Twentieth-century African American Literature Research Articles

Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity

Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity

That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing by Julia S. Charles

Reviewed by: That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing by Julia S. Charles Tyler Sperrazza That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing. By Julia S. Charles. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 224. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5957-2; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5956-5.) The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in scholarly inquiry around the subject of racial passing. The context of the current historical moment coupled with viral discussions of cultural appropriation and "blackfishing" brings a sense of urgency to understanding the long history of passing and its function in the U.S. context. Julia S. Charles's That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing offers a perspective on this phenomenon that places performance at the heart of the racial passing experience. Charles calls for a rejection of previous scholarly treatments of passing that foreground experiences of loss among those who pass and instead argues for a focus on the opportunities that performing race offered to certain mixed-race African American citizens. Charles presents a book of theory and philosophy on racial passing meant to inform the ways scholars of African American literature and media studies can make sense of mixed-race and passing characters throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. The title of Charles's book also serves as its main theoretical construction. "That Middle World" is a location that Charles defines as an interstitial and metaphysical space occupied by mixed-race characters that becomes the "location of culture and identity for so-called mulattoes in African American fiction" (p. 22). This space both creates and destroys boundaries between Black and white and offers a means of interpreting passing African Americans' experiences as a constant process of both making and crossing borders in a liminal space free of the "inadequate Black-white racial binary" (p. 40). Throughout the central chapters of the book, Charles adroitly moves between the historical lives and contexts of African American authors and the worlds their characters inhabit. Many of her subjects—Charles W. Chesnutt being central—were themselves mixed-race and able to navigate the boundaries of That Middle World in their everyday lives. Charles's interweaving of the historical and the literary is a welcome addition to this growing field of passing studies. The subjects of Charles's chapters will be familiar to readers with interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literature. However, she effectively breathes new critical life into texts that are often central to analyses of racial passing, such as Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). Charles analyzes these texts with an eye on both the written words and their authors in a way that combines the best tools of historiography, literary criticism, and performance theory. She also seeks to [End Page 164] add to the growing movement of scholars to recalibrate our view of African American literary production between the 1860s and 1930s toward regions beyond Harlem. Charles offers the conveniently termed "New Negro Renaissance" as a way of highlighting this important temporal shift, and readers who study this particular era could be well served in adding that phrase to their lexicon (p. 16). Charles has presented a fascinating new take on the phenomenon of racial passing during a particular moment in U.S. history. She makes connections between the contexts of historical authors and their writings, and how the lessons gleaned from her theoretical construction of That Middle World can have real interpretive power in our present moment. The book's epilogue, "That Rachel Dolezal," does just that by placing the theory of That Middle World into our contemporary moment and offering new perspectives on the ways racial performance continues to function in our world. This book is a must-read for anyone studying the politics of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tyler Sperrazza University of New Haven Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Review of Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man by Joshua Bennett (Harvard University Press)

Reading a robust archive of twentieth and twenty-first century African-American literature, Joshua Bennett's Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man lays the foundations for rethinking kinship and relation between humans and animals.

When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

“Split by the Moonlight”: Beethoven and the Racial Sublime in African American Literature

AbstractAs Nathan Waddell has recently argued of the literary modernists whose aesthetic incorporation of the Beethovenian legend complicates the dominant view of modernism as an antitraditionalist enterprise, Ludwig van Beethoven’s music has in fact left a more significant and complicated mark on African American literature relating to the sublime properties of his musical aesthetic than has previously been recognized. As a point of departure, I apply Michael J. Shapiro’s definition of the racial sublime as a confrontation with the “still vast oppressive structure that imperils black lives” to the setting of twentieth-century African American literature, where Beethoven’s Romantic sublime often stands in for the racial sublime. This transference, I argue, is not an expression of the artist’s repressed instinctual conflict, the mere sublimation of their devotion to “white” culture and the cult of genius, as Amiri Baraka once suggested. Rather, Beethoven’s music formed a persistent and powerful political allegory of the racial sublime for many prominent twentieth-century authors in their literary works, where the sublime constitutes a sublimation of direct forms of power into a range of aesthetic experiences. This can be observed in the Beethovenian ekphrasis featured in prose works by James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison—four writers whose works have also been considered indebted to blues and jazz musical influences and who approach the racial sublime not through language but by appealing to music’s nonsignifying suggestiveness, in order to capture the intensities that radiate out of these encounters. As this article reveals, their allegorical uses for Beethoven are not unitary. The forcefield of the racial sublime is registered allegorically through the performative sublime of Sonata “Pathétique” in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); the sublime melancholy of the “Moonlight” Sonata in Hughes’s tragic short story “Home” (1934); the spiritual sublime of Beethoven’s piano concerti and the Ninth Symphony in Baldwin’s short story “Previous Condition” (1948); and the heroic sublime of the Fifth Symphony in Ellison’s bildungsroman Invisible Man (1952).

ПОЕТ ЯК КРИТИК: ЕЛІЗАБЕТ АЛЕКСАНДЕР ПРО КЛАСИКІВ АФРО-АМЕРИКАНСЬКОЇ ЛІТЕРАТУРИ

У статті розглядається есеїстичний доробок сучасної афро-американ-ської поетеси Елізабет Александер, яка у 2000-х роках виступила як лі-тературний критик, видавши збірки «The Black Interior» (2004) та «The Power and Possibility» (2007), і як редактор книги «The Essential Gwendo-lyn Brooks» (2005). Наукова новизна розвідки полягає у тому, що вперше у вітчизняній американістиці розглядається есеїстика Елізабет Александер у світлі «чорних»/афро-американських студій. Досліджуються кл`v bnmbvczючові проблеми нехудожнього доробку письменниці: своєрідність мистецтва та літератури афро-американців, «чорного» фемінізму, расизму, афро-амери-канської ідентичності. У збірці «The Power and Possibility» письменниця представляє свій погляд на сучасну афро-американську культуру, зосеред-жуючи аналіз на сферах літератури, кінематографу, малярства та музики. Іконічними фігурами, про творчість яких розмірковує Елізабет Александер, стають Пол Лоренс Данбар, Гвендолін Брукс, Ленгстон Хьюз, Ріта Дав, Джун Джордан, Люсіль Кліфтон тощо. Зроблено висновок про новаторство літературно-критичного доробку письменниці, що полягає не лише у ви-вченні творчості митців афро-американців, але й їх діяльності з популяри-зації «чорної» естетики, в дослідженні тематики, літературних технік «чор-ного» мистецтва (Black Arts aesthetics) та аналізі ідей «чорного» фемінізму.

Equality Archive

Research Article| July 01 2017 Equality Archive: Open Educational Resources as Feminist Praxis http://equalityarchive.com/ Shelly Eversley, Shelly Eversley Shelly Eversley teaches literature, feminism, and black studies at Baruch College, the City University of New York, where she is an associate professor of English. She is the founder of Equality Archive and author of The “Real” Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth Century African American Literature (Routledge, 2004) as well as several essays on literature, race, and culture. She is the editor of “The Sexual Body” and “The 1970s,” both special issues of WSQ, a journal by the Feminist Press. She is at work on a new book titled The Practice of Blackness, or Integration's Discontents in Postwar African American Literature. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Laurie Hurson Laurie Hurson Laurie Hurson is a PhD candidate in environmental psychology at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is the architect of Equality Archive. She works in instructional technology and faculty development as an instructional technology fellow at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY, and as a hybrid coordinator at Baruch College, CUNY. She is the coordinator for planning and development for OpenCUNY.org, a student-run, open-source, academic, participatory digital medium for the CUNY Graduate Center community. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2017) 3 (3): 154–158. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2017.3.3.154 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Shelly Eversley, Laurie Hurson; Equality Archive: Open Educational Resources as Feminist Praxis http://equalityarchive.com/. Feminist Media Histories 1 July 2017; 3 (3): 154–158. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2017.3.3.154 Download citation file: Ris (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 All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search Keywords: assemblage, feminist praxis, intersectionality, open educational resource (OER) The big ambition of Equality Archive is to digitally present multidimensional issues, people, and history relevant to feminist thought and action in the United States.1 As an Open Education Resource (OER), it blurs genre—analog and digital, scholarly and popular, theory and practice—to offer a free and reliable source of knowledge and activist opportunities for a generation trained to seek information via Google and YouTube. Equality Archive's ongoing project is responsively built with open-source technology and adheres to the principles of fair use. Each entry is composed by a feminist professor, artist, or activist and originally peer reviewed by colleagues at the Feminist Press, now peer reviewed by its own collective of feminist specialists. The content created by Equality Archive contributors is licensed under Creative Commons, which allows authors and creators to retain some rights to their work while releasing the content to the public domain so... You do not currently have access to this content.

Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature by Jason Frydman

382 CLA JOURNAL Frydman, Jason. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 184 pp. ISBN: 9780813935737. Paperback: $24.50. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature explains the rationale for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1827 statement that “[n]ational literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature [Weltliteratur] is at hand” (1). In the introduction, Jason Frydman uses Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic periodization” to offer an alternative narrative of world literary history that promotes “a diasporic idea of Africa before European hegemony, extending to our own contemporary moment through the works of Du Bois, Hurston, Carpentier, Walcott, Condé, and Morrison” (7-8). Frydman’s subsequent examination of the interplay among European, African American, and Caribbean authors who historically have been analyzed within different global, national, and regional frameworks is as important for the study of world literature as it is for the study of African diaspora literature, because it decenters Europe’s role in world literature, destabilizes temporal narratives of literary progress, and deconstructs reemerging binary oppositions in contemporary literary criticism. In Sounding the Break, Frydman reconsiders African American and Caribbean authors’ diverse twentieth-century literature in a world literary context. While examining early to mid-twentieth-century literature in chapters one through three, Frydman demonstrates Du Bois’s appreciation of the classics, deconstructs oral/textual binaries in Hurston’s writing, and examines Carpentier’s attempts to “break [the] Latin American dependency on European literary trends” (66). In chapters four through six on mid-to-late twentieth-century literature, Frydman emphasizes Walcott’s movement across theoretical binaries like “‘African/ European’”and“‘colonial/anticolonial’”(Dash qtd. in Frydman 92), maps Condé’s “material involvement with world narrative systems” (102), and reconsiders Morrison’s “African American vernacular culture as one node rhizomatically linked to a sprawling global array” (131). At times, Sounding the Break’s loosely chronological structure and reiteration of historical narratives and oppositional binaries that have been used to privilege Europe over Africa seem to go against the grain of Frydman’s broader theoretical aims to more fully recognize the “African diasporic textuality” of “world literature’s longue dureé” (142); however, Frydman’s nuanced comparative analyses expose significant transatlantic connections among European, African American, and Caribbean authors and genres, such as Du Bois’s modernist aesthetics, Carpentier’s baroque techniques, and Condé’s “gothic elements” (113). More specifically, the examination of Goethe’s and Du Bois’s mutual appreciation of the classics emphasizes world literature’s earlier African origins and diasporicroutes. InTheNegro(1915),DuBoisrepresentsAfricaasthe“foundation” of the classics (25), and his integration of “classical culture” (36), such as in The Book Reviews CLA JOURNAL 383 Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), unravels perceived differences between “AngloAmerican ” and “Afro-American” modernisms (39). After demonstrating world literature’s“longue durée,”such as Africa’s earlier and more foundational roles, and the modernist overlap among twentieth-century European and American authors, Frydman reconsiders oppositional binaries that reappear in literary criticism of twentieth-century African American and Caribbean literature (12). The comparative analyses of diverse twentieth-century texts that traditionally havebeenexaminedwithinAfricanAmericanandCaribbeanliterarycontextsrather than world literary contexts meaningfully deconstruct unevenly valued binaries that have been associated with Africa and Europe, such as orality and textuality. Relevant examples of twentieth-century African American and Caribbean literature’s diasporic routes and hybrid networks include the simultaneous orality and textuality of the Pentateuch in Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) and the focus on “Afro-Caribbean culture”as a means to“displace Europe as the privileged center of perceptual and artistic authority” in Carpentier’s Bildungsroman, ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1933) (65). The fusion of folk and elite discourses in Walcott’s play, The Sea at Dauphin (1954), and the destabilization of mythical and historical binaries vis-àvis criticism of the griot in Condé’s Ségou (1984-85) also are notable examples. SoundingtheBreakinsightfullytracesworldliterature’sevolvinghistoriography and African American and Caribbean literature’s global origins, intertexts, and networks. In the conclusion, Frydman explains the importance of recognizing the global intertextuality of African American and Caribbean literature, even if texts resist a global context, such as in Morrison’s novels. By reconsidering...

When the Walls Came Down

When the Walls Came Down

F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature by William J. Maxwell

Reviewed by: F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature by William J. Maxwell Tamara Slankard William J. Maxwell. F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. xiv + 367 pp. Black writers were targeted by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI for over fifty years in a systematic attempt to undermine their cultural influence and to paralyze racial equality movements as a result. William J. Maxwell’s F.B. Eyes lays out an airtight case against the Bureau and Hoover’s G-Men, demonstrating how writers like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka were spied on, surveilled, and harassed throughout their careers. Maxwell examines nearly 14,000 pages of FBI files on some of the most significant writers of twentieth-century African American literature to show how the “Hoover boys … aimed to make a national public enemy of the Harlem Renaissance” (29). He also argues that this campaign of destruction was only partially successful. Undoubtedly, countless “writers and works were lost” to covert modes of censorship and overt, strong-arm tactics of “the FBI’s culture war on African American letters” (218), but many others survived to tell the tale in more or less thinly veiled ways. Afro-modernist writers were well aware of the gaze always on them, and they engaged with the censor actively and sometimes openly. Maxwell argues convincingly that at the core of Hoover’s practices was not only a desire for “nationwide public approval” (29) but also a warped recognition of the power of literature to influence and shape the national consciousness. As his “librarian-pirates” set to work seizing “entire institutional libraries” during the Hoover Raids (50) and his G-Men kept close tabs on the comings and goings of Afro-modernist writers, Hoover put many more agents to the task of “ghostreading” every shred of African American writing they could get their gloved hands on—before publication, in many instances—from 1919 to 1972. The sum total of these practices was meant to garner “knowledge of all published threats to the state, especially threats to the state of the Bureau’s reputation,” an agenda Maxwell calls “Total [End Page 568] Literary Awareness” (100). But at the height of the Black Power and Black Arts era, Bureau practices extended beyond the acquisition of knowledge and even beyond duplicitous, state-sponsored violence. None of these tactics satisfied what Maxwell contends was Hoover’s and the FBI’s “hunger to speak the foe’s literary language” (113). And so the Bureau undertook a kind of twisted ghostwriting, which Maxwell aptly calls “blackface minstrelsy’s literary afterlife” (4). By appropriating and adulterating “Black Nationalist vernaculars,” Maxwell explains, “[d]ozens of G-Men stole time from the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s to counterfeit … hundreds of poems, letters, comics, political platforms, and at least one entire newspaper” (113). In pen-mightier-than-sword fashion, this phony genre not only garnered clout for “Hooverite antiradicalism inside FBI headquarters,” Maxwell argues, but for much of the twentieth century it also posed a genuine threat to literary expression and to social justice (124). F.B. Eyes is more than just a historical laundry list of the FBI’s racist practices. Perhaps two of its most compelling assertions are these: first, that the power of Hoover’s FBI was tied directly to his ruthless agenda of containment for African American literature and its writers and, second, that the success of this agenda was tied directly to the “model citizen’s” willingness to see Hoover as a literary as well as a moral authority. Maxwell illustrates just how effectively the Bureau was able to couple racism with anti-Communism in the minds of midcentury white Americans and just how easily author and speaker could be elided so that any attempt at creative criticism of the Man automatically meant the author was guilty of at least literary treason. Hoover’s attack on African American literature happened with the aid of the 1940 Smith Act, which made it criminal merely to express antigovernment sentiments. It also happened right under the nose of...

The Literary Theory of American Afro-centrism

The Literary Theory of American Afro-centrism Xiomara Santamarina (bio) For those new to Henry Louis Gates’s landmark monograph, the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of The Signifying Monkey offers a bewildering editorial apparatus. The anniversary edition includes two prefaces, one original and one new; an original introduction and a new one; and finally, an epilogue—really an imprimatur—by W. J. T. Mitchell, the editor of Critical Inquiry, a journal for the academy’s all-stars. If this overdetermined layering of commentary doesn’t offer an example of “signifyin(g)” it’s hard to see what does. Representing classic Gates virtuoso volubility, the editorial material ranges across many genres: a conversion narrative, a bildungsroman, a memoir of institutional enterprise, and an aesthetic manifesto. Planting his explorer flag with zeal and conviction, Gates reaches the heights not of the North Pole but of formalist race theory. Signifying Monkey broke new ground when it appeared in 1988. It made visible a wide historical range of early, unknown texts by African American authors along with extensive readings of more familiar authors, like Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. Gates’s linking of early authors to modern authors was highly generative: building on the earlier work on slave narratives by Frances Smith Foster, Robert Step-toe, and others, he challenged the omission of nineteenth-century texts from discussions of black literature by putting these in conversation with twentieth-century African American literature and theory. In so doing, Gates sought to carve a new route in literary criticism, intending to sail clear of the Scylla and Charybdis of competing Eurocentrist and Afro-centrist literary theories of race difference. The “blackness of black texts” he asserted, was indigenous to and constitutive of a “tradition” anchored in the vernacular of black wordplay, parody, and critique known as “Signifyin(g)” (132). By yoking a distinct, black vernacular to then-prominent deconstruction theory Gates appeared to bridge the divide that kept black [End Page 855] literary theory invisible to the academy at large. If theory, according to Jonathan Culler, can be described as “[the] pugnacious critique of common sense” (4), signifying appeared to be a classic application of the practice. But Gates’s effort to theorize black authors’ Bloomian anxiety about earlier African American texts points tellingly to his own anxiety about his role during the prominence of critical literary theory in the 1980s and ’90s. As he recalls about the institutional culture of English departments at that time, “Our burden was that we had to represent the tradition, in our writings and in our persons, in our comportment and in our demeanor, as members of the faculties of English and American studies departments, to show skeptics that ‘our’ literature was just as complex as theirs, the literature that had been created by white males” (xiv). This imperative to personally represent the race—as “complex,” no less—extended to the conditions of entry for the study of black literature. If African American literature was devalued and seen as transparent, it wasn’t because the methods and ideologies of literary study in the academy were founded in structures of white race privilege (and class); Gates attributed the invisibility of a black literary tradition to a “lack of sophisticated scholarly attention to it” (xxii). His was a rectifying effort “to lift the discourse of Signifyin(g) from the vernacular to the discourse of literary criticism” (xxi). With this formulation Gates invoked a key metaphor from the late nineteenth-century black elite ideology of “uplift” that was the backbone of a middle-class black Talented Tenth’s “civilizing mission” (Gaines 14). Notwithstanding these conservative class politics it did appear that African American literary critics had to be inside the academy in order for black literature to be respected. As to his motivation, in his new introduction Gates recalls wondering “if [Africans] had been theorizing about their aesthetic practices and principles all along, as Europeans had” (xi). Notwithstanding the discovery of an African trope of origin narrativized outside of Western time, the search for a “signifying” trope remained ironically anchored to an Anglo-European consensus that inescapably figured African Americanist theory in relation to its belatedness. Today we could describe...

Claude McKay’s Road to Catholicism

I found it not in years of Unbelief In science stirring life like budding trees, In Revolution like a dazzling thief, Oh, shall I find it on my bended knees? —Claude McKay, Truth Claude McKay's seemingly sudden conversion to Catholicism, his self-proclaimed right turn in the mid-1940s, has puzzled literary and political admirers for over half a century. How could a leading light of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, one of the most militant black voices of twentieth-century African American literature, suddenly join one of the most hierarchical and powerful organizations in the world, not just a church but the Church, and not a black church but the Catholic Church? This conversion is all the more surprising because McKay had, throughout his life, so stubbornly maintained his radical individuality as he engaged with concentrated intensity in the social movements around him. Because he had refused to be rooted to any one place or worldview, he had experienced firsthand the most important and diverse movements of his own time, and anticipated many of the most important ideas to come out of twentieth-century black life. He was a student, albeit briefly, of agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute; already a West Indian migrant, he followed the Great Migration of black folk to the North and expressed in writing the tragicomedy of the new black metropolis, Harlem; he recognized, earlier than almost any Harlem intellectual of note, the significance and inner hopes of the Gar- vey Movement and attempted, alongside the distinctive African Blood Brotherhood, to create dialogue between the diasporic nationalism of the Garveyites and the socialism of the white-dominated American Left; a poet of the people, he found friends across the color-line in the increasingly radical movements of his time, briefly signing on to the 100,000-strong International Workers of the World in New York, working for women's suffrage and labor rights with Sylvia Pankhurst in London, and later becoming co-editor of the radical-bohemian newspaper, The Liberator; he traveled to Russia to participate in the historic debates following the 1917 Russian Revolution; and, in the meanwhile, wrote the poetry, novels, and memoirs that have made him one of the most well-known and influential black writers of all time. Given this illustrious life of intellectual and literary engagement, critics have been wary, to say the least, of McKay's final conversion to Catholicism, suspecting him of an intellectual abdication or exhausted rejection of his nomadic and radical youth. This is perhaps why scholars have either ignored or dismissed his unusual and fascinating years as a Catholic,

“Black Rage” And “Useless Pain”: Affect, Ambivalence, and Identity After King

This essay explores the psychic dimensions of post-civil rights black representation. I ask, what kinds of desire and identification, what vision of history and futurity, and what lost objects and forms of grief, drive nationalist approaches to black literature? In turn, what affective forces animate black literary and critical texts that are positioned, by will or by force, outside or against the contemporary black canon? I address these questions through analyses of two divergent narratives of the civil rights era loss of black leadership. I contend that this loss—marked most explicitly by the sixties’ infamous succession of political assassinations— functions as a crisis moment for black representation in both politics and culture. The stories that are told about this moment of rupture in turn work to imagine and concretize vying representational possibilities for a black present and future. In this essay, I juxtapose black nationalist responses to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination alongside Andrea Lee’s controversial novella Sarah Phillips, to explore how contemporary representations of blackness, imbued with the civil rights movement’s revenants of political longing and loss, are achieved, invoked, and disputed in late twentieth-century African American literature.

"Obsidian Mine": The Psychic Aftermath of Slavery

Oh, yes, I had my bad dreams. I had my good ones, too. Both required critique. He [the analysand] must find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his illness. His illness itself must … become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived. In the foundational article “All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race” (1996), Hortense Spillers argues “that the psychoanalytic object, subject, subjectivity now constitute the missing layer of hermeneutic/interpretive projects of an entire generation of black intellectuals now at work” (377). A mere handful of African-American writers serve as the exceptions that prove this rule, and the experimental science fiction and fantasy writer Samuel R. Delany is foremost among them. As both literary practitioner and critic, Delany has deeply considered the possibilities and the limitations of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual framework and as a means of psychic repair for black and/or queer subjects in the late-twentieth century. However, because Delany's oeuvre has often been analyzed outside the context of African-American literary and cultural studies, the implications of his engagement with and critique of psychoanalytic theory for black cultural discourse have not heretofore been explored. Representing psyches and, more specifically, sexualities damaged through racialized and gendered forms of oppression has been one of the most significant projects of twentieth-century African-American literature, at least since W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The internal operation of psychic recovery—the means by which psychological repair might be accomplished—takes up much less space within black American literature, and when the process of recovery has been represented, spiritual and cultural communion are, more often than not, the paths to psychic health.1 Thus, Delany's deployment of psychoanalytic practices of narrative healing, coupled with his critique of the homophobic orientation of much psychoanalytic theory, render his Return to Nevèrÿon series the most thorough engagement with psychoanalysis within African-American fiction since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952).2

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the Literary Imagination

Reviewed by: Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the Literary Imagination David Green (bio) Scott, Darieck . Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the Literary Imagination. New York: New York UP, 2010. For scholars interested in fresh approaches to the study of race, gender, and sexuality, Darieck Scott's brilliantly written Extravagant Abjection is mandatory. Scott provides an effective model to approach the cultural and historical relationships that firmly situate/ [End Page 815] define/separate African American studies, queer studies, history, and literary theory as interdependent fields of study. Extravagant Abjection argues that by historicizing the relationship between blackness and abjection we find not a history of shame, defeat, or humiliation that must be resisted, but instead, by embracing these histories, we are endowed with "counterintuitive power." Counterintuitive power reinterprets Black Power (and?) cultural nationalism through a lens of sexual freedom. Scott finds that in their efforts to resist white hegemony and to affirm black pride, leaders of the Black Power Movement utilized cultural nationalism that precluded sexual freedom. Counterintuitive power is, Scott writes, "that which is not-power according to the ego-dependent, ego-centric (and masculine and white) 'I' definitions we have of power" (23). Thus, counterintuitive Black Power at once encompasses racial, political, national, psychic, cultural, and sexual sovereignty from the hegemonic, imperial, and colonial West. Scott's methodology demands that we see historical excavation and literature as necessary when studying both blackness and sexuality. As Scott writes in the introduction: My aim here is not to seek the revelations of history but to emphasize that key component of the work of historical excavation that involves the construction of the past: that is, to work imaginatively with—and rework, and work over, and maybe, if we are lucky, work through—the material that history provides (10). Legitimizing himself as a historian is not Scott's goal. Scott is a literary theorist who employs historical method to demonstrate, especially in the Americas, how race and sexuality are mutually constitutive. "Examining queer blackness" Scott avers, provides "opportunities to consider how the history that produces blackness is a sexual history" (8). Here, Scott is in direct conversation with Kathryn Bond Stockton's Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets Queer (2006). In her text, Stockton treats blackness and sexuality as discrete categories of analysis and she links the two through debasement. Such a move, Scott asserts, assumes a historical difference between race and sexuality; and this assumption further establishes an exclusionary boundary between race and sexuality as ontological subject formations (16). Scott's critical optic of analysis is the rape of black men in canonical twentieth-century African American literature. Throughout the text, Scott signals penetration not as a sign of weakness and passivity but as a source of power and agency. In chapter 1, "Fanon's Muscle: Black Power Revisited," Scott articulates the book's theoretical framework. By mining and juxtaposing Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1952) alongside Black Power rhetoric of cultural nationalism, Scott finds that black radical thought often champions ideas of freedom that resist the history of pain endured by enslaved blacks. The practice of forgetting is not ahistoric. Due to the social construction of blackness through a process that Fanon theorizes as "sociogenesis," blackness is psychologically internalized and racially demarcated as the social Other. In Scott's reading of Fanon's theory, sociogenesis is a "psychoanalytic and phenomenological rendering of the cultural construction of blackness" as humiliation and defeat (38). According to Scott, internalizing blackness as Other resulted in Fanon and Black Power leaders viewing defeat [End Page 816] as "to be defeated" (72). This view robs Africans, African Americans and (post) Colonial suffering bodies of their agency and subtle strategies of resistance to colonial subjugation. Defeat, Scott insists, must be "worked with and worked through" if obtaining freedom is the goal for black radical intellectuals and current "inheritors" of the black experience. In his efforts to work with and "through defeat," Scott deploys Fanon's metaphorical "muscle tension" to interpret how colonized subjects perform certain "powers in the midst of debility" (64). As Scott explains: "Muscle tension in Fanon is a state of death...

African American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century South

Two recent monographs argue that nineteenthand early twentieth-century African American literature works to represent and imagine black identity in ways heretofore unrecognized. In Fugitive Vi sion, Michael Chaney considers how antebellum African American au thors from the South—who had been or had remained enslaved—-turn to the visual to ruminate on the relationship of racial blackness to sen sory knowledge. Sherita L. Johnson's Black Women in New South Lit erature and Culture attends to the overlooked significance of regional identity in literature by and about southern black women. Chaney and Johnson offer compelling arguments for renewed attention to the rela tionship of African American literature to the South. In six chapters along with an introduction and a brief conclusion, Chaney demonstrates that black authors and artists contend with rep resentations of slavery common to the antebellum period by combining

Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture

Reviewed by: Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture Emily J. Lordi (bio) Parham, Marisa. Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2009. What is there to say about the fact that African Americans generally assumed that Raynard Johnson, an African American teenager found hanging from a tree at his Mississippi home in 2000, had been lynched, while white townspeople generally assumed he had committed suicide? What to say about the nameless anxiety a black American may experience when driving past a cotton field or, for that matter, a police car? Depending on one’s subject position and experience, these phenomena may seem either too obvious or, alternately, too irrational to linger over. Yet the premise of Marisa Parham’s brilliant study, Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture, is that such matters demand careful attention and deserve a conceptual framework. Building on Avery Gordon’s path-breaking work on social haunting, Parham theorizes haunting as an intensely personal and public phenomenon. While people tend to speak of being haunted by their own disturbing memories, in Parham’s formulation, to be haunted is to experience someone else’s memory. Through close readings of literary texts, Parham offers several ways of thinking about how that “someone else” might bleed, without ever blending, into one’s self. The promiscuous memories she traces are often painful, many of them reflecting what Karla Holloway has identified as a black cultural sensibility shaped by the prevalence of early death. Haunting therefore describes how “the pain of others shades our own subjectivities” (7)—and, more specifically, how one may experience life as a reminder of many thousands gone whom one has never known. The point is not just that people are often viscerally affected by the past’s reverberations, but that they may be fundamentally constituted by them. The experience of being touched by the afterlife of the past in the present has shaped African American cultural expression in significant ways. As Parham writes, the “subject position [African American] . . . has historically required that one understand at least a small part of oneself as beholden to the memory of others who share that position, as remembering often works in places of absence, for instance in lieu of homeland—or political power” (6). While she theorizes “displacement” less fully than “haunting,” the phrase “places of absence” reflects Parham’s concern with the spatial dimension of memory—with the ways in which memories are experienced as visions of place. By weaving together Toni Morrison’s account of “rememory” and Nora’s notion of milieux de mémoire (the “real environments of memory” whose loss makes sites of memory necessary), Parham articulates a concept of memory based more on “what it felt like to be somewhere” than “to be back in sometime” (29). This is an affective experience that travels. People who do not share lived experiences may nonetheless be seized by a shared vision of the past as present; collective identities are made and remade in such moments. Haunting and Displacement takes surprising correspondences as its subject and also makes them its method. Structuring the book thematically rather than chronologically, Parham forges connections between works of twentieth-century African American literature that are seldom if ever considered together: the poetry of Bob Kaufman and Jean Toomer, the fiction of Richard Wright and Ann Petry. While she analyzes various texts with equal facility—Notorious B.I.G. album art, trauma theory, the televised Essence awards—she focuses on the literary. Perhaps this is because, as she suggests, “reading may be understood as the [End Page 967] best metaphor for haunting . . . a transmutation of history into an experience of reading, into a memory over which one can now claim ownership . . .” (84). That her readings are themselves haunted is a point Parham demonstrates through her periodic shifts to first person narrative, which intimate how texts “work us over, make us remainders of them” (5). Finally, Parham’s writing itself destabilizes another boundary, since many passages in this work of literary criticism are as affecting as the primary texts themselves. Chapter one, “Like Water,” moves from the enslavement narratives of Olaudah Equiano...

Moses, Man of Oppression: A Twentieth-Century African American Critique of Western Theocracy

If Allen Dwight Callahan, author of The Talking Book: African and Bible, is to be believed, African monolithically revere as a venerable ideal of African American (98), since he provided oppressed people with perfect model for setting captives free. So instrumental was figure of in project of emancipating blacks that he has been considered almost as important as Jesus, for as James Cone claims in My People: Black Theology and Black Church: Christians have always known that God of and of Jesus did not create to be slaves or second-class citizens in North America (8). No doubt figured prominently in nineteenth-century African American literature and culture, as can be seen in traditional spirituals (Thus saith Lord, bold said, / Let my people go [Go Down, Moses]), Frances Harper's Moses: A Story of Nile (Moses brings about great deliverance [l. 153] of enslaved and oppressed) and Paul Laurence Dunbar's An Ante-Bellum Sermon (de Lawd will sen' some / Fu' to set his chillun free [ll. 30-31]). (1) But there was a palpable split in black community's representation of in twentieth-century African American literature, which poses a substantive challenge to Callahan's monolithic interpretation. instance, in a letter to Carl Van Vechten about what she considered her most important work, Herod Great, Zora Neale Hurston claims that Moses forced his laws on ancient Hebrews and and that Moses was responsible for actual death of at least a half million of people in his efforts to force his laws upon them (Zora 529). So ruthless, monomaniacal, and fanatical was that Hurston refers to him as a dictator (530), a description that certainly had profound implications in 1945, just after end of World War II, when Hurston penned letter. Hurston's remarks about are interesting in themselves, but they are even more significant in relation to black community's treatment of and Exodus. Let me state my point more directly by challenging Callahan's monolithic interpretation of African and Moses. Callahan claims: For African Americans, was more than an expert magician or antimagician. He was, first and foremost, a leader of his people. personifies leadership as divine vocation (93). Based on her 1945 letter, Hurston certainly does not subscribe to view that was a divinely inspired leader. Indeed by linking with terror and and by calling him a dictator, Hurston indicates how he can be defined as perfect enabler of an oppressive and unjust political regime, a position that directly contradicts Callahan's interpretation of black appropriation of Exodus myth. As I will demonstrate throughout this essay, Hurston was not alone in thinking of figure as a potentially dangerous and ultimately destructive model of a political leader. In James Baldwin's Go Tell It on Mountain, Gabriel Grimes's mother has clearly internalized standard view of Exodus story in which the national quest of Israel became an analog for aspirations and aims of African Americans (Glaude 54). As Gabriel's sister Florence paraphrases her mother's view, God wants black community to hear, and pass thereafter, one to another, story of Hebrew children who had been held in bondage in land of Egypt; and how Lord had heard their groaning, and how His heart was moved; and how He bid wait but a little season till He should send deliverance (70). In Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin explains that the Negro identifies himself almost wholly with Jew. In fact, Baldwin writes, It]he more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for a to lead him out of Egypt (55). But in his prefatory comments to this claim, Baldwin offers a psychological rather than a theological explanation for black appropriation of Exodus myth: religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; bad will be punished and good rewarded, for God is not sleeping, judgment is not far off (54). …

Love and Marriage in Early African America (review)

Reviewed by: Love and Marriage in Early African America Jewell Parker Rhodes Love and Marriage in Early African America. Edited by Frances Smith Foster. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2008. Xvi, 360 pp. Illus. Index. $65.00, cloth. $24.95 paper. Love and Marriage in Early African America, edited by Frances Smith Foster, is one of those rare books that is a pleasure both for general interest readers as well as for the most dedicated scholars of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century African American literature. Twenty years in the making, uncovering an extraordinary range of primary writings—sermons, poems, stories, letters, lectures, memoirs, autobiography, folk sayings, and rhymes—Foster's project refutes stereotypical notions that slavery destroyed black families and created dysfunctional emotional, sexual, and gender power relationships among black men and women. Such evidence is important to our historical re-imagining of black life; but, surprisingly, the material resounds with contemporary relevance. In particular, emotions shine—ecstasy, disappointment, desire, self-doubt, fidelity, and joy. Such feelings are normally engaged during the journey from courtship, to love, then marriage. But the inherent power in these anthology selections make readers feel as if they are looking into a mirror that passionately reveals their inner selves or else eavesdropping on stories about their family or their friend's love life. Foster clearly revels in the material. Her Introduction, subtitled "By Way of an Open Letter to My Sister," is a jubilant "thank you" to her sister, Cle, for aiding in the archival research … a sharing of discoveries, "Cle, Phyllis Wheatley was a flirt!" as well as a recognition that this "old material linked [her] life directly to … ancestors." Made curious about her own family and history, Foster couldn't help but solicit courtship stories from her mother, noting that what her mother said (as well as didn't say) reflected attitudes and morals rooted in a centuries-old tradition of black heterosexual unions. For scholars, Love and Marriage in Early African America, proves without question that there was a vibrant print culture for African Americans as early as the eighteenth century. The Afro-Protestant Church, in its myriad forms, was a literary engine creating and buying newspapers, publishing sermons, letters, poems and encouraging consortiums of African Americans in cities and across states to write, edit, and produce religious as well as secular news and literature. The Christian Recorder of Philadelphia remains one of the oldest African [End Page 236] American newspapers in the world. In 1864, in a column entitled "The Young Ladies of To-Day," the unnamed writer laments that all modern women have become fashionable and "delicate," and, therefore, advises suitors: "Never marry the girl who sits in the parlor while her mother stands in the kitchen. It won't pay." While the gender roles are conservative and based in economic exchange, the paper, nonetheless, promoted respect as a key ingredient for a happy union. While a man should be wary of marrying a fashionable girl, women, in 1861, were given ten tips for how "To Avoid a Bad Husband." Tip #6 is "Never marry a man who treats his mother or sister unkindly or indifferently." Tip #10 implores "… never marry a man who is addicted to … spirits. Depend upon it, you are better off alone than you would be tied to a man whose breath is polluted, and whose vitals are being gnawed out by alcohol." Even at a time when to be unmarried, an "old maid" meant disgrace, the African American community drew the line at unions that had the potential to foster abuse and with men who lacked integrity, self-discipline, and kindness. In 1873, The Christian Recorder published the piece, "Aunt Jennie The Old Maid." The unknown author recreates Clara, a young girl, telling her friend, Lizzie, about her "wonderful aunt." Unmarried, the aunt "took an active part in attending to the numerous children with which her sister had been blessed." Clara clearly adores her Aunt Jennie, and recounts how active she is in teaching, guiding, and caring for the children. She ends by saying, "Mamma calls her an old maid; and I believe she is, for she takes us out so. Indeed, Lizzie I wish...

Frank Webb's Still Life: Rethinking Literature and Politics through The Garies and Their Friends

Literary critics such as Claudia Tate and Ann duCille have taught us to think differently about form and class in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century African-American literature. They have qualified the charges of acquiescence leveled against the literature of respectability or “uplift”: the charges that such literature adopted white middle-class values of industry, frugality, circumspection, and moral purity in a bid for social acceptance, and that such literature was distinguished by condescension towards the African-American masses and surrender to the dominant culture. Tate argues that African-American women novelists in the 1890s presented to their readers “allegories of political desire.” Rather than domestic mimesis, Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins offered shrewd portrayals of the gap between an imagined world of ideal courtship and marriage and the actual world of racial injury. In Tate’s words, such novels offered “cultural description as symbolic representation, not transparent presentation” (101). Analyzing the gap, revealing the deeper story beneath the surface, Tate finds not false consciousness but narratives that indicate a tempered hope for social equality and female agency. For duCille, African-American women novelists in the early twentieth century such as Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen transmuted marriage conventions and subversively explored issues