African American Narratives Research Articles

Unsanitized Domestic Allegories: Biomedical Politics, Racial Uplift, and the African American Woman's Risk Narrative

“Unsanitized Domestic Allegories” begins the work of recovering the complex history linking Progressive-Era biomedicalization, gender expectations, and ideologies of racial uplift within African American culture. Through a close reading of early-twentieth-century African American health care activists, including C. V. Roman, founding member of the National Medical Association (1895) and the first editor of the Journal of the National Medical Association, E. Elliott Rawlins, health columnist for the Amsterdam News, and Mary Fitzbutler Waring, chair of the Committee for Health and Hygiene of the National Association for Colored Women, Knadler's essay argues that race leaders recruited a language of health and hygiene to shape, manage, and regulate the class divisions and cultural disorientations of urban migration. But this community epidemiology was also connected to a particular biomediated image that functioned as part of a politics of risk and affect to preempt women's freedom: the (un)sanitized woman who was said to endanger the health of her family and the community at a time when many African American neighborhoods were experiencing epidemics of diseases as a result of health-care disparities and environmental racism. Knadler then turns to a close reading of Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) to show how its unruly, unsanitized domestic allegory exposes and destabilizes this interworking of medical language, affect, and gendered risk within racial uplift. Quicksand testifies to the complex meaning of agency in a world in which political, economic, and moral crises have been recast as the medical condition of specific “risky” bodies and doubts over their competence at maintaining sanitary self-care.

Ghosts of Southern Imperialism: Caribbean Space, Functions of Fiction, and Thomas Nelson Page’s “No Haid Pawn”

TAYLOR HAGOOD Florida Atlantic University Ghosts of Southern Imperialism: Caribbean Space, Functions of Fiction, and Thomas Nelson Page’s “No Haid Pawn”1 IN LIGHT OF THOMAS NELSON PAGE’S PRO-WHITE-SOUTH STANCE, IT IS very strange when complexity regarding race appears in his writing. For example, in his early frame narratives African American narrators serve his purpose of telling stories about harmonious race relations in antebellum plantation culture, yet those very narrators often lace their stories with subversive elements that undercut the very positive stories of slavery they tell. In these cases it is difficult to discern whether such characters somehow get out of Page’s control (which presents a problematic theoretical situation) or if Page realizes the other side of slavery and includes it in his crafting of otherwise pro-slavery, pro-Old South tales. Although the stories succeeded in bringing about their apparent desired effect of eliciting the sympathy of white Northerners and Page gave no known intimation that he was up to something more complicated,theslippageswithintheseAfricanAmericans’rhetorichint at an awareness of the sham of the Peculiar Institution on the part of the narrators if not Page himself.2 In the cases I am mentioning, such indications of slavery’s terrors are little more than hints, shadows in an otherwise sunny overall portrait, but in one of these stories terror becomes explicit. The story is “No Haid Pawn,” part of Page’s 1887 collection InOleVirginia. To observe that the story shows the dark side of slavery is to state a fact many scholars have 1 I want to thank Barbara Ladd, John Lowe, and Kirstin Squint for the SSSL panel this paper originated in. Thanks to my colleagues who offered prescient feedback, including Eric Berlatsky and Papatya Bucak. Thank you to Susan Donaldson and the anonymous reader for Mississippi Quarterly for their tremendously helpful comments. 2 Frederick Douglass had pointed out this doubleness of rhetoric a good four decades before Page when he noted that for fear of spies sent by masters onto plantations, slaves invariably reported that they led happy lives when asked by white people about their living and working conditions. 140 Taylor Hagood acknowledged, but what has not been so much explored are the reasons it does so or the machinery and underpinnings of the story’s critique.3 The question of why Page includes this discordant story is not easy to answer because doing so requires probing into the tricky techniques and purposes of Page’s compositional method. It also requires a careful investigation into the layering of time in the story, specifically the relationship betweenthepresent(post-Reconstructiontime)andthepast (the antebellum era). In “No Haid Pawn,” Page works out this temporal element through configurations of space in a specific kind of figure that can by its nature cross temporal borders—a ghost. Many of the other stories in Page’s first collection strategically deal with the past, before the Civil War, to soften antebellum sins and allay reader qualms with a sanitized portrait of a bygone and now irrelevant institution. “No Haid Pawn,” however, seeks to treat time and space so that both weave between a marked distance and an equally marked proximity. In other words, Page brings the antebellum past crashing into the story’s present with a ghost as the bridging figure while simultaneously invoking spaces distant from the Virginia setting.4 He does so in order to craft a horror story written in line with other horror stories by American writers before him. The specific kind of spatiality Page creates blends Virginia space with a Caribbean spatial model, and he particularly evokes the Haitian Revolution, a not uncommon move for white Southern writers (Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is a famous later example).5 Page uses long-standing fears of slave revolt to infuse his own historical moment 3 For treatments of this story, see Cuenca, Cowan, and Rubin. Fred Hobson extensively investigates Page’s oeuvre for critiques of slavery as a system inflicted on white Southerners “beneficial for the Negro but detrimental for the Southern white” (141). In Page’s thinking, while race-based slavery may have held back the white South economically and culturally, its ordering of race...

An Important Time Recalled

Robert Bone and Richard Courage, The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 336 pages, $29.95, paperback.The late Robert Bone had a socialist background which impelled him to study African-American history and literature long before those subjects became fashionable. From the 1950s on his pioneering work in this field included The Negro Novel in America (1959) and Down Home: Origins of the Afro-American Short Story (1975). He had planned, and partially researched and written, a study of the Chicago African-American Renaissance of the 1930s and later. When his health began to fail, he gave his notes to Richard A. Courage, author of many articles on African-American narrative and visual arts. Courage completed Bone's research, and the result is a compelling book which will be a standard in its field for many years to come.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Chester Himes, Frantz Fanon and the Literary Decolonization of Harlem

The existing scholarship on African American novelist Chester Bomar Himes and Martinican postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon offers concrete, but sporadic indications that each was acquainted with t...

Mathematical Counterstory and African American Male Students: Urban Mathematics Education From a Critical Race Theory Perspective

In this article, the author argues that the persistent underachievement of many African American male students in urban school districts requires pedagogical interventions designed to re-engage and re-orient students to mathematics as a critical cultural activity. While counterstory, a critical race theory construct, has wide application across educational research, few researchers have explored its relevance for urban mathematics education. Here, the author provides a grounded operationalization of counterstory by examining the pedagogy embedded in African American narrative on literacy. Using data from a participatory action research project involving male African Americans in South Los Angeles, the author then demonstrates how counterstory is embedded in the mathematical activity associated with graphical representation and trend analysis of data. Through the theorized approach to counterstory presented, the author provides useful direction for education researchers interested in counterstory, and for mathematics educators attempting to broaden their pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning mathematics.

Toward an Alternative Engagement of Black Theology with Modern Science

Religious narrative is rarely studied for the purpose of gaining insight into the nature of consciousness or for finding suitable metaphors and norms for the enrichment of modern science. Barbara Holmes is among the few scholars exploring the intersection of modern science with Black liberation theology. In Race and the Cosmos, Holmes constructs a view of race and social justice informed by quantum physics and scientific cosmology rather than by religious narrative. Her approach is unfortunately mired by a supposition of dualism and moral realism. This article proposes an alternative approach that permits both engagement with science and appreciation of narrative. The article shows that African American religious narrative, if dealt with phenomenologically, is a compelling point of departure for Black theologians seeking critical engagement with the natural sciences. In addition, this turn to phenomenology broadens the meaning of liberation to include the quest for self-transcendence, a recurring theme found in Black religious narratives.

Speaking lives, authoring texts: three African American women's oral slave narratives

Speaking lives, authoring texts: three African American women's oral slave narratives

Assault Rifles, Separated Families, and Murder in Their Eyes: Unasked Questions after Hurricane Katrina

This essay critiques the trauma literature that includes African Americans who endured Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. It is concerned with possible dissonance between scholars' and subjects' agendas. Drawing on narratives from the the Saddest Days Oral History Project that Penner directed in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, she explores divergences between the most urgent traumatic concerns of her study's narrators and the dominant questions of Katrina mental health literature. Her focus is the survivors' perceptions of rescuers' intentions, a primary consideration in the assessment of potentially traumatizing events. The mental-health specialists, with minor exceptions, correctly predicted an overall surge in traumatic and depressive symptoms for Hurricane Katrina survivors. They were less effective in identifying causation, specifying type, and appreciating major differences between social groups and communities. For almost all of the African American narrators trapped in the city after the storm, the trauma of Katrina was experienced as the product of human beings, mainly armed law enforcement personnel and soldiers, brandishing assault rifles, acting disdainfully, and separating families. The event was made cataclysmic not by the winds or the floodwaters but by their descent into a militarized zone in which narrators seemed singled out for persecution because of their race/ethnicity (and gender). The traumatizing events that were omitted from the structured interview protocols, in particular the impact of the militarized response, have had the deepest impact on survivors' identity and ability to trust others.

A Student Roundtable on Prison Abolition and Imprisonment Writing

P Lai: In spring 2009, I offered a junior-level English seminar on Literatures of American Imprisonment, a course that surveyed writing that emerges from or reflects on various historical moments and forms of captivity. Rather than considering such imprisonment as anomalous to the United States of America, the course forwarded an argument about the constitutive quality of such captivity for American national character. We read captivity narratives from colonial America in the contact between European and Native Americans; African American slave narratives; Indian boarding school memoirs; Japanese American internment poetry; contemporary prison writing and neo-abolitionist discourse; and poetry from the Guantanamo Bay prison detainees. While the readings covered a span of over three hundred years, we read them out of chronological order to avoid creating a progressive narrative of increasing freedom or decreasing restrictions on the individual body. Instead, we considered how imprisonment has functioned variously to delimit who belongs to the national body and where boundaries can be drawn for the nation-state. The class began with a focused consideration of prison abolition by way of Angela Y. Davis’s succinct, provocative Are Prisons Obsolete? and selections from Joy James’s Brown, Michelle. The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle. New York University Press, 2009.

A Documentary History of African-American Freedom: An Introduction to the Race, Slavery and Free Blacks Microfilm Collection

This essay offers an introduction to the Race, Slavery and Free Blacks: Petitions to Southern Legislatures and County Courts microfilm collection, edited and published by Professor Loren Schweninger and the Race and Slavery Petitions Project at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In 2003–04 the author joined the RSPP staff as the National Historical and Public Records Commission's Fellow in Documentary Editing. This essay identifies how the petition testimonies included in this unusual microfilm collection can inform our understanding of African-American freedom before emancipation. More specifically, it examines petition testimonies filed with county courts and legislatures for evidence of how slaves, slaveholders and free African-Americans experienced the legal process of manumission. It argues for petition testimonies as a unique form of African-American narrative.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Changing Significance of Race: African Americans and the Hebrew Bible

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Changing Significance of Race: African Americans and the Hebrew Bible

The Fourth Dimension: Kinlessness and African American Narrative

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Fourth Dimension: Kinlessness and African American NarrativeNancy BentleyNancy Bentley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 35, Number 2Winter 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/596643 Views: 249Total views on this site Citations: 62Citations are reported from Crossref © 2008 by The University of Chicago. 0093‐1896/09/3502‐0001$10.00. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Katharina Fackler, Silvia Schultermandl Kinship as critical idiom in oceanic studies, Atlantic Studies 72 (Jun 2022): 1–31.https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2022.2079900Cécile Roudeau, Nancy Bentley Re-thinking and Re-making Kinship—a Critical Reevaluation of the Narratives of (American) Modernity: An Interview with Nancy Bentley, Transatlantica , no.Hors-sérieHors-série (Sep 2021).https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.17498 Refusing Demography, (May 2021): 1–27.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021452-001 Accounting for the “Most Excruciating Torment”, (May 2021): 141–169.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021452-005 “The Division of the Captives”, (May 2021): 170–206.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021452-006 “Treacherous Rogues”, (May 2021): 207–244.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021452-007 Madness, (May 2021): 245–255.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021452-008 Bibliography, (May 2021): 257–281.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021452-009 Introduction, (Mar 2021): 1–25.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013129-001 On “Godly Family” and “Family Roots”, (Mar 2021): 27–55.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013129-003 Moving against the Grain, (Mar 2021): 57–82.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013129-004 Black Like Me? Or Christian Like Me?, (Mar 2021): 83–106.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013129-005 Bible Study, Fraternalism, and the Making of Interpretive Community, (Mar 2021): 107–134.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013129-007 Churchwomen and the Incorporation of Church and Home, (Mar 2021): 135–166.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013129-008 Black Evangelicals, “the Family,” and Confessional Intimacy, (Mar 2021): 167–198.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013129-009 Conclusion, (Mar 2021): 199–211.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013129-010 Notes, (Mar 2021): 213–228.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013129-011 References, (Mar 2021): 229–245.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478013129-012 “The Thing Looked Absurd”, (Jan 2021): 1–16.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012801-001 “To Become a Colored Man”, (Jan 2021): 17–37.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012801-002 “A Chapter of Political Philosophy Applicable to the American People”, (Jan 2021): 38–54.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012801-003 “One Method for Expressing Opposite Emotions”, (Jan 2021): 55–81.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012801-004 “Assault Compels Defense”, (Jan 2021): 82–100.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012801-005 “A Living Root, Not a Twig Broken Off”, (Jan 2021): 101–123.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012801-006 “Somebody’s Child”, (Jan 2021): 124–158.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012801-007 “Nothing Less than a Radical Revolution”, (Jan 2021): 159–187.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012801-008 “That Strange, Mysterious, and Indescribable”, (Jan 2021): 188–205.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012801-009 Notes, (Jan 2021): 207–242.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012801-010 Bibliography, (Jan 2021): 243–261.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012801-011Lucy Sheehan “Fraud, Fun, and Feeling”: Slavery, Industrialism, and the Mother-Machine in Frances Trollope's Fiction, Victorian Literature and Culture 48, no.33 (Aug 2020): 519–550.https://doi.org/10.1017/S106015031900007X Genealogies of Interracial Kinship, (Jan 2020): 1–25.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012689-001 Blackface Desdemona, or, the White Woman “Begrimed”, (Jan 2020): 29–54.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012689-003 “Almost Eliza”, (Jan 2020): 55–82.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012689-004 Mothers and Mammies, (Jan 2020): 85–118.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012689-006 Kinfullness, (Jan 2020): 119–157.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012689-007 Mary Jemison’s Cabin, (Jan 2020): 161–194.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012689-009 Racial (Re)Construction, (Jan 2020): 195–228.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012689-010 “Minus Bloodlines”, (Jan 2020): 229–244.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012689-011 Notes, (Jan 2020): 245–282.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012689-012 Bibliography, (Jan 2020): 283–298.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012689-013 Introduction, (Jan 2019): 1–14.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005285-001 On the Impasse, (Jan 2019): 15–72.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005285-002 Fungible Becoming, (Jan 2019): 73–116.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005285-003 Carceral Space and Fugitive Motion, (Jan 2019): 117–167.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005285-004 The Maroon Matrix, (Jan 2019): 168–219.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005285-005 Diplomacy in the Undercommons, (Jan 2019): 220–231.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005285-006 Notes, (Jan 2019): 233–286.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005285-007 Bibliography, (Jan 2019): 287–312.https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005285-008Lauren Heintz The Crisis of Kinship, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23, no.22 (Apr 2017): 221–246.https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3750437Jeffrey Cottrell At the end of the trade: obeah and black women in the colonial imaginary, Atlantic Studies 12, no.22 (Jun 2015): 200–218.https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2015.1025216Elizabeth Maddock Dillon Reassembling the Novel: Kinlessness and the Novel of the Haitian Revolution, Novel 47, no.11 (May 2014): 167–185.https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-2414120Lloyd Pratt Early American Literature and Its Exclusions, PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 128, no.44 (Oct 2020): 983–988.https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2013.128.4.983Lloyd Pratt “I Am a Stranger with Thee”: Frederick Douglass and Recognition After 1845, American Literature 85, no.22 (Jun 2013): 247–272.https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2079152 Introduction, (Jan 2012): 1–35.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394945-001 Doing Justice with Objects, (Jan 2012): 36–90.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394945-002 Telling Time, (Jan 2012): 91–136.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394945-003 The Political Conscious, (Jan 2012): 137–196.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394945-004 Refusing Identification, (Jan 2012): 197–238.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394945-005 Critical Kinship, (Jan 2012): 239–300.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394945-006 The Vertigo of Critique, (Jan 2012): 301–343.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394945-007 BIBLIOGRAPHY, (Jan 2012): 345–389.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394945-008 Bibliography, (): 313–340.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822395737-009

Reading Religion in African American Narratives

Reading Religion in African American Narratives Ethel Young-Minor (bio) Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Slave Narrative. By Yolanda Pierce. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005. 151 pp. $59.95 cloth. Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-Century African American Fiction. By James W. Coleman. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006. 252 pp. $42.95 cloth. The first decade of twenty-first century literary analysis introduces two arresting treatments of how religious discourse informs the African American narrative tradition: Hell Without Fires by Yolanda Pierce and Faithful Vision by James Coleman. Pierce’s work considers the spiritual narratives of five African Americans: George White (1810), John Jea (circa 1811), Solomon Bayley (1825), Zilpha Elaw (1845), and David Smith (1822). The book’s central premise is that antebellum African American writers understand hell as two distinct concepts; the spiritual hell of biblical narratives and the earthly hell blacks of this milieu experienced through “daily physical and psychological suffering.” Pierce argues that as antebellum writers became conscious of both realms of hell, and subsequently located ways to deflate the power of earthly hell, they became both God-possessed and self-possessed. They were then equipped to enact communal change. Each chapter provides interesting history and information about these often overlooked, yet important writers. Pierce’s chief contributions to [End Page 155] the scholarship of antebellum literature, however, are found in her novel critiques of George White and Solomon Bayley. While many critics have customarily dismissed White’s connection to the black community because of his membership in a majority-white denomination, Pierce dismantles this notion. She calls attention to autobiographical information and radical movements in White’s sermons that display a desire to speak back to white authority and to create a self-possessed “black” identity in a world that sought to deny him that right. The chapter centered on Solomon Bayley, like other portions of Pierce’s work, often becomes heavy-handed in its offering of summary; however, she eventually uses this summary to undergird her argument that Bayley offers a revolutionary and bold stance against American racism. She emboldens his stance by suggesting, “Bayley voices in his narrative what [Phillis] Wheatley is unwilling or unable to address in her poetry; the fact that the Negro in America could and would never be entirely free.” In précis, Pierce’s exploration of rarely treated narratives adds an integral layer to scholarly dialogues about intersections of race and religion in black narratives. The book’s proposition that the Christian concept of hell did more than terrorize enslaved blacks opens important new pathways for examining Christianity as a positive wellspring in the construction of early black American identity. James Coleman’s Faithful Vision is a masterful consideration of how African American faith systems influence the writings of African Americans. Coleman defines African American “Faithful Vision” as a complex network of supernatural beliefs that has real implications in the everyday lives of African Americans. In Coleman’s designations, Faithful Vision contains diverse spiritual and intellectual traditions. Even as the Judeo- Christian Bible rests in the center of the tradition, Coleman believes that interpretations of the Bible can be influenced by myriad traditions, among them naturalism, postmodernism, womanism, and hoodoo/voodoo (Coleman uses the terms with a slash so my usage here reflects his own). Coleman puts forward Faithful Vision as a critical component of black cultural efforts to place their daily struggles in historical context; as such, it informs a cultural ethos that suggests that no matter how arduous things appear in the immediate reality, black Americans should remember that God “didn’t bring us this far to leave us.” Coleman successfully intermingles brief personal narrations of Faithful Vision with intense critiques of how African American writers approach Faithful Vision through literary treatments in the latter half of the twentieth century. The first two chapters brilliantly construct [End Page 156] Coleman’s frame of Faithful Vision as a lens that grows out of the cultural tradition that writers themselves have established. He then expertly treats an imposing list of writers from the African American literary tradition, including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Ellease Southerland...

Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity; With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians; “Shakin' Up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965–1995)

Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity; With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians; “Shakin' Up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965–1995)

A Liberation Narrative

Page 6 American Book Review Golden continued on next page Gaines continued from previous page Americans] made modernity in that country [the US],” Hardy then excerpts an achingly intimate conversation between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich before shattering the quiet with the deliciously bawdy Roseanne Barr. This sonic assemblage (or perhaps it is only this reviewer that can hear Barr reminding us that “All of American culture is pimp culture”) sets the stage for Hardy’s special brand of deeply insightful funk even as it is sutured to discussions of the most mainstream aspects of popular culture. In a parenthetical riff on the notorious beef between rappers DMX and Ja Rule, for instance, Hardy sharply declares, “You can take black folks’ temperature to find out how the American body is doing.” Hardy sees beyond the stereotypical constraints of both blackness and queerness with a humor that is as profound as it is brash. Mining multiple sites of possibility and resistance , Hardy refuses to over-edit, offering us that raw footage most would leave behind on the cutting-room floor. He does so “living at the end of [an] imagination ” that sees beyond the stereotypical constraints of both blackness and queerness with a humor that is as profound as it is brash. “If Sex and the City were cast with Negroes and Carrie Bradshaw had dreads and an ass, this might be the show’s nightlife scene,” he writes to describe Rassela’s, an after-hours spot in San Francisco. While Hardy follows blood, he does so while remaining critical of the hackneyed performances of authenticity that often dictate communal belonging. It is this renegotiation of what “realness” looks, feels, and sounds like that provides coherence to the collection. In “Young Soul Rebels: Negro/ Queer Experimental Filmmakers,” Hardy dares to push his readers beyond the seductions of the minstrel versions of blackness that have become comfortably lucrative for some and a violent undoing for others. He writes, We’re all seduced into wanting to play along…. Whether it’s spoon-fed uplift the race bullshit or plantation legacies (refurbished by mainstream rap music and videos) of thugs, pimps and gangstas, we are comfortable with and eagerly support images and storylines that merely regurgitate cliché and stereotype or that allow us to be “empowered” by simply putting black faces on cinematic archetype and creaky formula. Here, Hardy reminds us to subvert, distort, and play with the edges of blackness. Or as he writes, “Blackness is experimental.” Hardy ends his collection with two very sexy, previously unpublished “downloads”—an almost too lengthy genre-bending essay of personal reflection and multi-person interviews on the gay, mainly Latino, porn scene in NewYork, and a quilted “interview ” with Lil’ Kim stitched together from a series of other sources (her publicist let Hardy know she wasn’t interested in a sit down). While the Lil’ Kim essay is inspired by the now infamous photograph of her sporting a bikini and burqa on the cover of One World, both pieces fly in the face of propriety, interrogating constructions of colored sexuality and gender that work to soothe and balm, as well as irritate. Hardy theorizes the political through the banal and the spectacular, the funky and the vanilla, while unapologetically forcing his readers to take some necessary conceptual risks: to challenge categories of identity, agitate the status quo, and push the boundaries of what is counted as “culture.” This is black criticism. Alisha Gaines is pursuing her doctorate in the English Department at Duke University, as well as a certificate in African and African American studies. Her interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American narrative, queer epistemologies, visual popular culture, and Michael Jackson. A Liberation Narrative Ebony Noelle Golden How does the body practice resistance? When she is turned against herself, how does she breathe light? When the body is buried by shame, depression, embarrassment, guilt, how does she exhume herself like a black flower, and offer a song? How does she gather the pieces of herself unto herself like a brilliant decoupage of chords, photos, notes, meditations, riffs, and melodies that highlight the journey and hold space for real life trauma? The answer is...

Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Writing and Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Writing and Culture Elisabeth Bronfen Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Writing and Culture. Edited by Lucy E. Frank. Hants: Ashgate. 2007. The fourteen essays in Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Writing and Culture explore ways in which the violent and traumatic nature of America has come to generate its unique forms of literary and cultural haunting. As the editor Lucy E. Frank notes in her introduction, "America's extreme repertoire of death images both conjures up and attempts to contain some of the nations profoundest anxieties and contradictions" (6). Starting point for many of the contributions is the relationship between the dead and the natural body politic. One is reminded of George Romero films about the living dead, in which the zombies serve as a cipher for those deemed to be non-citizens and therefore socially dead before their actual demise. It is, thus, one of the scholarly merits of this volume that it offers the historic precursors to this staple in the American cultural imaginary. Why a nation, built on a religious, political and economic promise of a new life for those who took upon themselves the challenge of emigration should have come to be so obsessed with death is not something these essays address. Instead, what they compellingly illustrate is that an engagement with death and its after-effects is not something specifically modern, but rather functions as the measure for the way American culture has always thought about itself. A seminal contradiction for much of America's dealings with death is outlined by John J. Kucich in relation to the literary afterlife of Chief Seattle's speech on the shores of Puget Sound. Invoking the supernatural staying power of ghosts, his words predicted the resilient claim the Indians would continue to have on the living in a text seemingly about the threat of their demise. Equally focused on the question of a more general cultural repression that was far from successful, Jeffrey Steele presents African-American narratives by the survivors of slavery in light of the way these transform particular grief into stories that address a more general political grievance. But the question of spectral afterlife equally applies, as Dana Luciano shows, to the fallen soldiers of the Civil War. As an icon of collective sadness, President Lincoln embodied the "as-yet-unfulfilled realization of democracy's promise," more precisely a claim on the future, "that demands further progress toward national goals as compensation for historical losses suffered in their name" (45). If the dead return in literary texts to remind the living of their failure to live up to the democratic ideals of the American Dream, haunting is also linked to sentimentality as one of the most powerful aesthetic attitudes of 19th century culture. Though the essays do not take on the question why the sentimental mode came to adapt itself so fruitfully to America's need to take responsibility for its dead, what they do offer is an insight into the richness of the material revolving around this ambivalent articulation of mourning. A moribund fascination with infant mortality produced an entire industry, including anthologies of child-elegies and post-mortem photographs. Other sites of articulation for a sentimental consumption of death were the fashion industry, theatrical stagings of ghost illusions, as well as mesmerism as a persistent literary theme. Yet, as Elizabeth Carolyn Miller suggests, Edgar Allen Poe used the genre of crime fiction precisely to critique the proclivity of his fellow citizens to sensationalize death. What one thus comes to recognize, as one moves through this richly suggestive collection of essays, is that America's obsession with death is not merely a curious detail. Rather, this resilient conversation with the dead emerges as a dominant force, which continues to haunt us even today. [End Page 158] Elisabeth Bronfen University of Zurich (Switzerland) Copyright © 2009 Mid-America American Studies Association

Sharon D. Wright Austin, The Transformation of Plantation Politics: Black Politics, Concentrated Poverty, and Social Capital in the Mississippi DeltaKim Lacy Rogers, Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience and Social Change

Sharon D. Wright Austin, <i>The Transformation of Plantation Politics: Black Politics, Concentrated Poverty, and Social Capital in the Mississippi Delta</i>Kim Lacy Rogers, <i>Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience and Social Change</i>

“Shakin' Up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965–1995)

“Shakin' Up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965–1995)

Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity; Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative

Book Review| March 01 2007 Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity; Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative Mendi Lewis Obadike Mendi Lewis Obadike Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (1): 197–199. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-083 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mendi Lewis Obadike; Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity; Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative. American Literature 1 March 2007; 79 (1): 197–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-083 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Exorcizing the Past: The Slave Narrative as Historical Fantasy

Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred is a hybrid text: part historical novel, part science fiction/fantasy and part slave narrative. The story transports a contemporary black heroine into 19th–century Maryland in order to explore, recreate and connect with African American narratives of identity. Providing two narrative strands, one in 19th–century Maryland and the other in 20th–century California, the text is able to juxtapose the realities of slavery with its legacy. Conflating these time–periods, Kindred aims to interrogate the marginalization of African American history, but specifically the role black women played in that history, in America's bicentennial year. While Butler adapts what has been regarded as the quintessential African American literary mode of the slave narrative, her fiction consciously draws upon a literary heritage that foregrounds narratives written by black women. Consequently, Kindred highlights the issues and concerns that directly affect the construction of black femininity and its role in the community of slaves as well as examining the historical pressure brought to bear on the configuration of contemporary African American womanhood. In doing so, Butler's fiction articulates the right of black women to intervene in their own construction and to inscribe the existence of black women in stories of originary identity. What this article seeks to explore is how Butler's fiction develops and extends the traditional slave narrative, how this is utilized in order to interrogate the ‘realities’ of both slavery and contemporary US society, and how effective the text is in challenging stereotypical representation of white and black femininity.