Strange Fruit Research Articles

Black Liberation Theology and the Lynching of Jesus

Black Liberation Theology and the Lynching of Jesus

Beyond the photograph: a graphic history of lynching

This paper studies the 2008 graphic novel Incognegro in conjunction with the surviving lynching photographs. It argues that Johnson and Pleece’s work gives us a behind-the-scenes documentation of lynching – an ‘inside view’ that the photographs, despite their claimed reliance on a facticist projection of ‘objective reality’, often fail to do. To the extent that the period’s white-sponsored lynching photographs follow a carefully coded if unwritten convention and aesthetics of representation, they tend in fact to elide and gloss over the ‘whole truth’, or distract from immediate and direct enregisterment of the full and utter horror of the violence being perpetrated; this, despite the presence of the ‘strange fruit’ that grotesquely and ominously hangs from the itinerant scaffolds dotting the lynchtime landscape. In this backdrop of history and representation, Incognegro may be understood as an interventionist text in the long and innovative narrative of America’s visual culture; a first-order intervention that reconfigures a racist visual archive from within, so as to unravel and deconstruct the undergirding matrix of ideological, socio-cultural and aesthetic values upon which the lynching photographic archive stands.

Gender and lynching: the politics of memory

Introduction Evelyn M. Simien Mary Turner, Hidden Memory, and Narrative Possibility Julie Buckner Armstrong Sisters in Motherhood (?): The Politics of Race and Gender in Lynching Drama Koritha Mitchell The Female Lynch Victim in Post-Reconstruction African American Literature Barbara McCaskill A Woman was Lynched the Other Day: Memory, Gender, and the Limits of Traumatic Representation Jennifer D. Williams The Politics of Sexuality in Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit Fumiko Sakashita Gender, Race, and Public Space: Photography and Memory in the Massacre of East Saint Louis and the Crisis Magazine Anne Rice

Lillian Smith, Cold War Intellectual

Over past four decades, scholars in southern studies have images of two different Lillian Smiths. (1) The first is Smith liberal humanist, moralist, and therapist, whose worldview derives equally from secularized vision of Christian brotherhood and spiritualized vision of psychoanalysis. She believes in universal human nature, affirms aesthetic value but not ontological reality of difference, and regards equality as human birthright, something that would be self-evident had not neuroses and oppressive social structures--above all, the race/sex/sin spiral endemic to southern culture (Killers 121)--poisoned otherwise spontaneous and healthy relationships. Fond of tributes to human spirit and possessing what Jay Garcia calls transnational dimensions (60), Smith frames South's predicament within global anticolonial struggles and, more abstractly, within imperative that she calls the Twentieth Century dialogue ... [of] relationships not systems (Killers 233). Though committed to civil rights movement and possessing indubitable moral courage, she believes that lasting social change will come neither as result of pragmatic efforts to seize power, nor as consequence of more accurate theory, but rather as sum of individual awakenings, as oppressors and oppressed discover their mutual humanity and learn to form constructive relationships. This is Smith portrayed by Richard King, who finds in her work a moral authority that far outweighed her institutional connections (176), and from different vantage point by Mab Segrest, who lauds her as an important lesbian precursor to contemporary Southern women's literature of wholeness (40). And while this Smith, assimilable to mainstream liberalism of mid-twentieth century, is undoubtedly appealing, she also stands accused of essentialism, naivete, and platitude. Moreover, moral and therapeutic lens through which she views sexuality threatens to render it unsexy, as does soporific earnestness of her prose style. The second Lillian Smith, on other hand, is savvy and transgressive, dissector and connoisseur of grotesque who anticipates obsessions of early twenty-first century academy and reveals, even against her intentions, ideological charade of liberal humanism--all while secretly suspecting, like an appropriately disillusioned post-1968 intellectual, futility of any alternative political program. This Smith, McKay Jenkins claims, is fully engaged with notions that are now considered staples of postmodern racial thought, that constructions of 'Otherness' ... are not only not apart from subject but are located specifically within subject, are indeed something on which subject depends for its very existence (123). One implication of such claim is that Smith resembles Cathy Caruth more than Freud, refusing fantasy that one might ever assimilate one's traumas or be cured of one's neuroses. No matter how often her writing waxes universal and holds out possibility of healed humanity, she does not transcend horrific particularity of South, for her experience--indeed, her body--cannot permit it. In Patricia Yaeger's words, For Smith, to be white southerner is to know and be grotesque--to overwrite, overread, and participate in an economy of cruelty, defensiveness, reaction formation, and overcompensation (246-247). However one might strive against one's immersion in racist system, there can be no escape from grotesque as self-stunting habitus (247), delicious, frightening riddle, space of permeable, ongoing disturbance (249). Whereas first Smith seems like Church Lady, this one seems like an S&M enthusiast. Both of these versions of Smith draw much of their justification from Strange Fruit and Killers of Dream, which remain her most widely-read texts. Their popularity is understandable, for interlocking problems at center of two works--racism, segregation, sexual repression, misogyny and its mirror image, gyneolatry--may indeed be investigated either as crimes that arise when difference is elevated to an essence and made to obscure common humanity, or as illustrations of how differences, no matter how constructed they may be, remain intractably vexing, alluring, and as real as blow to spine. …

‘Gays who cannot properly be gay’: Queer Muslims in the neoliberal European city

The article traces the framing of Muslim Europeans as the continent’s Other by focusing on the silencing of queer Muslims within public debates around ‘Islam and homosexuality’. Ignoring class as a factor in the violence produced by the gentrification of urban spaces, the pitting of the (implicitly white) gay community against the (implicitly straight) Muslim community posits the latter as a threat to the continent’s foundations that needs to be contained through forms of spatial governance in line with the neoliberal restructuring of the city. Maintaining that this is a Europe-wide phenomenon, the article looks at Amsterdam as exemplifying the European metropole as a site of pseudo-homophile Islamophobia. Simultaneously, with activist groups like the queer of color collective Strange Fruit, it is also representative of the strategies of resistance developed by groups whose presence is virtually erased through culture clash discourses, namely queer Muslims. The article argues that an intersectional queer of color activism, as practiced by Strange Fruit, and a queer of color critique building on it, allows to undermine binaries from the Muslim/European dichotomy to the normative coming out narrative, invariably positioning queers of color as ‘not properly gay’.

Strange fruit

The Indian government’s pursuit of BlackBerry reveals inconsistencies in its policy on privacy and security. Prashant Iyengar reports

"Strange Fruit": Representations of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in Children's and Young Adult Nonfiction

This essay looks at representations of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in interactive nonfiction for young readers, and both examines the kinds of interactivity of these texts, and considers developments in what we know about the Rosenberg case. The various ways in which these texts invite reader participation, namely in placing readers in the position of jurors for the Rosenberg case, as well as developments such as the 1995 release of the Venona documents, open narrative possibilities that ultimately resist master narrative.

By Hands Unknown (review)

Reviewed by: By Hands Unknown Koritha Mitchell By Hands Unknown. Conceived by Kym Gomes. Directed by Kym Gomes and Harvey Huddleston. Brava Company/Chelsea Rep Lab, New York International Fringe Festival, New School for Drama, New York City. 21 August 2010. In 1914, African American author Angelina Weld Grimké drafted a three-act play about lynching, now known as Rachel, which was first staged in Washington, D.C., in March 1916. During the next two decades, lynching plays proliferated as dramatists turned to the one-act format, often forsaking traditional theatrical success. Kym Gomes's By Hands Unknown returned to such scripts. Gomes decided to address racial violence after seeing the 2000 New York Historical Society presentation of Without Sanctuary, an exhibit featuring nearly a hundred photographs of lynch victims. These images originally circulated in turn-of-the-century newspapers and picture postcards; meanwhile, American dramatists wrote one-acts about those who survived the mobs' attacks. Lynchings often drew large crowds, but plays highlighting long-term consequences did not. Most often, lynching plays appeared in magazines, available for amateur performance and dramatic readings. When Gomes's show, consisting of seven one-acts from the 1920s and '30s, joined the 2010 New York Fringe Festival, a wider audience encountered these scripts and the genre's message. In particular, Gomes's revival demonstrated that the physical brutality captured in the photographs was only the beginning of the damage to US families. Click for larger view View full resolution The family in Aftermath before John knows that his father was lynched while he served overseas: Jihan Ponti (Millie), Phil John (Lonnie), Carmen Balentine (John), and Valerie Elizabeth Donaldson (Mam Sue). (Photo: Claudia Turbides.) Given the source material, the show could have seemed dated and disjointed, but the choices made by Gomes and her co-director Harvey Huddleston as well as the expert execution of the ensemble cast highlighted the dramatic power of the original works and the relevance of lynching plays for today's audiences. The show's careful transitions, emphasis on thematic connections, and manipulation of sound and silence articulated this history's connection to the present. With seven one-acts, transitional elements proved crucial, and the choices were flawless. Throughout the two-hour presentation, performer Safiya Fredericks [End Page 279] provided continuity; she remained stage right, with a musician by her side. Before each individual play, Fredericks recited a different poem while a single light shone on her and the musician, who played guitar or harmonica or remained silent. Fredericks began with the words of "Strange Fruit," the poem by Lewis Allen that became a famous song with Billie Holiday's 1939 recording. Although Fredericks recited it as a poem, not a song, the recognizable lines assured audience members that we knew something about the show's subject matter. When the poem ended, the stage went dark, and it remained so when a choir's singing initiated the action of Georgia Douglas Johnson's A Sunday Morning in the South (1925). The choir stayed in the shadows, representing a church near the home where the action took place. When 19-year-old Tom was falsely accused of rape, the singing stopped. Police officers dragged him from the house, and his grandmother cried and prayed. The presentation suggested that whenever "strange fruit" hung from trees, families mourned. Click for larger view View full resolution A daughter tries to convince her father that violence is not necessary in Country Sunday: Alison Parks (Emmaline) and Rick Schneider (Samuel Bates). (Photo: Claudia Turbides.) Every recited poem created a bridge between the one-acts. Fredericks ushered the audience from the sympathy inspired by a praying grandmother to the militancy of Claude McKay's poem "If We Must Die" (1919). Insisting upon the necessity of fighting back, this poem prepared the audience for Mary Burrill's Aftermath (1919), in which a black soldier returns from World War I to discover that his father has been lynched. The action ended with him exiting, pistol in hand. Similarly, McKay's poem "The Lynching" (1922) describes white women who looked without sorrow at a hanging corpse; this image provided a segue into Corrie Howell's The Forfeit (1925). In this...

Moving Around, Moving Between: Mobility and “Home” in Caryl Phillips’s Strange Fruit

Caryl Phillips’s first play, Strange Fruit (1981), inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts ( Gangangere, 1881), shares its basic plot with Ghosts: the respectability of the late father, which the mother desperately wishes to maintain, is destroyed by a son’s homecoming. However, Strange Fruit, set in a black British household in the 1970s, is inevitably more focused on a complicated relationship between mobility and “home”, an urgent issue for a second generation of post-war British immigrants. Mobility is presented as a key factor in informing the main character’s sense of belonging. First, various kinds of mobility, from walking around a British city to movement between two countries (an unnamed Caribbean island and Britain), are represented as painfully deracinating for the characters. Taken together, these experiences work to erode the authenticity of concepts of “home”, whether defined in relation to family or to “homeland”, which each character “imagines” exists, variously, in Britain, the Caribbean island, or Africa. Secondly, a conflicting relationship between these already eroded notions of “home” generates a possibility of mobility itself becoming a space in which to dwell, an alternative to “home”. The article analyses ways in which mobility transforms characters’ (particularly the main character’s) ideas of “home” and, ultimately, contributes to a progressive though painfully fragmented sense of what Caryl Phillips later termed a “transatlantic identity”.

Burnt: Writing Torch Singers and Torch Singing

This article responds to Phillip Auslander’s call for performance studies scholars to engage analyses of popular music performances, particularly those that consider the performers themselves. The author takes Auslander’s tripartite scheme for the performer—performance interaction as a starting point for looking at how torch singers and torch singing are heard, understood, fixed, loved, reviled, and dismissed. In contrast to musical performers and performances as conscious constructions of purposeful identities (separate from the musician as person), the torch singer and her performances are understood as an inevitable collapse of person, performance persona, and character. This is particularly evident in discussions of Billie Holiday’s performances of torch songs and the antilynching anthem “Strange Fruit,” as well as commentary on her love life and sexuality.

Pomegranate

Pomegranate Jean Janzen We live in a valley of Biblical fruits. Grapes, figs, olives, and pomegranates thrive in this subtropical climate. The soil of an ancient seabed combined with hot summers and the irrigation of mountain snows combines into a fertile setting. In our own garden, a lovely, gnarled fig tree spreads its many arms and large, rough leaves, then supplies us and the birds with at least three crops of pale pink succulence every summer. Even our neighborhood fox jumps up for the ripest ones. Our one pomegranate tree offers its sweetness in autumn, the weighty balls of rosy skin clinging to the branches of lacy leaves as the seeds gather sugar until their pouches split, ripening just in time to be placed in honor on our Thanksgiving and Christmas tables. Our first pomegranates in Fresno arrived as a gift to my pediatrician husband, a shopping bagful. What to do with these unfamiliar globes? “Cut them open and suck out the juice,” my husband said, as he stood over the sink in a kind of rapture. Suck and chew and spit out the seeds in primal joy. The children were enthralled while I somewhat carefully let my teeth sink in to release the astringency, this juice that is both sweet and tart. When I discovered that the splattered stains were almost impossible to remove, the new rule in the house was for the children to take off their clothes and sit in the bathtub to eat this strange fruit. The seeds are bright jewels in a leather‐like cup, divided into sections of white parchment. Amazing and ancient. I fell in love, and each year press them for juice to drink and to make jelly. Other times I meticulously remove the seeds for salads. The grandchildren remind me each year to make their favorite Jello salad, which features the seeds whole, softened enough in the gel to swallow them. And at Christmas, I send home with them a jelly jar of this exotic fruit, each spoonful like a large ruby on bread or waffles. Fruit of mythology. In the Greek myth of Persephone, the pomegranate is called the fruit of the underworld. Persephone is persuaded to swallow one seed, resulting in the requirement that she returns into the dark earth for a part of every year. Pliny offers advice on preserving this fruit by hardening them in seawater, then drying them in the sun for 3 days. Homer places the tree into his Garden of Alcinous. In the Muslim Qu’uran, it is called the fruit of Paradise. It is the Biblical source that intrigues me most. The tree is mentioned in Haggai, Song of Solomon, Deuteronomy, Numbers, First Samuel, and especially Exodus. In the instructions for the Tabernacle, pomegranates are to be attached to the hem of the priests: “They made pomegranates of blue, purple, and scarlet yarn and finely twisted linen around the hem of the robe. And they made bells of pure gold and put the bells between the pomegranates all around on the hem of the robe, alternating a bell and a pomegranate all around on the hem of the robe for the service, just as the Lord had commanded Moses.” This instruction with its repetitive phrasing sounds like a song or poem, lifting the fruit into textile art, exciting the senses as they shimmer between the ringing golden bells. The High Priest enters the Holy of Holies through the dyed curtains, the elements of earth crafted into beauty and swinging around his feet. What has this to do with a Mennonite woman taught to live simply and frugally? My lessons in preservation of fruits and vegetables began when I was tall enough to lean over the kitchen counter to peel and slice, hours at a time. It was tedious, and it was the way of winter survival—corn, peaches, peas, beans, tomatoes, and even chicken. The gleaming jars were carried into the cellar to which my mother’s friends were invited to view the harvest behind glass. Canning changed to freezing when I moved to this valley, and soon fresh produce was available year around. I have the luxury to choose, sometimes slicing luscious...

Bearing Witness: The Noose as an Iconic Prop in African American Theatre

Bearing Witness The Noose as an Iconic Prop in African Ameri­ can Theatre Adrienne C. Macki As a horrific relic of our cultural memory, the lynching noose represents a period of Ameri­ can history that stirs visceral emotions . From 1880 to 1930 (the end of the Reconstruction through the beginning of the Depression), there was widespread support for lynch mobs in the old South among the white establishment. In the late 1930s African Ameri­ can blues singer Billie Holiday popularized the lynching protest song “Strange Fruit.” At the same time, a flurry of lynching dramas appeared in response to anti-­ lynching legislation. Black and white activists, such as African Ameri­ can poet and playwright Georgia Douglas Johnson, submitted lynching plays to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to be performed by local branches, encouraging support for the Wagoner-­ Van Nuys Anti-­ Lynching Bill. Although many of these plays are now forgotten in archives, they were once stage worthy and incredibly important to local groups, community organizations, and Little Negro Theatre companies. The phenomenon of staging politically subversive dramas concerned with the specter of the lynching noose warrants further analysis to consider the development and significance of the iconic noose as a stage property. In this essay, I evaluate the increasing representation of the lynching noose in performance, along with its meaning and dramaturgical function as an explosive, iconic, transformational theatrical prop in five representative lynching plays. My work focuses primarily on works by African Ameri­ can playwrights from what I term the second and third wave, or phase, of lynching drama, but also includes a noteworthy example from the first phase. For the sake of clarity, the three categories include: the initial phase from roughly 1858 to 1937, the second phase from 1938 68 A d r i e n n e C . M ack i to 1961, and the third phase from 1962 to the present. The first wave of lynching drama, which has received greater scholarly attention, reflects the trend towards stage realism and folk drama but largely restricts the depiction of brutal violence onstage. The second phase often places the lynching onstage and incorporates the noose as a critical, experimental component of its otherwise realistic dramaturgy.1 Here, the noose serves as a catalyst for dramatic action and/or supplies the play with its havoc-­ wreaking climax. The third phase, launched by Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, tends to invoke departures from realism with stylized, expressionist interpretations of the lynching scene. While these phases overlap, they offer a model to evaluate the role of the noose dramaturgically. Analysis of the noose onstage is complicated by the fact that the lynching drama genre resists periodization because many early lynching plays have been (and perhaps remain) lost. My research has uncovered several unpublished manuscripts. Each rediscovered text offers a new perspective, expanding on Kathy Perkins and Judith Stephens’s seminal anthology, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by Ameri­ can Women.2 Long lost plays add to Strange Fruit’s important chronological index of known lynching dramas. Furthermore, closer scrutiny reveals that the genre of lynching plays (especially those from the middle period) reflect the incendiary presence and/or frequent allusion to a trinity of potent symbols: the lynching mob (as a sign of mass misrule); the trope of a gun (either brandished onstage or confined to a threatening sound effect catapulting the dramatic action); and finally, the most complex and unsettling of all, the noose onstage. My study is mainly concerned with the depiction of the noose onstage in African Ameri­ can theatre to illustrate how the prop noose functions as an object capable of advancing dramatic action, reflecting and refracting dramatic meaning, and inciting audience reaction by ritually extolling or exhuming the dead. As Andrew Sofer suggests in The Stage Life of Props, a prop can also be “fetishized” or “defamiliarized” through its manipulation and placement onstage.3 This is especially true of the lynch­ ing noose. Although previous studies have effectively highlighted the anti-­ lynching movement as well as considered the impact of race, gender, and class politics on lynching drama, or focused on the work of one playwright , few have...

Strange Fruit Indeed: Interrogating Contemporary Textbook Representations of Racial Violence toward African Americans

Background/ContextRecent racial incidents on college and high school campuses throughout the United States have catalyzed a growing conversation around issues of race and racism. These conversations exist alongside ongoing concerns about the lack of attention given to race and racism in the official school curriculum. Given that the field of education is generally located as a space to interrogate why these difficult issues of race in schools and society still persist, this study illustrates how contemporary official school knowledge addresses historical and contemporary issues of race and racism. To do this, we examine how historic acts of racial violence directed toward African Americans are rendered in K–12 school textbooks. Using the theoretical lenses of critical race theory and cultural memory, we explicate how historic acts of racial violence toward African Americans receives minimal and/or distorted attention in most K–12 texts.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyWe examined the knowledge constructed about racial violence and African Americans in the United States. Using the theoretical lenses of critical race theory and cultural memory, we show how the topic of historic acts of racial violence toward African Americans receives minimal and/or distorted attention in most K–12 texts. The purpose of this study is to illustrate that although accounts of racial violence that historically have been excluded from textbooks are now being included, this inclusion matters little if it is presented in a manner that disavows material implications of racial violence on sustained White privilege and entrenched African American inequities.Research DesignThe findings from this study come from a textbook analysis of 19 recent U.S. history social studies textbooks adopted by the state of Texas. Drawing from the tradition of recent critical textbook studies, this study used a literary analysis methodology.Findings/ResultsIn this study, we found that although narratives of racial violence were present throughout the texts, they often rendered acts of violence as the immorality of single actors or “bad men doing bad things.” Additionally, these presentations portray violence as disconnected from the institutional and structural ties that supported and benefited from such acts.Conclusions/RecommendationsThe findings from this study illustrate the limited historical and sociocultural knowledge about race and racism provided to teachers and students through K–12 social studies textbooks. These findings have direct implications for how teachers and students conceptualize and grapple with real issues of race and racism in schools and society. We suggest that the knowledge contained in school texts must go beyond simply representing acts of racism, situating such acts of racism within the discursive and material realities that have shaped the lives of African Americans in the United States.

Bite me: food in popular culture

Chapter 1: Introduction: Pop Culture Drama: Food and Body Politics Chapter 2: Hungry Memories: Food, the Brain and the Consuming Self Chapter 3: Of Breasts and Beasts: Vampires and other Voracious Monsters Chapter 4: Tasty Utopia: Food and Politics in Science Fiction Chapter 5: Quilting the Empty Body: Food and Dieting Chapter 6: Jam, Juice, and Strange Fruit: Edible Black Bodies Chapter 7: Tourism and Taste: Exploring Identities Afterword: A Plea for Pleasure

Strange fruit: why both sides are wrong in the race debate

The debate about race is back - and with a vengeance. In the past, scientific ideas of race reflected political ideas of inferiority and superiority, whereas today it reflects contemporary notions of diversity. Malik challenges both sides of the race debate, controversially revealing that it is not through the scientific study of human differences but through our political obsession with identity and diversity that racial ideas are once more catching fire. Weaving together politics, history, science, and philosophy, Strange Fruit discusses issues ranging from the science of skull measurement to the politics of the Holocaust; from diabetes rates among Hispanics to the fate of the Elgin Marbles; from the genetics of altruism to the struggle for Aboriginal rights; and, from the successes of Human Genome Project to the failures of multiculturalism. Huge in its reach and powerful in its grasp, the book uproots the conventional ways of thinking about race, science, and identity.

Discourses of Desire: Uncovering Discursive Spaces of Race and Gender in Modern Southern Fiction

Discourses of Desire: Uncovering Discursive Spaces of Race and Gender in Modern Southern Fiction Chanté M. Baker (bio) Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy. By Gary M. Ciuba. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007. x + 287 pp. $47.50 cloth. Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women’s Writing, 1920 –1945. By Nghana tamu Lewis. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2007. xiv + 208 pp. $37.95 cloth. These two recent studies make important contributions to our understanding of noted twentieth-century southern authors and their interrogations of southern culture. While the authors’ scholarly concerns are as varied as the works they investigate, Lewis’s and Ciuba’s projects are linked in that both studies illuminate racial and gendered subtexts underlying the works of selected white southern writers. Entitled to the Pedestal examines five “white women of aristocratic southern heritage”: Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith. Nghana Lewis insists that a close reading of the authors’ novels, essays, and personal writings reveals their clear engagement with and endorsement of two myths derived from the gendered and racial politics of “Lost Cause” rhetoric: the myth of white [End Page 156] southern womanhood and plantation mythology. Rightly challenging conventional narratives of both myths as “white-male-constructed and -governed,” Lewis says white southern women’s participation in maintaining a staunch Confederate consciousness before, during, and after the Civil War is a “mythic authority” inherited by the women novelists featured. Lewis insists that Peterkin’s, Bristow’s, Gordon’s, and Cather’s engagements with myths surrounding southern white womanhood and plantation culture are best understood when examined against the backdrop of modernity. Like their white male counterparts who witnessed and contested national changes in the United States between 1920 and 1945, the writers featured in Lewis’s enlightening study struggle with a “fear of change” and embrace myths endemic to the “Old South” to counter an emerging sociopolitical thrust to further unsettle southern culture and to unseat southern women from their mythic pedestals. Lewis convincingly argues that these women writers challenged the myths as constructs of “idealism and ideology” exclusively, and she insists the novelists espoused those same myths in order to assert varied claims to “authorship and entitlement” at the expense of African Americans and poor whites. She contends that Peterkin’s “patronizing” depictions of African Americans and Bristow’s investment in “mythic notions of womanhood, place, and race,” for example, demonstrate the writers’ implicit engagement with ideas derived from white supremacist ideology. Such ideology also shapes Gordon’s southern white female characters, and it influences the construction of “black racial and poor white class proscriptions” in her work. In her comparative reading of Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl and Smith’s Strange Fruit, Lewis cogently notes how Smith’s particular belief in “aristocratic white southern women’s public activism” afforded such women the opportunity to enjoy the spoils of mythic white womanhood while at the same time evaluating the very racial structures that enable its existence. Even on the silver screen, as cleverly suggested by the title of Lewis’s final chapter, “old sites of [southern mythic] authority” continue to have cultural currency in movies such as Bringing Down the House (2003). She skillfully demonstrates that a desire to “lay claim to the mythic pedestal upon which southern women have been positioned” and to “indemnify plantation culture” was as prevalent yesterday as it is today. Gary Ciuba joins Lewis in uncovering hidden racial and gendered subtexts in his provocative study Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction. Heavily influenced by the theoretical positions of [End Page 157] René Girard, Ciuba investigates how the confluence of desire, violence, and divinity results in the “mimetic desire” that he sees appearing explicitly in southern literature. Resulting from this dialectic exchange are scapegoating or “surrogate victimage mechanisms,” which Ciuba reasons are the progeny of “a culture of violence” interacting with “the violence of culture.” He claims the works of Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy illuminate such mechanisms by imagining how desire, violence, and the...

The Bad Secret (review)

Reviewed by: The Bad Secret Merrill Leffler (bio) Judith Harris . The Bad Secret. Louisiana State University Press. For poets as for prose writers, there are taker-outers and putterinners. Less is more, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Thomas Wolfe, implying that Wolfe could stand to eliminate a good many of his sentences. By association, I think of Keats's advice to Shelley, "Load every rift of your subject with ore," and more than a century later W. C. Williams's advice to a young poet, "Don't hammer things down with a maul . . . just let it touch the subject." Are "load every rift" and "just let it touch"—or taker-outers and putter-inners—mutually exclusive? This is a rhetorical question that leads me to Judith Harris's The Bad Secret. In her best poems, Harris offers a rich metaphoric ore while remaining spare in her methods and in the pacing of her lines. Her subjects themselves are not astonishing; they often have to do with what has been a modern and contemporary mode: memory and what it calls up with mother, father, sisters, and those seemingly innocent episodes that for the poet are pregnant with more than are dreamt of in the minds of mere mortals. The mode often feels worn out to me, this going back and back to prospect for epiphany. "Weave a circle round him thrice / For he on honey-dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of paradise." After so many years of this, it's hard to bring off these poems with freshness, though if it's done, they can be tremendously evocative—not for their originality but for "what oft was said but ne'er so well expressed." These remarks are to help characterize Harris's poetry—they are no backhanded compliment. Her poems are compelling because of the way diction and imagery [End Page 182] work to clarify feeling—even if you don't believe that poems reflect feelings but create them in the process of writing—in the most exacting ways. Precision is the word I keep thinking of. I've heard Harris read from The Bad Secret twice, once at Catholic University and then at the Library of Congress. In her opening remarks and between poems, she referred to the darkness of many of them apologetically, in case they should bring us down or depress us. Such remarks divert us from the poems as poems. They are not downers—quite the opposite! Listening to them and then reading The Bad Secret, I felt exhilaration. Maybe I come to them with the ear of a mournful Jew who has a high threshold for depression. After all these are poems—they are not Treblinka or Baghdad or Darfur or any of a hundred brutal places. The subjects may be dark: the self's wounds, departure, sorrow, death. But the poems hold up their dark subjects to the light of language that is often fresh in imagery and diction. Think of blues music and how we can feel the grief and sorrow riving into us and be grateful for, if not in thrall, holding on for comfort and pleasures simultaneously. And why? Well, who can really explain the exquisite grief of Billie Holliday's "Strange Fruit," to give one lone example. In trying to get at or understand the distinctiveness of Harris's voice, I tried a small editing exercise on one of them, "Still Waltz." Here's my edited version. Against an empty skyThe elm is feathered with gold.On the dark avenue, people pass. Through the lit windows,Empty stairwells and still pianos.Sparrows. The moon. Solitude. In the winter to comeThe earth will turn its cheekAnd bear up against the cold. My reduction is a fair Sung- or Tang-like poem. Now here's the poem as it appears in The Bad Secret (which not so incidentally is a beautiful book from Louisiana State University Press in its design and cover art, a complement, and compliment, to the poetry.) Against an empty skyThe elm is feathered with goldlike some apparent wing.On the dark avenue, people pass,lifting their collars. Through the lit windows,Empty...

Books for Summer Reading

One of the attractions of school life is the yearly pause that summer brings. But while that pause gives educators a chance to relax and recover from the day-to-day demands of the school year, it doesn't have to mean idleness. Indeed, for educators, summer is the best time of the year for what we would call independent if we were our own students. In this year's edition of the Kappan's annual Books for Summer Reading, Roger Soder has enlisted some book-loving friends to offer an assortment of ideas for using those lazy summer days to good purpose. Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer breaks the mold of South Africa's racial prejudice in My Son's Story (Penguin, 1991). Gordimer's character development and attention to detail are classic achievements in this account of the evolution of a family in the midst of a revolution. Her capacity to write from multiple perspectives- male or female, black or white - is singular. For a compelling look at the complexity of race relations closer to home, try Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit (1944; Harvest/HBJ, 1992). Smith writes with sheer power of the conflicts arising from differences in race, class, gender, generation, and education. And, true to life, she leaves readers in the middle of conflict, reminding themselves that this story is not contemporary. An unusual and extraordinarily inventive book, The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson (Ivy Books, 1991), follows a strong, gothic tradition of inviting the reader to embrace fear - in this case the fear of true passion and obsession. With a spareness that belies its complexity, this beautifully written tale is as bizarre as a Flannery O'Connor short story and as unusual as Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons. Because it is both genuine and unsentimental, this book took some courage for a contemporary author to write. Brief, brutally honest, and with a blast of irony, Josephine Hart's Damage (Ivy Books, 1991) demonstrates how members of a family that looks quite normal from the outside can unwittingly contrive to injure one another. Using descriptions that border on the spooky, Hart depicts a hero who avoids pain - and so, much of life itself - until a catalytic personality acts on his own and his family's complacence. Hart's sparse prose, a strange combination of the poetic and the clinical, pulls readers along at a fast clip as she seeks a broader view of this landscape of the soul. A classic to be savored like a fine meal is George Eliot's Middlemarch (1874; Norton, 1977). Eliot charts in exquisite detail the pulsing of 19th-century English provincial society, replete with humor and pathos. An imposing piece of work, Middlemarch challenges modern readers but rewards them with an understanding of times past that helps put today's moral questions in perspective. - Sargassa Literatae, a Washington, D.C., reading group whose members are Lynn Barnett, Adell Blankenbaker, Laura Casal, Francie Gilman, Sharon Givens, Bev Hitchins, Mary Jane Klocke, and Marilyn Shorr. At a recent family dinner, my sister, who is deaf and teaches American Sign Language at Gallaudet University, was asked if she would consider having a cochlear implant. Despite all our attempts to convince her of the benefits of hearing, she was adamant not only in her disdain for such a device, but also in her preference for remaining deaf - a perspective difficult for the hearing to grasp. She suggested that we all read The Mask of Benevolence (Knopf, 1992), by Harlan Lane, to enlighten ourselves about her view of cochlear implants. The book provides an in-depth and compelling view of deafness - its history, culture, and politics. Most important, Lane shows how the language and culture of the deaf minority in our society are actively suppressed by the hearing majority - what Lane refers to as the audist establishment - primarily for its own benefit. Arguing against the prevalent view that deaf people are disabled, Lane, a hearing psychologist, makes the cogent argument that the deaf community is both a cultural and a linguistic minority with its own history, heroes, and legitimate language. …

Carson McCullers and Lillian Smith : The Intersections of Gender and Race in the Jim Crow South

Carson McCullers and Lillian Smith openly rejected a false conception of loyalty to fantasies like southern tradition or white supremacy, a loyalty that veiled a persistent lack of self-analysis. They exposed the cracks in the South’s pretended “unity” and homogeneity and criticized the self-destructive resistance to acknowledge that, as a socially constructed category, race is linked to relations of power and anticipated the instability of racial categorization that would be underscored by historical and scientific research later in their century. These two southern women writers opposed the insistence of their culture on racial purity as vehemently as its demands for rigid sexual definition and its suppression of any deviant form of sexuality. The characters in their fiction are victims of a dichotomic culture that resists the acknowledgement that black and white have always been as inextricably linked as male and female.In Killers of the Dream and Strange Fruit, Lillian Smith showed the interactions of racial and sexual segregation, which she saw as parallel emblems of the South’s cultural schizophrenia. She was one of the first to detect the psychosexual damage inflicted on southern women by the racial discourse, and established a most interesting parallel between the segregated parts of the female body and the segregated spaces of any southern locality. Like any system of differentiation, segregation shapes those it privileges as well as those it oppresses. Excluded from the white parameters of virtue and even from the condition of womanhood, the black woman’s body became the sexual prey of the white man who could not demand sexual satisfaction from his “pure” wife. The culture of segregation privileged the white woman but it also made her powerless; the very conventions which “protected” her deprived her of contact with physicality and locked her into bodilessness.

Jean Toomer's Cane and the Erotics of Mourning

Jean Toomer's Cane and the Erotics of Mourning Jennifer D. Williams (bio) In a 1924 review essay titled "The Younger Literary Movement," W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke praise Jean Toomer for his daring portrayal of black sexuality in Cane. They proclaim him the first black writer to challenge the conventions of black genteel literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and its endorsement of Victorian notions of purity, chastity, and domesticity.1 While these writers of genteel literature sought to restore dignity to black bodies discursively assaulted in mainstream news and literary organs, the ideology of respectability upheld by these texts, as well as the surveillance and policing that reinforced this ideology socially, imposed new forms of sexual repression.2 By deviating from these conventions, Toomer's work, according to the review, advances a necessary shift in black arts and letters. That Toomer's depiction of sexually transgressive women marks a literary achievement is certain. However, Du Bois and Locke's serial gloss of these women resembles a seraglio: Here is Karintha, an innocent prostitute; Becky, a fallen white woman; Carma, a tender Amazon of unbridled desire; Fern, an unconscious wanton; Esther, a woman who looks age and bastardy in the face and flees in despair; Louise with a white and black lover; [End Page 87] Avey, unfeeling and immoral; and Doris, the cheap chorus girl. These are [Toomer's] women, painted with a frankness that is going to make his black readers shrink and criticize; and yet they are done with a certain splendid careless truth. (289) Locke and Du Bois imply that liberating "the colored world" from repressed sexual mores can be achieved through liberating black women's bodies. By ascribing an element of realism and "truth" to Toomer's depictions, these authors bestow a certain degree of authenticity to an unbridled black female sexuality.3 Moreover, the review fails to account for the overlap of desire and loss that occurs on the bodies of black women in Cane.4 Toomer's representations of black women's sexuality neither replicate the exotic primitivism of the Jazz Age nor the nostalgic return of the romantic imagination. Rather, acts of sexual union and conception in Cane are marked again and again by traumatic history. I want to intervene at that critical crossroads in Cane, where sexuality and loss intersect at the black female body. I call this coupling of desire and loss an "erotics of mourning" and regard Cane as an embodied narrative of a passing era associated with the trauma of slavery. Materializing this passing era in song and/as female embodiment, Cane accentuates the role of black female sexuality in modern constructions of blackness. Moreover, Toomer connects anxieties around racial and cultural continuity generated by modernity to the regulation of black female desire. In "Love and Loss: An Elegy," George E. Haggerty attributes an erotics of mourning to the pastoral elegy, and specifically to the male homo-eroticism that is common to the elegy form. I also find the elegiac connotation of the erotics of mourning suggestive for considering Toomer's use of the landscape of black female sexuality to uncover a history of racial trauma. Yet, Toomer reworks the elegy —as well as its thematic preoccupations with sex and death —and makes it relevant to an African American historical context of slavery, lynching, and migration. In the tradition of the pastoral elegy, Toomer laments modernity's corruption of nature and of folk aesthetics. At the same time, his critique of modernity retains critical ambivalence. He mourns a vanishing "folk spirit" without romanticizing it and attends to the potentially destructive elements of modernity without insisting upon a return to a simpler past. Since the South for African Americans functions as a site of trauma as well as a symbolic homeland, black pastoralists tend to be less nostalgic than their Anglo American counterparts.5 Evoking Billie Holiday's performance of "Strange Fruit," for instance, Farah Jasmine Griffin [End Page 88] recounts, "[Holiday's] portrayal of the naturally beautiful 'pastoral South,' marred by the realities of burning black bodies, gives meaning and emotion to the descriptions written by [black] novelists" (15). Like Holiday, Toomer...