Contemporary African American Literature Research Articles

Exploring the Theme of Incarceration in Contemporary African American Literature

Exploring the Theme of Incarceration in Contemporary African American Literature

The Chaneysville Incident and the Research Narrative in Contemporary African American Literature

The research narrative is a genre of contemporary African American novels told from the narrow point of view of one character who is obsessive in their frustrating and pleasurable pursuit of knowledge through long periods of textual study. The protagonist of a research narrative is often affiliated with an institution of higher education. Research narratives are littered with dissertations and academic books; many of these novels include excerpts from the texts that their protagonists study or write. Narration closely focalized through one character is necessarily unreliable; these novels invite readers to oscillate between sympathy for and skepticism of their protagonists. Research narratives are simultaneously invested in and skeptical of historical knowledge, particularly knowledge of enslavement and fugitivity. David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981) establishes traits of the research narrative. The genre has flourished in works including Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999), Victor LaValle's Big Machine (2010), Mat Johnson's Pym (2011), and Danzy Senna's New People (2017). This essay argues for the research narrative as a genre of Black novels that theorize an ambivalent relationship to the past.

Marronage or Underground? The Black Geographies of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer

Abstract I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad—and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground—with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and “thinking otherwise” about land and water, I suggest that despite the differing, and at times contrasting, trajectories of maroon histories and the histories of Black flight to the North, African American maroon experiences and the Underground Railroad are conceptually connected in contemporary African American literature. I read the two novels as recent literary expressions of this conceptual link, which is played out via representations of relating to the land. By reimagining and intertwining marronage and the underground, both novels articulate a critique of settler-colonial and plantation modes of spatial practice, modes they identify as formative for US-American nationhood. They also, tentatively but forcefully, gesture toward alternative ways of being “above” and “below” the land while affirming African American connectedness to place.

"The Post-Civil Rights Coming-of-Age Narrative in Contemporary African American Literature"

For black youth in contemporary America, coming of age is fraught not only due to the struggles they already face as ethnic minorities, but the pressure that arises from living in a post-Civil Rights Movement era, where the advancements made during the mid-20th century are not always reflected in their daily reality. In this article, three contemporary novels involving teenage African-American protagonists (Caucasia, The White Boy Shuffle, and The Hate U Give) will be compared and examined, with a focus on the ways in which they explore the conflicts arising from living in a Post-Civil Rights era and how African-American teenagers react to the complications of racism and protest in different ways. In Caucasia, Birdie’s biracial identity and the societies she lives in force her to constantly choose one race or the other, highlighting the focus on racial identification in the Post-Civil Rights generation. Gunnar Kaufman’s experiences in The White Boy Shuffle illustrate the ways that both blackness and whiteness are performed and contrasted against one another, particularly through the novel’s satirical tone and focus on popular culture. Angie Thomas’ depiction of the gulf between lower-class black communities and upper-class white neighborhoods in The Hate U Give represent the issues that come with traversing both communities, resulting in a novel that argues for the enrichment of black communities and for social progress rather than worrying about mainstream white opinions on what they should do. While the novels all tackle different subjects in different fashions, they all emphasize the ways that the Civil Rights Movement impacted America and where we can go forward from here.

Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination by Farrell O'Gorman, and: Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African-American Literature by Erin Michael Salius (review)

Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination by Farrell O'Gorman, and: Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African-American Literature by Erin Michael Salius (review)

The Vain Conversation by Anthony Grooms

CLA JOURNAL 129 Grooms,Anthony.The Vain Conversation. University of South Carolina Press,2018. 239 pp. ISBN: 978-1-61117-882-1. $27.99 Hardcover. The Vain Conversation is the second “race” novel of Anthony Grooms, an awardwinning Kennesaw State University literature professor. It chronicles thirty-seven years in the life of Lonnie Henson, a poor white southerner, from the time he witnesses at eight years of age the horrifying lynching of four black individuals—Bertrand Johnson and Luellen, his wife; and Jimmy and Jewel Mae, his pregnant wife—until his retributive killing three decades later of Noland Jacks, one of the murderers. As historical fiction, The Vain Conversation gains its impetus from the 1946 lynching of two black couples in Walton County, Georgia. In his intriguing novel, Grooms locates the lynching of his black characters in Talmaedge County (Grooms adds an “e” to his county’s name), a fictional region with an assumed etymology of Eugene Talmadge, a three-time segregationist governor of Georgia alleged to have sanctioned the reallife murders in Walton. The argument in The Vain Conversation is that the horrors of racism result from useless talk between people reciprocally dependent on each other. Reclaiming African Americans’ lynching history, Grooms brilliantly develops his argument of unprofitable intra-racial and interracial communication through the common thread of antithetical characters, contrary settings, and opposing themes. Grooms’ argument is not original, but it is sound as he develops a compromised, race-related communication between poor and better-off whites, between white men and black men, and between men and women. Lonnie Henson, the protagonist, effectively proves the point that Grooms makes. In the innocence and naiveté of childhoodandpoverty,Lonnieispittedagainstthemoreeconomicallythreateningwhite segregationists who misinterpret his information as an assault on white womanhood after he relates news of Bertrand’s kindly helping the destitute widow Mrs. Henson. As an adult during the 1960s black consciousness movement, Lonnie communicates with blacks and is misinterpreted. His relating to a black male cook his adoration for Bertrand is misunderstood as a need for homosexual love. Lonnie’s confiding in Aza X, his African American girlfriend, about Bertrand is viewed as an opportunistic means for her to seek slavery reparations from Lonnie. No progress exists in the conversations among this divisive mix of characters. However, Grooms has appropriately endowed Lonnie with courage and vulnerability, requisites for beginning genuine conversations about race. In Lonnie, Grooms has created a unique white male attempting to enter into amicable and serious dialogue about race, making him an unparalleled character in contemporary African American literature. The novel’s opposing settings affirm that racial misunderstanding is timeless and widespread. The expansive bucolic setting in 1940s Talmeadge County suggests a peaceful and protected existence, yet white segregationists utilize the land as a provision for human sustainability and as a site to carry out inhumane violence against their misunderstood black neighbors. Conversely, small, man-made places in the 1960s Pacific region to which economically oppressed blacks have been confined contribute to blacks’ insensitivity toward Lonnie’s race-related distress and to their Book Reviews 130 CLA JOURNAL desire for vengeance against the white man’s historic injustice. Whether depicting the black cook’s cramped quarters below deck on the USS Bennington (an evocation of the trans-Atlantic slave ship) or Lonnie’s unemployed black girl friend’s tiny onebedroom apartment in San Francisco (symbolic of blacks’ economic disadvantage, even outside the South), Grooms succeeds in revealing the hopelessness of America’s race relations resulting from unresolved social, political, economic, and educational differences. In so situating the conversation about race, the author astutely manifests that the ugliness of whites’ behavior in Talmeadge County shames the fertile beauty of the place and that the retaliatory behavior of blacks against whites in the Pacific region keeps America’s democracy in the throes of racism. More importantly, Grooms forces his readers to pause and think about their own accountability for poor race relations due to miscommunication in any setting. In presenting how miscommunication between the races is often negatively resolved, The Vain Conversation explores two opposing yet interrelated themes— murder fails to guarantee personal satisfaction, and revenge is no justification for murder. Blinded by arrogance and anger, murderers often...

Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature

<i>Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature</i>

Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature by Erin Michael Salius

Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature by Erin Michael Salius

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis

Reviewed by: Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis James Arnett POSTHUMAN BLACKNESS AND THE BLACK FEMALE IMAGINATION, by Kristen Lillvis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 144 pp. $44.95 cloth. Kristen Lillvis's Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination demonstrates how emergent theories of posthumanism and black humanism provide generous new angles through which to look at contemporary African American literature. In this critical work, Lillvis elaborates a genealogy of black women's literature and culture that takes us from canonical neo-slave narratives of the 1980s, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Sherley Ann Williams' Dessa Rose (1986), through the funhouse mirrors of Janelle Monáe and Erykah Badu, to the works of Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, and Julie Dash. Ambitiously covering literary, musical, and visual narratives, this text productively periodizes contemporary black women's writing and demonstrates continuities between past-facing and future-oriented narratives. Lillvis's text is a welcome addition to the creative, critical, and theoretical work surrounding the current moment in black literatures, which we might characterize as Afrofuturist—while acknowledging important critiques of the term—and which urgently calls for an evaluation of literature, culture, and politics of the present as it looks towards an increasingly uncertain future. Lillvis explains in the introductions to the book and to each chapter how contemporary eruptions and flashpoints of racial tension call for a reconsideration of some texts whose scholarly criticism and apparatus has unfairly burdened them, limiting an appreciation of their contemporary applicability and vitality. Indeed, Lillvis's work consistently engages with the weight of literary critical discourse on each of these texts, doing due diligence to situate each within the field of scholarly secondary texts. In the first two chapters in particular, Lillvis strives to bridge the gap between black humanisms and posthumanisms to demonstrate how these artists are "transforming the past into a present source of power for black women authors and characters" (p. 6). In her reading of Morrison's Beloved and her more recent A Mercy (2008) in chapter one, Lillvis endeavors to explain the "posthuman liminality" of Beloved and Sethe and how both characters experience "liminal temporalities" in the continuities of past, present, and future in their fraught mother-daughter relationship (pp. 11, 13). In chapter two, Lillvis focuses on the possibility of black-white solidarities in spite of historical and ideological contingencies and violences in Williams. In chapter three, she turns to the fierce theme of reproductive justice and self-narration in Jones's Corregidora (1975) and, in chapter four, the horizon of multiple gendered temporalities and racialized consciousnesses in Butler's Kindred (1979). Chapter five explores the communicative transversality of black womens' relationships in the short fiction of Sheree Renee Thomas [End Page 246] and Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991). This final reading points out how, for instance, multiply constituted and temporally and subjectively liminal consciousness is "developing through connections to others—particularly mothers—across space and time" (p. 116). Lillvis's stated project—to draw together black humanism and post-humanism into a hybridized and generative "posthuman blackness"—is ambitious; she wants to describe the "boundary crossings that exist within posthuman cultures [that] enable black subjects to make connections to diasporic history in the present and also imagine the future as a site of power" (p. 8). There is great difficulty in preserving the ambivalence between a poststructuralist, posthumanist rejection of binaristic thinking in favor of multiplicities and Lillvis's focus on primarily biological, feminine gendered kinship structures. She acknowledges that there are inherently some difficulties in her project: "locating power within the bonds that exist between mothers and children in diasporic cultures can be a dangerous project" (p. 116). Nevertheless, Lillvis capably situates a Deleuzean posthumanist multiplicity as an evolution of DuBoisian double consciousness and Fanonian triple consciousness (chapter four) and then goes further, implicating Glissant's notion of transversality (chapter five). Perhaps the shortcoming of the work is not in what it fails to do but in what it fails to name itself doing, if that is not too fine a point to make. The productive labor of mothering is the central focus of nearly all...

Reading Contemporary African-American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African-American Canon. By Beauty Bragg

Reading Contemporary African-American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African-American Canon. By Beauty Bragg

Mapping the Terrain of New Black Fatherhood in Contemporary African American Literature

This paper explores the trajectories of black manhood and fatherhood in modern and contemporary American literature and literary criticism and contemplates a possible space for “good” black fathers. As we investigate how earlier discourses and discussions on black manhood have been constructed, and have remained and developed, there certainly is a change or progress in reading and creating different types of representations of black men — without focusing too much on body and sexuality — in American literature and literary criticism, starting from a ragged image considered problematic, violent, dangerous, or bereft, and under institutionalized destitution. This denigration of the black male has intensified and solidified myths of the black family — a black matriarchal family that lacks a desirable father figure, consequently leading to the effeminized, castrated black masculine presence in their communities — but has come to be questioned, leading to a somewhat hopeful, positive, and even philosophical depiction by questioning the core of defining good and bad under the dire circumstances within which African American men find themselves. By scrutinizing innocuous, caregiving father figures dwelling at home in African American novels, this paper looks back at how literary criticism and literature itself have exercised creative power in order to give birth to the “good” black men, who were deemed nonexistent or insufficient before, through re -reading, re -tracing, and re -looking at black fathers/men in novels written by renowned literary figures from Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison to contemporary — and relatively young — authors such as Leonard Pitts Jr. and Bernice L. McFadden.

Re-enchanted with the Work

Re-enchanted with the Work

Memory-dependent grief in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling

Magdalena Łapinska is a graduate of the University of Bialystok. She wrote her MA thesis on slavery-related traumatic experiences. She is currently working on her PhD. Her dissertation is devoted to violence-related emotions in contemporary African-American literature.

Reading Contemporary African American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African American Canon by Beauty Bragg

Reading Contemporary African American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African American Canon by Beauty Bragg

Post-Blackness and Culinary Nostalgia in Marcus Samuelsson’s Yes, Chef

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I found myself lying on the couch indulging in an afternoon marathon of my favorite television show, Chopped, which airs on Food Network. I cannot explain why I take such perverse pleasure in watching the anxiety-ridden countenances of chef-testants upon being given a hodge-podge of four ingredients as disparate as calf's liver, gummy bears, Swiss chard, and smoked gouda and charged with transforming them into a tasty dish in less than 20 minutes. In one particular episode, while introducing the illustrious panel of judges, host Ted Allen referred to Marcus Samuelsson as the Harlem Renaissance chef.1 Naturally, I was intrigued. As a scholar of contemporary African-American literature and culture, I have been careful to stay abreast of emerging black artistic movements and trends. But the Harlem Renaissance was a moniker for a seemingly localized black cultural, artistic, and apparently, culinary, rebirth of which I knew little.Ultimately, this led to an afternoon of pursuing all things Marcus Samuelsson. While doing so, I came across the November 2008 issue of Food and Wine that featured an article entitled, The New Harlem Renaissance, highlighting the easy friendship and culinary collaboration between Chef Marcus Samuelsson, owner of the Red Rooster restaurant, and Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum of Harlem. article in Food and Wine details Golden and Samuelsson's plans for an elaborate dinner party to celebrate the publication of his then-new cookbook, Soul of a New Cuisine, which pays homage to the African food cultures that Samuelsson believes have gone virtually ignored in Western culinary spheres. Among the invited guests were famed artist Kara Walker, jazz pianist Jason Moran, and choreographer Bill T. Jones, the latter two of whom were touring with new works and in the past six months have been in more than 45 cities, from Rio de Janeiro to Melbourne.2It is fitting that this august group assembled at a gathering cohosted by Golden, who is, perhaps, most well-known in academic circles for her coinage of the term post-black, in reference to the 2001 Freestyle exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem. Golden, along with artist Glenn Ligon, defined artists as adamant about not being labeled 'black' artists, though their work was steeped, in fact, deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.3 Indeed, many of the artists featured in the exhibition, including Ligon, Rico Gatson, Rashid Johnson, and Susan Smith-Pinelo, among others, are less (if at all) invested in representing the celebratory notes of and more intent upon signifyin' tropes of through various forms of satire and play.4 After Golden's iconic exhibition, the expression post-black quickly morphed from mere description of a singular artistic event to characterize the experiences of an entire generation of blacks who came of age in the post-civil rights era. This generation is marked by the critical distance from its civil rights forebears (who are most often and most directly their parents) at the same time that its members have benefitted both materially and socially from the activist struggles that exemplified the civil rights and black power eras. However, what truly distinguishes this generation is its desire to live outside what had previously been the rather tight strictures of racial allegiances and expectations.5 In fact, the most common strain in works is the expression of a desire to exist as an individual composed of many distinct attributes. Blackness, in this case, operates within a pretty vast sea of subjectivity.The shared sensibilities of the artists in attendance at Golden and Samuelsson's dinner party all reflect a post-black/post-soul aesthetic in which the concept of blackness has been negotiated and renegotiated both as a site of subjectivity and as an aesthetic object. But the intention of this particular fellowship was not to provide a discourse about visual or musical art but rather to familiarize guests with Samuelsson's take on contemporary African cuisine. …

“Negras Aguas”: The Poe Tradition and the Limits of American Africanism

This article tests Americanist claims about Edgar Allan Poe's racism against Latin American, Caribbean, and contemporary African-American literature written under his influence. I start with a discussion of Toni Morrison's agenda-setting reading of Poe in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). I show how Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), resists Morrison's interpretation by playing ironically on white anxiety and Black creativity. I then follow this mode along an international itinerary of authors working in styles and modes pioneered by Poe: Comte de Lautréamont, Ruben Darío, the Negritude poets, and the contemporary African American novelist Mat Johnson. I submit that these later writers exploit Poe's formal strategies for more explicitly anti-racist and anti-colonial aesthetics.

Traduzindo literatura da diáspora africana para a língua portuguesa do Brasil: o particular, o pós-colonial e o global

The present article presents a brief reflexive synthesis of a relevant aspect raised by recent trends in Translation Studies in their intimate relationship with Literary Studies. Departing from studies from the last decades, which have been showing that translation is not just an interlingual process, but basically, an intercultural activity, this article aims at raising elements for the understanding of how blackness – or the black subject – is translated into different contexts and geographical spaces. In lusophone areas, the issue is full of colonial and postcolonial traits. Focusing on Brazilian Portuguese, we look for answers to questions such as “Which are the implications of translating contemporary African-American Literature from English, with its specific forms of questioning identity, into Brazilian Portuguese?” (or vice-versa), or still, “Which are the assumptions about Afro-descendant Literature in Brazil and in the United States?” Having in mind that such questions are much broader and deep than they actually seem, new questions turn up about the construction of identities in different geographical spaces. Aspects related to the translation of African-American works into Brazilian Portuguese (and vice-versa), as well as political and cultural aspects that shape selection, translation, and reception of translated literature will be central in the discussion.

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

Transnationally Rooted Practices of Candomblé in Toni Morrison's Paradise

Since the 1970s, a number of African American writers, including Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Danzy Senna, and Elizabeth Alexander, have developed literary works around Brazilian spiritual, cultural, and social formations. Advancing within a hemispheric context Houston Baker's concept of an “oceanic critical consciousness,” this article examines how narrative representations of Candomblé in Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997) prompt acts of self-reconstruction that penetrate the national borders framing certain notions of African American identity in the post-Civil Rights era. The author argues for greater recognition of the abiding yet often ambivalent transnationality of African American identity and its employment, particularly by women writers, in contemporary African American literature. The article suggests that African American literature and U.S. blackness in general must be resituated in global terms and that one way of doing so is through the figure of the woman spiritually reconstituted through transnationally rooted practice.

Rountree, Wendy:The Boys Club: Male Protagonists in Contemporary African American Young Adult Literature

Rountree, Wendy:<i>The Boys Club: Male Protagonists in Contemporary African American Young Adult Literature</i>