Black Fiction Research Articles

Wild seed: Africa and its many diasporas

This paper engages with the epistemological assumptions of diaspora as it has been narrativised within North American discourses of Black identity formation. It will be argued that in light of the rapid growth of Black African migrant women populations in both the United States and Canada, and their second generation descendants over the past four decades, new frameworks for understanding Blackness are needed. The experiences of Black identity formation among these women in North America are particularly susceptible to exclusion within older and more dominant frameworks for narrativising histories of slavery, migration and Blackness. I will argue that Black feminist speculative fiction, with its history of subversion and reputation for unbound imagination, can be useful in addressing this exclusion. Thus, using Octavia Butler’s 1980 novel Wild seed as a case study, I will argue throughout this paper that Black feminist speculative fiction presents epistemological tools useful in exploring the limits of these older frameworks, while still drawing from them in order to create newer and/or more flexible epistemologies better suited to the gendered, ethnic and sexual differences within Black diasporic communities, especially those that have come about as a result of these newer migrations from Africa.

“A Mighty Queer Place”: Textual and Sexual Dis-Ease in Ann Petry’s Country Place

Despite Ann Petry’s stature as one of the most prominent African American writers from the mid-1940s and the first black woman to hit the million-dollar mark in sales with her iconic protest novel The Street in 1946, Country Place (the second of her three novels), published in 1947, remains relatively neglected if not totally obscure. This complex portrait of a predominantly white New England besieged by a hurricane departs appreciably from her first novel, which was and still remains much more widely known as emblematic of the black naturalism/protest discourse popularized by Petry’s male contemporaries—Richard Wright most famously, as well as by Chester Himes. In flipping the familiar racial protest script of African Americans’ inexorable victimization in hostile white America, Country Place plumbs the interiorities of white malehood : sexual, gendered, even narratological. In this unflinching depiction of white men’s psycho-sexual lives, Country Place limns not simply the dis-ease of whiteness, but white maleness and manifold anxieties therein. Indeed, this relatively invisible novel contributes inestimably not only to the important white-life subgenre of African American literature, but also to the legacy of black fiction writers who broached what was then relatively unbroachable —pioneers such as Pauline Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen, all of whom unwittingly or surreptitiously encrypted homosocial desires within heterocentered storyworlds.

37. Street Literature: Black Popular Fiction in the Era of U.S. Mass Incarceration

37. Street Literature: Black Popular Fiction in the Era of U.S. Mass Incarceration

Jacqueline Woodson and Queer Black Fiction for Young Adults

Jacqueline Woodson and Queer Black Fiction for Young Adults

The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction

The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction

Contemporary African American literature: the living canon

Foreword Mat Johnson, University of Houston Acknowledgments Introduction Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner, Penn State University I. Politics of Publishing, Pedagogy, and Readership 1. The Point of Entanglement: Modernism, Diaspora, and Toni Morrison's Love Houston A. Baker, Jr., Vanderbilt University 2. The Historical Burden that Only Oprah Can Bear: African American Satirists and the State of the Literature Darryl Dickson-Carr, Southern Methodist University 3. Black is Gold: African American Literature, Literacy, and Pedagogical Legacies Maryemma Graham, University of Kansas 4. Hip Hop Fiction (feat. Women Writers) or, Other Things Hip Hop Music Has Taught Black Fiction Eve Dunbar, Vassar College 5. Street Literature and the Mode of Spectacular Writing: Popular Fiction between Sensationalism, Education, Politics and Entertainment Kristina Graaff, Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technical University of Berlin II. Alternative Genealogies 6. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slave: Visual Artistry as Agency in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery Evie Shockley, Rutgers University 7. Variations on the Theme: Black Family, Nationhood, Lesbianism and Sadomasochistic Desire in Marci Blackman's Po Man's Child Carmen Phelps, University of Toledo 8. Bad-Brother-Man: Black Folk Figure Narratives in Comics James Braxton Peterson, Bucknell University III. Beyond Authenticity 9. Sampling the Sonics of Sex (Funk) in Paul Beatty's Slumberland L. H. Stallings, Indiana University 10. Urkel No More? Black Geeks in Contemporary Black Literature Alexander Weheliye, Northwestern University 11. The Crisis of Authenticity in Contemporary African American Literature Richard Schur, Drury University 12. Someday We'll All Be Free: Contemporary Fiction and the Post-Oppression Narrative Martha Southgate, Brooklyn Novelist IV. Pedagogical Approaches and Implications 13. Untangling History, Dismantling Fear: Teaching Tayari Jones's Leaving Atlanta Trudier Harris, UNC-Chapel Hill, Emerita 14. Reading Kyle Baker's Nat Turner with a Group of Collegiate Black Men Howard Rambsy II, Southern Illinois University 15. Toward the Theoretical Practice of Conceptual Liberation: Using An Africana Studies Approach to Reading African American Literary Texts Greg Carr, Howard University and Dana Williams, Howard University Afterword Alice Randall, Vanderbilt Novelist Annotated Bibliography Pia Deas, Lincoln University and David Green, St. Johns University Index

“Storytellers, Not Just Case Makers”? A Study of Storytelling in the Essays of Njabulo S Ndebele

Njabulo S Ndebele's review of Yashar Kemal's Anatolian Tales praises the effectiveness and entertainment value of Kemal's rural tales as stemming from his (Kemal's) being rooted in “the timeless tradition of storytelling”. Ndebele criticises, in contrast, the poor quality of fiction by black South African writers. He calls it journalistic, or documentary in style, ‘making a case’ of overtly political situations in the context of apartheid South Africa. Yet he venerates the literary skill of certain black writers who, he believes, marked the start of a new trend in fiction writing in 1976, calling them “storytellers, not just case makers”. However, in South African literature there are a number of interpretations of the term “storytelling” and its role particularly in black South African fiction. I deal with the interpretations of Ndebele, Mike Kirkwood and Michael Vaughan, as I trace their interpretations back to Walter Benjamin's notions of ‘storytelling’.

Dividing lines: class anxiety and postbellum black fiction

One of the most extensive studies of class in 19th-century African American literature to date, Dividing Lines unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities. By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. The book argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction's form. Andrea N. Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses from book reviews, editorials, and letters to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.

"Something Like a Harlem Renaissance West": Black Popular Fiction, Self-Publishing, and the Origins of Street Literature: Interviews with Dr. Roland Jefferson and Odie Hawkins

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the popularity of self-published street literature (also known as urban literature, ghetto fiction, and hip-hop literature) has exploded among African American readers. Starting with the publication of titles such as Teri Woods’s True to the Game (1998), Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (1999), Vickie M. Stringer’s Let That Be the Reason (2001), and Nikki Turner’s A Hustler’s Wife (2003), street literature has emerged as a driving force in the African American publishing industry. Dozens of independent imprints, each publishing several books per year, sprang up virtually overnight, and now thousands of street literature novels compete for the attention of an ever-growing black readership. Some of the more influential independent publishers of this new genre include Urban Books, Teri Woods Publishing, and Stringer’s Triple Crown Publications, though new publishing houses arrive on the scene each year. Triple Crown Publications is probably the most successful of these new publishing houses, having sold more than a million books between its founding in 2001 and 2006. As a further indication of street literature’s growing power in the marketplace, mainstream trade publishers (including Ballantine Books, Simon and Schuster, and St. Martin’s Press) have begun offering six-figure, multiple-book deals to some of the biggest names in the business, including K’wan Foye, Shannon Holmes, and Turner. These books can be purchased at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com, at book vendor tables along 125th Street in Harlem, and in state and federal penitentiaries across the country. Street literature is particularly popular in American cities with large black populations, including New York, Detroit, Houston, Oakland, and Atlanta. At a moment when the

Reading new black fiction of East Asia: An ex-centric approach to transnational literary studies

Responding to critiques of the status quo in transnational literary studies, this essay models an alternative approach, particularly for the field of African–Asian studies. The transnational turn in literary studies has often been less global than we might desire: postcolonial texts are frequently read in terms of predetermined features or ideologies, and comparative studies often posit the USA as their locus for comparison. Following Ato Quayson’s call for attention to the “ex-centric” in postcolonial and transnational literature, this essay demonstrates how the figures of gui and Eshu emerge as interpretative keys in two recent African–Asian works, by Ken Kamoche and Biyi Bandele. The essay argues that these figures point up the complexities inherent in transnational relations, which the texts explore. The essay invites us to read with greater alertness to the “ex-centric” in transnational texts in order to unpack their full implications.

Recent Studies on Contemporary British Fiction: The Historical Novel and Black British Fiction

Recent Studies on Contemporary British Fiction: The Historical Novel and Black British Fiction

Neo-segregation narratives: Jim Crow in post-civil rights American literature

This study of what Brian Norman terms a neo-segregation narrative tradition examines literary depictions of life under Jim Crow that were written well after the civil rights movement. From Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, to bestselling black fiction of the 1980s to a string of recent work by black and nonblack authors and artists, Jim Crow haunts the post - civil rights imagination. Norman traces a neo-segregation narrative tradition - one that developed in tandem with neo-slave narratives - by which writers return to a moment of stark de jure segregation to address contemporary concerns about national identity and the persistence of racial divides. These writers upset dominant national narratives of achieved equality, portraying what are often more elusive racial divisions in what some would call a postracial present. Norman examines works by black writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, David Bradley, Wesley Brown, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Colson Whitehead, films by Spike Lee, and other cultural works that engage in debates about gender, Black Power, blackface minstrelsy, literary history, and whiteness and ethnicity. Norman also shows that multiethnic writers such as Sherman Alexie and Tom Spanbauer use Jim Crow as a reference point, extending the tradition of William Faulkner's representations of the segregated South and John Howard Griffin's notorious account of crossing the colour line from white to black in his 1964 work Black Like Me.

Africa in Europe: narrating black British history in contemporary fiction

This article analyses three examples of contemporary black British fiction that attempt to inscribe into the narrative of Britain the experience of the African diaspora: not only the life of immigrants from the former colonies after World War II, but also the less visible earlier settlement of Africans in the United Kingdom. This is a presence that official history has usually erased or underplayed in the construction of British identity, and these stories complicate the traditional concept of an ethnically homogeneous British past. Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) serves as a necessary reminder that before Caribbean workers came to rebuild the UK in the late 1940s, they had participated in the war effort; David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (2000) recreates the life of enslaved and free Africans in Britain in the late eighteenth century; Bernardine Evaristo’s comic novel-in-verse The Emperor’s Babe (2001) imagines the presence of an African family in Roman Britannia.

The Time of Breach: Class Division and the Contemporary African American Novel

Literary and cultural critics have tended to interpret African American literary postmodernism as a broad threat to the cohesion of racial community. Alternatively, this essay submits that contemporary novels by Charles Johnson, Andrea Lee, and others have also construed these changes in racial collectivism as opportunities to recast the political and formal protocols of black fiction. More specifically, these writers draw on the class divisions that intellectuals have viewed primarily through the lens of crisis as a means to challenge existing models of racial solidarity and to renovate the formal features of narrative itself.

The sweet part and the sad part: Black Power and the memory of Africa in African American and black British literature

This paper examines the approach toward narratives of Black Power by African American and black British writers in the post-Civil Rights era. The relationship to Black Power politics is explored here in the particular context of how African American and black British writers are perceived to relate to a “memory of Africa”; how “Africanness” fits into these diverse configurations of contemporary black identity. African American writers often find that Black Power, with its heavy reliance upon iconography, has failed to acknowledge the fluid relationship which exists in African American communities and artforms with a traditional African American past, and with a “memory of Africa” within that tradition. The performance of Black Power is a practice which is shown to distance the present from the past, whereas traditional African American artforms are understood to figure performance as a site where the past may “possess” the present. Black British authors are not concerned with situating the memory of Africa as part of a continuous tradition in the way that African American writers are. Both American tropes of blackness, and the memory of Africa itself, are dramatized in black British fiction as inherited tropes which must be adapted in order to bear any relevance to contemporary experience. The very different kinds of emphasis that writers from these two cultural scenarios place upon notions of performance and tradition, in relation to blackness, lead us to discover that narratives in the vein of the “Black Atlantic” must be approached with some caution if they are understood to provide a global locus of identification while also respecting specific conditions of local cultures.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Modernist Studies and the Bildungsroman: A Historical Survey of Critical Trends

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Modernist Studies and the Bildungsroman: A Historical Survey of Critical Trends

Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998

Reviewed by: Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998 Qiana J. Whitted (bio) Valkeakari, Tuire. Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007. Much of the figurative language that distinguishes African-American creative writing has been—and continues to be—shaped by black religious traditions. Since the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s verses in the eighteenth century, African-American literary tropes of sacrifice, communal deliverance, and the quest for ultimate truths resonate, explicitly and implicitly, with the evolving syncretism of Afro-Christian faith. Studies such as Katherine [End Page 961] Clay Bassard’s Spiritual Interrogations have made thorough and persuasive arguments for Wheatley’s allegorical profundity; the complex spiritual discourses of nineteenth-century fugitive slaves and evangelists have been fundamental to the study of African-American cultural formations.1 Nevertheless, critical literary scholarship has been much slower to recognize what James Weldon Johnson observed in the preface to his 1927 poetry collection, God’s Trombones—that the remarkable inventiveness of the modern black literary imagination continues to be bound inextricably with the religious rhetoric and scriptural wisdom of Sunday Service. Tuire Valkeakari examines key aspects of this discourse through a comprehensive study of religious symbols and characterizations in black fiction from twentieth-century in her book, Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998. It is the title’s emphasis on “idiom” that distinguishes Valkeakari’s contribution to the field, as her analysis forges constructive intertextual associations between tropological networks and evaluates the literary coherence of biblical allusions. Her study considers religious discourse as a social and cultural product—not unlike folklore or myth—without endorsing a “religious agenda” (200) or arguing specific theological interpretations. Importantly, Valkeakari marks Ellison’s Invisible Man as a turning point in the secular use of religious idiom, particularly as it is manifested through “the social commentary and artistic innovation” (56) of late twentieth-century Christological messianic and scapegoating imagery, sacred orature, and gendered articulations and authorizations of the Word. To make her case, Valkeakari draws on well-known texts by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, and Octavia Butler, while shedding new light on works by Leon Forrest and Gayl Jones that have received far less critical attention. Valkeakari puts forth an overview of how Christianity and Judeo-Christian rhetoric has been utilized by earlier writers in her first chapter. Her discussion of William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter and the early poetry of Francis E. W. Harper and Paul Laurence Dunbar underscore the use of religion in anti-slavery rhetoric through biblical allusions to Moses and the Book of Esther’s Queen Vashti. Following an analysis of W.E.B. DuBois’s “biblically derived intertextuality,” (31) she engages writers of the New Negro Renaissance such as James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, and Nella Larsen. Still, her argument begins in earnest with Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel. Invisible Man diverges from its predecessors, Valkeakari asserts, through a “highly ironic, subversive, and hilarious manipulation of Judeo-Christian tropes” (52) that differs thematically from the folk religion preserved in Hurston’s narratives, and stylistically from Richard Wright’s abrasive naturalist fiction. Specifically, the second chapter on Invisible Man catalogues the persistent failings of the story’s false messiahs, whether parodied through the Founder and Norton, exposed through the opportunism of Ras and Rinehart, or undercut through the tragic death of Tod Clifton. The analysis also draws a provocative connection between ancient Hebrew scapegoating rituals and the black sharecropper, Jim Trueblood. As both an outcast and a “blues priest” (61), Trueblood foreshadows the social realities and depraved contradictions of racial performance that will ultimately drive the unnamed narrator underground. Likewise, Ellison’s narrator—whose cyclical journeys Valkeakari frames in terms of the Edenic expulsion and Christian resurrection—resists the temptation to assume his own “mock-messianic” role as a public speaker in favor of the more reflective, historically resonant posture of hibernation (73). [End Page 962] It is, perhaps, because of Ellison’s too subtle insinuation of religious discourse in a novel already rife with allusion that Valkeakari refers frequently to his “secularization” of religious idiom...

Charles Johnson: the novelist as philosopher

Essays by Herman Beavers, Gena Chandler, Marc C. Conner, William Gleason, William R. Nash, Linda Selzer, Gary Storhoff, and John Whalen-Bridge In Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher, leading scholars examine the African American author's literary corpus and major themes, ideas, and influences. The essays explore virtually all of Johnson's writings: each of his novels, his numerous short stories, the range of his nonfiction essays, his many book reviews, and even several unpublished works. These essays engage Johnson's work from a variety of critical perspectives, revealing the philosophical, cultural, and political implications of his writings. The authors seek especially to understand black fiction and to provide the multifocal, whole sight analysis Johnson's work demands. Johnson (b. 1948)--author of Dreamer, Oxherding Tale, and the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage--draws upon influences as diverse as Richard Wright, Herman Melville, Thomas Aquinas, Franz Kafka, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He combines rigorous training in western philosophy with a lifelong practice in eastern religious and philosophical traditions. He has repeatedly told interviewers that he became a writer specifically to strengthen the interplay between philosophy and fiction. Marc C. Conner is associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University. William R. Nash is associate professor of American studies and director of African American studies at Middlebury College.

Black short fiction

Black short fiction

Black Short Fiction

Black Short Fiction