa’s first hard-boiled crime fiction created by a black writer: Arthur Maimane’s crime stories published in Drum magazine in 1953. Maimane wrote a series of stories about a black PI, styled on the American hard-boiled genre for Drum, a popular South African magazine aimed at a black audience, known for its borrowing from American popular culture. Mamaine’s fiction has been widely dismissed by generations of Drum critics, as “derivative” “imitation.” Repositioning the stories within the broader context of crime fiction suggests quite a different reading. Maimane’s stories reveal how tensions between the genre and laws in apartheid South Africa resulted in radical alterations to the hard boiled formula. Since Maimane’s stories precede Chester Himes’s African-American novels, they should be recognized as a pioneering example of black crime fiction that demonstrates the relationship between race and genre.

Postmodern Cautionary Tale of Grassroots Democracy in Charles Johnson’s “The People Speak”

Charles Johnson’s 2001 short story collection Soulcatcher was commissioned with the purpose of complementing a PBS series Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery, by way of imaginatively revisiting some memorable events, personalities and generic idiosyncrasies of the antebellum United States. The task of producing literary renditions of such an ideologically-charged historical period is valuable in its own right, yet it puts considerable constraints upon the artistic autonomy of the writer. As an African American novelist and scholar, Charles Johnson straddles two mildly dichotomous positions in this respect. As a literary scholar, he has criticized the lingering tendency to read and appreciate black fiction as a sociological probe, thereby downplaying its own artistic merits. He particularly deplores the implicit inauguration of a black writer as a spokesperson for his or her race, which may have generated a panoptical reflex within the African American literary community. Johnson regards this reflex as inevitably conducive to tendentious writing which he summarily calls “racial melodrama”. The paper therefore examines one story from the Soulcatcher collection, namely “The People Speak”, which displays overt symptoms of ideological literature. The analysis first identifies some panoptical anxieties within the narrative, but it ultimately looks for intertextual echoes which go beyond the literal frame of the story. In doing so, the paper seeks to point out that Charles Johnson manages to retain a considerable degree of artistic autonomy even when dealing with what seems to be a one-dimensional and baldly ideological topic.

Fugitive Slave, Fugitive Novelist: The Narrative of James Williams (1838)

AbstractThis essay argues for reading a discredited slave narrative—the Narrative of James Williams (1838)—as an early black novel. Reading this narrative as a founding black novel à la Robinson Crusoe complicates the genealogy and theoretical parameters of literary criticism about early US black fiction. Such a reading revises accounts about the emergence of the third-person fictive voice inaugurated by Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown in the 1850s. It also offers a new understanding of the antislavery movement’s quest for authenticity. More importantly, reading NJW as novelistic fiction illustrates how a fugitive slave might narrativize muddied textual politics and effectively challenge the reparative vision with which we theorize the genres and politics of early African American literary texts.

Towards A Black British Fiction Of Memory:, Narrating The Peripheral Space Of English Identity In Andrea Levy Small Island

Towards A Black British Fiction Of Memory:, Narrating The Peripheral Space Of English Identity In Andrea Levy Small Island

“A Good and Necessary Thing”: Genre and Justice in Octavia Butler's Bloodchild and Other Stories

Abstract Widely recognized as a science fiction writer, and one of a number of prominent black science fiction writers publishing in English, Octavia Butler's “work needs to be understood within the context of the traditions of the genre” of science fiction, a point Patricia Melzer makes in her book, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. Discussing Octavia Butler's fiction and its genre, however, means going beyond simply using the term science fiction to describe the many literary works she wrote over her prolific and decades-long career.