Black Writers Research Articles

Nancy Morejón, Nicolás Guillén y el cimarronaje aún necesario en Cuba contemporánea

This intersectional and epistemological study of Nancy Morejón’s 1982 Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén resolves the tension, which intrigued most of her critics, between her political commitment and sophisticated lyricism. The author examines Morejón’s unquestionable revolutionary support and adhesion to Guillén’s conceptualization of la nación mestiza—instrumental for the cohesiveness promoted by the revolutionary regime—through the comprehensive analysis of her family socioeconomic background, the coincidence of her arrival to adolescence with the revolutionary triumph in 1959, and her affiliation to the editorial group El Puente (1961–65). Intersectionality allows an understanding of how Morejón’s self-identification and self-representation as a black revolutionary female writer condition her elaboration of counternarratives that thwart the Eurocentric and patriarchally constructed national history. The essay reveals rarely examined contradictions between Morejón’s and Guillén’s poetry and discusses how the writers’ shared essentialist views on nationhood fail to ultimately deconstruct the hegemonic Eurocentric epistemology they vowed to upend. (In Spanish; an English translation is available online)

Challenging social standards

Prior to the evolution of the Black Arts Movement, the concept of “beauty” in the United States relied on specific standards, among which were being white and having blue eyes. However, this narrow definition changed over time as sociopolitical factors affected such concepts. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Black Arts Movement affected and changed the concept of beauty among Black Americans. African Americans stood not against white individuals but against everything that was unjust toward them in white American society. As a result, the literary works created by Black writers had to be built on either a political or an aesthetic framework. This paper examines the standards of beauty in The Bluest Eye and discusses the novel’s ideological tone and its references to the Blues, Black aesthetics and Black feminism. The novel was published in the middle of the Black Arts Movement era, and it satisfies the Black Art Movement’s major concern, which is how the work of art can help African Americans live a better life. Morrison’s novel highlights the concept of beauty at the time and how to change it among Black Americans.

NOISY SOUNDS! It’s a Listening Affair: Jazz Aesthetic, Improvisation, and Womanism in M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks

Black writers adapted jazz music to “say the unsayable” or employed the “jazz aesthetic,” which includes improvisation, citation, and variation as a stylistic device to distance their literature from European forms of narration. These elements can also be found in M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1988) which rigorously challenges the way language and words are perceived. Philip denounces the Western ideology of non-ambiguity, dichotomies, and narration altogether by engaging the reader as jazz musicians engage their audience. What role did music play in the Black resistance? What is the “jazz aesthetic” and how is it incorporated into Black diasporic literature? How does jazz music create community and how did Black female musicians speak up in a rather hypermasculine jazz universe? How does Philip incorporate the jazz aesthetic, improvisation, and womanist thoughts in her poems? And what is the intention of noise, dissonance, and (musical) violence?

Seeing Blackness through Black Expressive Culture: A Reading of Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama – Hail the Dark Lioness

This article examines visual and textual representation of blackness in contemporary black expressive culture. Its primary objective is to discern what blackness means and looks like when seen from the point of view of contemporary black expressive culture. To assess this, I first, briefly, analyze and interpret blackness. Second, I interrogate how contemporary black practitioners critique European ideas of blackness and mirror the complex multidimensionality of black subjecthood by conducting a formal analysis of two pieces of South African artist Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama – Hail the Dark Lioness series. Third, I explore the relationship between visual and textual imagery and their involvement in discourses on race. My intention is to reveal the role text and images play and have played in shaping the concept, perception, and representation of blackness; the visual effect they have had on the black imagination; and the heavy responsibility placed on black writers and artists not only to correct these images but to create images for the collective more often than for themselves.

FAVELA COMO ESPAÇO FEMININO EM CONCEIÇÃO EVARISTO E ELIZANDRA SOUZA

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar a representação da mulher negra no romance Becos da Memória, de Conceição Evaristo, e no poema Favela, Mulher!, de Elizandra Souza, apontando para a importância do uso da figura feminina como símbolo representativo da favela — geralmente representada como lugar da dominação, da violência e da marginalidade masculina e da fragilidade e vitimização das mulheres. Analisa como o ato literário das autoras discutidas notabiliza não só a importância da mulher como agente de preservação da memória e identidade dos afrodescendentes no Brasil, como também evidencia o papel político e cultural desempenhado pelas próprias autoras enquanto escritoras negras, vindas das margens do nosso sistema literário elitista, branco e masculino.

Reverberations of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a writer, poet, activist, and independent scholar whose experimental triptych (Spill, M Archive, Dub) offers both mundane and unearthly interventions for humanity’s struggles against histories of ecological extraction and Black feminist refusals. Sangodare is a multimedia artist, musician, and theologian drawing from Black feminist writings and African Diaspora wisdom. They are co-founders of several multi-platform undertakings such as the Mobile Homecoming Project that birthed the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus (BFBC). It is one of many online and in-person spaces supporting QPOC and Black feminist communities. The BFBC, in particular, blends theory, meditation, music, poetics, and Black church traditions. In this asynchronous mantra practice, hundreds of participants receive daily “ancestor” mantras via the Mobilehomecoming.org website. These mantras are shortened quotes from the diverse writings and speeches of figures such as Marsha P. Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. The social, juridical, and digital records of violence against women, POC, queer, and non-binary bodies and communities is not new. However, as consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have overlapped with conspicuous displays of anti-Black policing and asymmetric economies, the BFBC has provided an alternative space to rebuild and re-enchant social, political, and intellectual life through a remixed spiritual practice of amplifying voices. This interview highlights how race, gender, location, and time do not limit the quest for freedom. Thus, the primacy of Black queer positionality is instrumental in the chorus’s examination of both liberating and oppressive social hierarchies.

“Do You Care That It’s Me?”: Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” and The New Normal in the Age of Posthumanism

Since early 2020, the whole humanity has been living the pandemic era of which we have never experienced before. The post-pandemic era will necessarily be entirely different from now and thus we need to define the New Normal with the ultimate and groundbreaking reconceptualization of humanity, environment, and symbiosis. In this paper, I contend that Butler’s symbiosis exercised in “Bloodchild” dismantles sociopolitical hierarchy and power, whatsoever, and calls forth sympoiesis with the genetic and mutual change in interspecies relations. Butler questions the anthropocentric conceptualization of humanity and reconfigures interspecies symbiosis in the framework of posthumanism. Her intertwining of feminist and black writings in and outside the SF genre convention creates the posthuman tropes, and helps us reconsider the New Normal condition and anticipate the post-pandemic era beyond the binary scope of humanist ontology.

The “Con” in Conspiracy: Racial Violence as Political Assassination in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog

Abstract This article argues that Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer-prize winning play Topdog/Underdog (1999) mobilizes a conspiracy theory concept of anti-black violence in America. The highly discursive play depicts a pair of black brothers named Lincoln and Booth as they banter, argue, and compete with each other over games of three-card monte. In the final scene of the play, the brothers fulfil the destiny inscribed in their names: Booth shoots and kills his brother Lincoln after a dispute over their meager inheritance. The play frames this final act of brutal fratricide as a form of political assassination in order to activate the rescaling that comes with a conspiracy theory lexicon: Topdog/Underdog formulates a generative and radically resistant conspiratorial conception of anti-black violence that ultimately enables a genuine confrontation with the origins and structures of racialized oppression. The play thus belongs to a lineage of works by black writers that have wielded a paranoid aesthetic in order to galvanize a revolutionary opposition to the structures of racial oppression. This tradition includes authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and, most explicitly, John A. Williams, whose novel The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) emerges in the article as a precedent for the conspiratorial racial politics of Parks’s play. In its own interpretation of paranoid anti-racist critique, Topdog/Underdog elaborates a concept of conspiracy without intentionality whose hierarchies, despite being beyond the parameters of any single individual or collective entity’s agency, can nonetheless be undermined and, ultimately, toppled.

Ethnic Irony in Melvin B. Tolson's “Dark Symphony”

AbstractThis article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson's poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson's Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet's attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem's relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem's sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.'s study of “mastery and deformation,” theorizes the poet's tone. While prior critics have read the poem's lofty conclusion as sincerely aspirational toward assimilation, this article emphasizes the ambiguity, or irony, that Tolson develops: he embraces the symphony's capacity as a symbol to encompass multiple meanings, using the genre metaphorically as a mark of achievement, even as he implicates such usage as a practice rooted in conservative thought. The “symphony,” celebrated as a symbol of pluralistic democracy and liberal progress, meanwhile functions to reinforce racialized difference and inequality—a duality that becomes apparent when this poem is read alongside Tolson's concurrent poems, notes, and criticism. Such analysis demonstrates that “Dark Symphony” functions as a site for heightened consciousness of racialized musical language, giving shape to Tolson's ideas as a critic, educator, and advocate for public health.

‘How much more must I suffer?’: post-traumatic stress and the lingering impact of violence upon enslaved people

ABSTRACT By centering the voices of formerly enslaved people, this article suggests that black Americans in the nineteenth century had a sophisticated understanding of how slavery’s brutality instituted a multi-generational legacy of trauma in the United States. While they would not recognize the term ‘post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), black writers’ detailed descriptions of traumatic violence, and its debilitating impact amongst their friends and relatives, reflect many symptoms associated with PTSD. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and its call to examine the lethal repercussions of systemic racism, this article provides one approach for scholars examining the links between anti-black racism and trauma in early American history.

The marvellous life of a Haitian refugee: James Noël’s Belle merveille

This article examines the marvellous realism of two Haitian writers, past and present. Building on earlier schools of literary and socio-ethnographic thought, including Haitian indigenism, French surrealism and the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s ‘marvellous real’, Jacques Stephen Alexis theorized marvellous realism at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956. Some 60 years later, James Noël published Belle merveille, a novel that depicts a refugee who survives the earthquake of 2010 and embarks on a journey to understand his place among international aid groups that proliferate in the aftermath. The article suggests that Noël’s novel is both a tribute to and a creative rethinking of Alexis’s ideological commitment to the intersection of literary and social realism. It argues that by filtering events through the imaginary of the refugee, Noël interrogates the very categories of the marvellous and the real undergirding Alexis’s aesthetic and political project. After providing theoretical and historical context for Noël’s work, the article carries out close readings of Belle merveille to illuminate the ways in which its redeployment of marvellous realism delivers a critique of humanitarian aid.

Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) as a Transgressive White-Life Novel

"James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) as a Transgressive White-Life Novel. In the wake of the Second World War, American literature saw the rise of a type of novel that is little known today: the white-life novel. This type of novel is written by black writers but describes white characters acting in a mostly white milieu. While at the time African-American critics praised this new way of writing as a sign of maturity, many have since criticized it for being regressive by pandering to white tastes. This paper sets out to analyze the most famous of these novels, namely James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). It is my contention that Giovanni’s Room connects blackness and queerness through the use of visual metaphors in the novel, disrupting thus the post-war consensus on ideals of white masculinity. The novel, while seemingly abandoning black protagonists, enacts a subtle critique of white heteronormativity akin to Baldwin’s own positioning within American thought of the post-war era. Keywords: blackness, James Baldwin, post-war fiction, queer, white-life novel "

Greatness and the Convertibility of Literary Capital: W. D. Howells and Black Writers

AbstractOpening with James Weldon Johnson’s discourse on artistic greatness, I discuss William Dean Howells’s assessment of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt through the lens of the convertibility of literary capital, developed with Pierre Bourdieu. From within the racial taxonomy and with white middle-class readers as implied addressees, Howells conceives of both writers as participating in a literary market, a field structured by the tenets of realism. Howells endows Dunbar with universal literary capital and creates a regional affiliation that breaches the color line, before he singles out his poems written in vernacular notation as lasting contributions and asserts the valence of such notation as general poetic practice. On Chesnutt he bestows literary capital by marking and converting two innovations: the genre of the short story and the representation of a world in-between the racial divide. In turn, the convertibility of that world is secured by a comparison of social class habits.

Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek Fredrick Douglass Dixon Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek, eds. Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century. Ohio State UP, 2020. 264p. Feminist Stand-Point theory continues to gain acceptance in academic circles amidst a burgeoning scholarly movement dedicated to the demands for inclusivity in higher education. This theory is mainly used to analyze inter-subjective discourse. The overarching premise centers on the thought that knowledge is socially situated, and the most marginalized voices are valuable locales of knowledge production. Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century parallels the Stand-Point theory in that it solicits the writings of one the most marginalized populations, black science fiction writers, to define and explain Afrofuturism through a critical black lens. Editors Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek employ a diverse assemblage of black science fiction writers to provide critical analysis of the systematic layered nuances of racism in the genre of Science Fiction (SF). They contend that: “This anthology is designed to introduce readers to Afrofuturism as an aesthetic practice that enables artists to communicate the experience of science, technology, and race across centuries, continents, and cultures” (1). Literary Afrofuturism offers two fundamental objectives: first, a means to widen the current scope of SF actors, accomplices, and allies; and second, a scathing examination of the historical marginalization of black authors’ ideas and accomplishments in SF. To define one’s identity remains a prerequisite for self-determination. Afrofuturism symbolizes the on-ramp for black authors to “reboot the black identity, challenge white supremacy, and imagine a range of futures in full color” (1). Wrought with an imaginative and exacting posture, Literary Afrofuturism takes on the task of re-defining Afrofuturism that challenges its mainstream definition and origin. Many SF consumers and critiques credit Mark Dey, a white cultural critic, with coining the term Afrofuturism in the early 1990s. According to Dey, “Afrofuturism is a process of signification that appropriates images of technology and the prosthetically-enhanced [End Page 121] future to address the concerns people of color face in contemporary culture” (3). This definition stands as the fundamental pillar of how a significant portion of white artists identify with Afrofuturism. The editors remind readers that a ubiquitous phobia exists within the industry’s central zone of power that believes black writers will ruin SF’s enjoyment by critically examining pressing social justice issues. This anthology underlines how Afrofuturism can become a remedy to disrupt the dominant narrative by embracing a more balanced and inclusive focus on black humanity when defined by progressive black artists. Literary Afrofuturism explores distressing concepts of white privilege in SF by taking readers on a comprehensive excursion by black SF writers who make empirical arguments about the lack of depth and veracity concerning Afrofuturism’s definition. From a medley of skillfully written narratives by prominent SF writers, a core group of notable themes emerges: (1) the current definition marginalizes the diverse paradigms, theories, and talents of black SF artists; (2) it is a filter that systematically excludes individuality; and (3) it does not possess the propensity to liberate the dominant pop-culture consciousness from its racist nature. Minister Faust provides an analysis that uncovers the lack of pragmatic utility of the term Afrofuturism, “much of Africentric fantasy is set in the past or the present, not in the future, which makes the term Afrofuturism a failure from the start” (27). Nisi Shawal finds the term a convenient marketing tool, while Nick Wood deems it a conceptual umbrella that encompasses the “African diaspora in North America” (28). Although Afrofuturism finds considerable public criticism from black SF practitioners, it directly holds value for black authors. It widens the customary roster of contributors by giving palpable agency to women writers. Andrea Hariston and others now wear the title “Dangerous Muses” due to their devotion to adding an all-important aesthetic lens that eradicates the traditional boundaries assigned to women SF authors. “They are dangerous to the status quo, destroying the old temple images of the golden past, and are stealthily building the world anew in their own remarkable image” (36). The thread that links the...

Ryan Hanley. Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c. 1770–1830.

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Literature’s Vexed Democratization

Abstract This article examines the contradictions of the contemporary literary field that appears both increasingly capacious and more exclusionary than in the past. Discussing the expansion of publishing enabled by digital and online technologies, we note that these changes did not reshape the demographics of most published works in the US, which remain overwhelmingly white authored. We then turn to literary prizes as an indicator of who writes prestige literature, narrating the twentieth-century formation of a racially segregated field and its slow changes against the backdrop of publishing overproduction. Combining a history of prestige literary culture with a demographic analysis of prizewinning writers (1918–2019), we discuss how a mostly white, New Critic-dominated field became the much more diverse and wide-ranging scene of the present. While this area has importantly opened up to writers of different backgrounds, our data show that the inequities of earlier prizegiving now take shape as drastic educational barriers to entry. Observing that a great deal of contemporary literature dramatizes the peculiarity of performing racial difference—often under the auspices of white audiences—we argue that the path to “excellence” has never been more narrow for writers who are not white, and Black writers in particular.

Afro-American Racial Oppression in Paul Laurence Dunbar and Amiri Baraka's Poems

This study explores how Afro-American racial oppression is reflected in Black Writers’ poems, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Amiri Baraka. Using a descriptive-analytical method, this study analyzed words, phrases, and clauses indicating Afro-American racial oppression in the ten selected poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Amiri Baraka. Roland Barthes’ semiotic was employed to get the interpretation of the signs used in the poems. These interpretations were strengthen by juxtaposing the meaning with socio-cultural context of the poems using Wellek and Warren’s perspective of sociological approach in literature. The result of the study showed that as African American, both Paul Laurence Dunbar and Amiri Baraka portray the experience and feeling of Afro-Americans towards racial oppression in United States of America. Through the use of particular signs in their poems, Dunbar and Baraka speak up about the ill-treatments directed to Afro-Americans as well as the injustice that occurred in United States. Dunbar depicts the life of African American during the Jim-Crow America where the practice of discrimination was spreading like wildfire. Whilst, Baraka portrays the life of Afro-Americans during the 1960s in which Black people remained the target of oppression. The analysis of the ten selected poems showed that despite the fact that Black residents have achieved formal equality through the Civil Right Acts in 1964, significant racial oppression persists. Afro-Americans had to deal with oppression during and after the segregation era. In their poems, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Amiri Baraka also advocate African Americans to establish racial pride within themselves for them have been degraded through racial oppression by White ruling race.

What Do Black Students Need? Exploring Perspectives of Black Writers Writing Outside of Educational Research

ABSTRACT What does it mean to educate the Black student? How do education stakeholders committed to Black students and communities understand the role of teaching and teachers to help students meet education goals? In this analytical article, inspired by multiple traditions in Black intellectual thought, I explore how Black writers who write outside of education research discuss the teachers and teaching Black students need. I examine three pieces published between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois’, commencement speech, “Diuturni Silenti,” writer and activist James Baldwin’s speech and essay, “A Talk to Teachers,” and education journalist Melinda D. Anderson’s, “Becoming a Teacher.” I argue that because these authors speak from a different standpoint than academic research traditionally engages, they present a unique historic and contemporary vision of teachers and teaching for Black students.

Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion by Matthew Pettway

Reviewed by: Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion by Matthew Pettway Reggie Bess Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion. By Matthew Pettway. University of Mississippi Press, 2020, p. 325, $30.00. In six well-researched and well-crafted chapters, Matthew Pettway presents the life and times of two of Cuba’s most interesting and productive Afro-Cuban literarians. The book covers the years between Juan Francisco Manzano’s birth (1797–1854)) to Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés’s (also known and referred throughout the book as Plácido) death by firing squad (1809–1844). Both made very significant contributions to Cuban literature during the colonial period. Borrowing from the great Toni Morrison, Pettway “engage[s] this body of work as a sort of ‘literary archaeology’ to borrow a phrase from Toni Morrison. Jenny Sharpe explains that Morrison relied on historical knowledge and an ‘imaginative recreation of the past’ to write great works of fiction like her novel Beloved. But I perceive archaeology as apropos for the unearthing of black Cuban texts characterized by double-voicing, ostensible contradictions, silences, and the subservice use of Catholic, Romantic, and Neoclassical symbology. This book is literary analysis and part cultural history; so, I too am ‘piercing together a world that exists only in the archives.’” (37) In the Introduction, Pettway asks the following questions: “How could writers with no formal humanistic training, no military expertise to speak of, and no experience in the diplomatic corps pose a political threat to one of the greatest empires in the world? What subversive writing practices did Plácido and Manzano employ in their poetry and prose? What role did religious discourse play in the creation of anticolonial literature? And what did they hope to accomplish by writing against the Spanish empire?” (6) Pettway then tells the reader the significance of this book to the field: “Cuban Literature contributes to Latin American Studies in several ways. This is the first book-length study of Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, perhaps the most important writers of African descent in colonial Spanish American history. Moreover, my emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers contributes to our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and Political innovators. Finally, by reworking theories of transculturation from the angle of African epistemology,” Pettway “seek[s] to demonstrate that some of the processes of social transformation that cultural anthropologists have examined were also at work in literature in ways heretofore unknown.” (43) [End Page 169] As important as these contributions are, equally significant is the way in which Pettway’s work “represents a paradigm shift in our thinking about black writers in colonial Latin America because it analyzes how they reconstructed Africa in America through an epistemological engagement with Bakongo- and Yoruba-inspired spiritualities.” Pettway argues that “it is an African Atlantic system of religious knowledge—not the strictures of Catholic doctrine—that provided Plácido and Manzano with the tools, both political and meta-physical, to conceive what African-descended liberation might look like.” (43) Finally, Pettway notes: “Cuban ‘Literature contributes to the fields of Latin American Studies, Hispanic Cultural Studies, religious studies, Cuban and Caribbean History, and Africana Studies by suggesting a paradigm shift for the way scholars analyze Afro-Latin American colonial literature.” (44) In the book Pettway lists the writers’ singular accomplishments. For example, Manzano’s Poesías líricas, published in 1821, marked “the first collection of Cuban verse published by anyone, black or white. (12) The reader also learns that in 1836, Juan Francisco Manzano was writing the only known autobiographical account (slave narrative) of slavery in Spanish America, his Autobiografía de un esclavo, originally titled La verdadera historia de mi vida. Pettway makes note of the fact that Manzano;s Cuban slave narrative preceded the work of black Abolitionists Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1845, and William Wells Brown’s Narrative of...

John O’Brien (1945–2020): A Most Subversive Man

John O’Brien (1945–2020): A Most Subversive Man Warren Motte (bio) Yesterday evening, I attended a memorial service for my friend John O’Brien. It was both moving and bracing to hear so many people speak about him with such deep affection. Like every other event that we “attend” these days, in this crushingly lousy, godforsaken year of 2020, it was held on Zoom. That medium, as useful as it may have proved in last few months, is not one where I feel immediately comfortable, and yet last night I felt even more dislocated than usual. I finally realized that this time it was not Zoom’s fault; instead, it was occasioned by the fact that I am still shocked by John’s death. For in some sense I had never considered him as a mere mortal, had never consciously imagined the prospect of his death. Click for larger view View full resolution John was a man of many parts. First and foremost, he was a committed, intrepid reader. Though by his own account, he came to reading fairly late, as a freshman in high school. There, a teacher introduced him to William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot. At the end of the school year, he gave John a reading list of a hundred titles, and John spent the next few years working through it (beginning with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot), with such singlemindedness that he largely neglected his social life. “I was searching for something, and I thought that literature was where I was going to find it,” he remarked recently. He would go on to teach literature at Illinois Benedictine College and Illinois State University. John was an early champion of African-American writers. His book Interviews with Black Writers, published in 1973 and still in print, includes conversations with seventeen authors, from Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to John Wideman and Alice Walker. And he was also a novelist, though his manuscript, entitled The Man Who Arrived Home after a Trip to London and Was Greeted by His Wife (or Lover) at O’Hare, remains unpublished. I knew John as a smart, curious, warm, engaging man. His kindness toward me was exceptional and unflagging. I was first in contact with him in the early 1980s, when we spoke about projects for The Review of Contemporary Fiction involving Italo Calvino, and then, a bit later, about Harry Mathews. He would subsequently invite me to contribute to the RCF, and to Context, and to play a role in the Dalkey Archive Press, advising him on French literature. He published many of my articles and book reviews, and several of my books. Equally important to me, he persuaded me that I had a home at Dalkey, and a significant role to play there, a precious thought for any academic. And I was not the only one in my family to feel that way: for several years my son Nicholas, a graphic designer, contributed cover art for Dalkey volumes, at John’s kind invitation. John’s sense of hospitality was boundless. And it was a joy to be around him, to chat with him, to argue with him. I remember our cheerful, running disputes about who was (at the time, of course) the most distinguished living writer of English, me arguing sometimes for William Burroughs, sometimes for John Barth, John, always and steadfastly, for Gilbert Sorrentino. John founded The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1980, “out of a sense of isolation, as well as a kind of outrage at the fact that books and authors were reduced only to marketplace value.” He would later launch another publication, Context, a review intended for free distribution at bookstores and on college campuses. His intent in doing so was “to reach as many people as possible, especially college-age students and younger staff at bookstores, in other words people who are more or less just beginning their serious reading.” It was in 1984 that he founded the Dalkey Archive Press, with the idea of bringing important books back into print, and keeping them there. The Dalkey catalogue now contains many hundreds of titles from a staggering variety of...