White Writers Research Articles

Death, Denial, and the Black Double: Reading Race in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction

DOREEN FOWLER University of Kansas Death, Denial, and the Black Double: Reading Race in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction FLANNERY O’CONNOR ONCE SAID THAT “DEATH HAS ALWAYS BEEN brother to my imagination” (Mullins 35). Her words are a poignant reminder that death shadowed both her life and her art. As a child, she watched her father die of lupus; in 1950, at twenty-five, when she was writing her first novel, she was diagnosed with this same autoimmune disease; and she died a short fourteen years later at the age of thirty-nine. O’Connor lived and wrote with the threat of death always trailing her, and her fiction is littered with dead bodies. Critics have long recognized O’Connor’s preoccupation with death; for example, in an early study of O’Connor, Suzanne Morrow Paulson observes the prevalence of “death haunted” characters who seek to avoid “the fate we all share—mortality” (13, 14). I propose that these death-haunted characters are authorial avatars and that when O’Connor writes that “death [is the] brother to my imagination,” she means that a desire to deny death drives her art and that, denied, the fear of death returns in her fiction in the form of the double. In fact, O’Connor’s choice of the word “brother” for the connection between her imagination and death invokes doubling since a brother is often a literary figuration of the double. In O’Connor’s fiction, her death-haunted characters are invariably shadowed by a double, and this doubling has been thoughtfully analyzed by Frederick Asals, among other scholars. But Asals and others have failed to note that O’Connor’s preoccupation with death is often tied to race and that she seems to find people of color particularly serviceable as deathly doubles. O’Connor explicitly acknowledges this figurative use of a black presence not only in her own work but in the southern literary imagination generally. In an unpublished manuscript, she writes that “In Southern Literature the Negro, without losing his individuality, is a figure for our darker selves, our shadow side.”1 The “darker sel[f],” 1 This comment is quoted by Asals (86), who cites the source as an unpublished manuscript in the Flannery O’Connor Collection. 304 Doreen Fowler “the shadow side” is an unmistakable reference to Freud’s concept of the uncanny double, the alter ego or other self.2 “The uncanny” is the English translation for Freud’s German unheimlich; a better translation is “unhome-like,” i.e., that which is familiar and close to us which we have rejected, and only our rejection, signified by the prefix “un,” separates us. Freud also explains that “repression itself . . . produces substitute formations . . . indications of a return of the repressed” (Standard 14:154). One of these “substitute formations” is the double. In literature, the double is the representation of repressed fears, desires, or instincts come back to haunt us in the form of a rejected, estranged version of the self. In O’Connor’s formulation, death is denied and returns in the form of the black double. In interpreting O’Connor’s mysterious representations of whites’ “darker selves,” I turn to Toni Morrison, who, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, urges literary scholars to attend to white writers’ figurative use of African American people in forwarding their literary agendas. Morrison maintains that a whiteinvented Africanism is often used by white writers as “a trope” for the contemplation of “chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom” (7). While Morrisonnotesthatthese engagementswithAfricanismhavesometimes been used as a way of “organizing American coherence through a distancing [of] Africanism” (8), she emphasizes that she is as interested in identifyingthose moments “when [American] literature exploded and undermined” racism as those occasions when it was “complicit in the fabrication of racism” (16). In the early pages of Playing in the Dark, Morrison points specifically to Flannery O’Connor as a writer whose representations of an Africanist presence have not been decoded by scholars. In particular, Morrison insists that there is a “connection between God’s grace and Africanist ‘othering’” in O’Connor’s...

Rethinking the Idiom of Transition

A dilemma facing those exploring the post-apartheid novel in English is how to group white and black writers in a single box, given that previous scholarship often focused on racial binaries. Debates anticipating the post-apartheid liberal order attempted to highlight areas to be privileged without equal regard for the historical reality of pain inflicted on the population. This is probably why some white academics have invoked a defacement of history in the discourse of recent fiction. Others, however, have argued that literary scholarship should remain a search for ‘social justice’. Michael Chapman, for one, appeals for “a humanism of reconstruction” and “a hermeneutics of suspicion”—a position confirmed by the work of several black scholars. This essay explores the views of Mphahlele, Mzamane, and Oliphant with respect to the emerging tradition of writing in post-apartheid South Africa. It takes into account the fact that South Africa is still a ‘transitional state’—a ‘nation’ undergoing immense transformation not only in the political arena but also in practically every facet of its social imaginary.

No Exit: Mixed-Race Characters and the Racial Binary in Charles Chesnutt and Ernest J. Gaines

While Ernest J. Gaines has generally emphasized the importance of white writers rather than ones in his career, he shares with Charles Chesnutt an interest in the role of mixed-race characters in narrative. Repeatedly in his brief fiction-writing career, Chesnutt engaged with both the passing tradition and the status of those who were marked as though they clearly had white ancestry. Similarly, Gaines, in both novels and short stories, depicted the social and racial pressures on light-skinned characters.1 focus of this essay will be on narratives of those who have been clearly labeled regardless of ancestry. While Gaines shows little interest in stories of passing, he shares with Chesnutt a concern for Black Creoles and for those who choose or are compelled to identify as black. texts will be examining are Chesnutt's Paul Marchand, F. M. C. and The Wife of His Youth and Gainess Catherine Carmier and Bloodline. two novels treat Creole characters and their status within multiracial and multiethnic societies, while the two stories focus on light-skinned men and their relationships to other blacks as well as whites. Each of these works in one way or another signifies on the tradition of the tragic mulatto/a. For example, there is no deceit or confusion on the part of the central characters about their racial category, as there is in Chesnutts House Behind the Cedars. Nor is there the angst of white and mulatto romance such as we see between Robert and Mary Agnes in Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Instead, we find a free man of color who turns out to be white, a black man who has the arrogance and racial superiority of his white father, a family of Black Creoles who are the only members of the community who define themselves as different from blacks, and a light-skinned man who at the end of the story may or may not identify with his past. Both authors, in effect, depict complex performances of race along the socially constructed boundary that constitutes the color line. Thus, each of them rejects straightforward ideas of essentialism, does so in the context of his particular historical moment. For Chesnutt, this moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the time of retrenchment in civil rights, white racial terrorism, and the development of a racial science that sought to give a biological, social, and anthropological basis for essentialist thinking and policies. Gaines's moment came at the high point of the civil right movement, with the emergence of nationalism and a reversed claim of essentialism that asserted moral superiority. Thus, it can be argued that each writer uses mixed-race characters to subvert fixed notions of race while acknowledging the power of such notions in shaping the lives of their characters. It is also worth noting that all four works involve some moral violation that extends beyond white supremacy (which both writers see as a fixed aspect of the societies they depict) and the violations of women's bodies that produced the mixed-race characters that are their subjects. Thus, the texts create an implicit link between such figures and the moral failure that is the nation's racial ideology. In The Wife of His Youth, Chesnutt can be seen as critiquing if not satirizing the pretensions of northern, middle-class, light-skinned blacks. (2) It is worth noting that this is Chesnutt's own social category, so the story may be read as self-criticism. central character, Mr. Ryder, has become the leader of the Blue Vein Society, so called because its members are assumed to be light enough to have visibly blue veins. While the group denies such an exclusionary requirement, Ryder himself, though slightly darker than others, establishes a standard: I have no race prejudice, he would say, but we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by the white race and extinction in the black. …

Line 2: Faces

Line 2: Faces Terrance Hayes (bio) During the first weeks of my freshman year in college, I shared some of what looked like poems with my new English professor, Dr. John Thatcher French. It was the only way I could think of impressing him. My teammates—I was on a basketball scholarship—warned me he was a hard ass. He’d failed students for as little as a comma splice, they said. He’d been a naval intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, he was a horse trainer, a Faulkner scholar, a chain smoker, and lapsed Yankee. Dark haired and square jawed with an abrupt baritone, he had the look and bearing of R. Lee Ermey, the actor who played the infamous drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. I don’t remember an especially enthusiastic response when I showed Dr. French my poems, but when a poet named Fran Quinn visited campus that October, he set up a poetry conference for the two of us. It was the first time I met someone who lived as a poet. I knew poets roamed the earth. I’d heard rumors, growing up, that the poet James Dickey ran fat, drunk, and naked through some woods not far from my house, but I never saw him or met anyone who saw him. And in any case, no one I knew would have been impressed to meet a poet. No one in my family knew I was writing poems. I didn’t know what to make of Fran Quinn. He was probably in his forties at the time. In the light of certain memories his hair was silvery blonde, other times I remember it as a yellowish silver; he had a round face with a mild bewildered look or he had a saggy face with a quizzical sadness. It may have been the blue baseball cap he wore that skewed his age and demeanor. He didn’t seem especially poetic. He wasn’t Beatnikish, professorial, or hung over. We sat alone in Dr. French’s office. Dr. French had smoked probably three cartons of cigarettes a day over a span of twenty years in that office. Fran Quinn shuffled through a stack of fifty or so pages bound by a large binder clip, reading his poems to me. He shared his own work perhaps as a way to disarm me, but it didn’t comfort me. I thought it was strange that he didn’t have a book. I showed him the best of my altogether terrible poems. He must have offered encouragement. Quinn asked if I’d heard of Robert Bly. I hadn’t. I told him I liked Gwendolyn Brooks. I asked what he thought of James Dickey. Not much. While Quinn spoke—maybe he was talking about Robert Bly again—I scanned Dr. French’s wall of books. As best as I could tell, the measure of an educated man was what he’d read, not what he’d written. French had read all of William Faulkner plus lots of books about Faulkner; all of Mark Twain plus lots of books about Twain; most of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne: dead white writers. He taught what he knew to us. Once in the middle of reading Molly Bloom’s sprawling soliloquy in Ulysses, he began to weep right there in front of our class. That’s still among the most shocking and lovely moments in all of my college education. Another time in [End Page 811] my sophomore or junior year, when he was too hung over to teach a chapter of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, he lay his rumpled head down on his desk and asked me to teach it. I don’t know that I would call the moment a boy decides he will become a teacher a coming of age story. There’s no drama to it. I was the first in my family, the first of all my grandmother’s children and grandchildren to go to college. I did not go into the army as both my father and stepfather had. I was tall enough to get a basketball scholarship to a small liberal arts college surrounded by...

Bodies that (Don’t) Matter: Regulating Race on the Toilet in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help

Bodies that (Don’t) Matter: Regulating Race on the Toilet in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help Christopher Lloyd (bio) “I think if God had intended for white people and colored people to be this close together for so much of the day, he would’ve made us color-blind” exclaims Minny, a black maid in Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help (2010).1 This bestselling drama about domestic servants in 1960s Mississippi (also adapted to film by Tate Taylor in 2011) circles around the proximity of black and white women in the U.S. South. So “close together,” and far from “color-blind,” these women are forced to confront one another’s bodies. The white women of The Help frequently cannot understand or confront blackness, in all its embodied and lived materiality. In attending to the novel’s investment in feces and urination, this article will explore the visceral corporeality represented in Stockett’s novel. The narrative concerns a white southern writer—Miss Skeeter—who, on seeing the daily struggles of the black servants that sustain her domestic world in Jackson, Mississippi, decides to write down the lives of these women. Skeeter thus embarks on a difficult project of interviewing local maids, starting with Aibileen (her friend’s maid) and later talking with many other black women from the town. Eventually, the interviews become a book—Help—that is a bestseller across the nation, especially in Skeeter’s own town of Jackson. Skeeter’s narrative clearly mirrors Stockett’s own, as she is a white woman who was raised in the South by a black woman. She sees the novel as a response to that particular past, a form of both personal and cultural memory. Stockett is certainly not the first white author to represent this key southern relationship: Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream (1949) and Ellen Glasgow’s The Woman Within (1954) are memoirs featuring [End Page 259] memories of their “mammies”; more recently, Tony Kushner’s musical Caroline, or Change (2003) connects the lives of a young, white, Jewish gay man and his family’s black maid. The tradition of white writers excavating memories of the South’s reliance on black labor continues into the twenty-first century and is sure not to disappear soon. Literature’s role in the “production of cultural memory,” Astrid Erll tells us, is an “ongoing process, characterized by a dynamic interplay between text and context, the individual and the collective, the social and the medial,” and thus we must attend to the mediation of the southern past in The Help.2 While public responses to the novel and film have been largely positive,3 those in the academy have problematized The Help in a number of ways, most particularly in relation to the representations of race.4 Focusing here on the matter of embodiment and bodily processes, I suggest that Stockett’s novel, through its attention to toilets, feces, and urination, demonstrates the central tensions and disavowals of race relations in the Civil Rights-era South. In his History of Shit, Dominique Laporte suggests that “socialization is regularly subverted by the politics of waste” in that “To touch, even lightly, on the relationship of a subject to his shit, is to modify not only that subject’s relationship to the totality of his body, but his very relationship to the world.”5 Thus, reading The Help’s representations of toileting illuminates the workings of socialization in the segregation-era southern home, workings that the novel dramatizes through distance from and proximity to human waste. I draw on Karl Abraham’s argument that in the psychoanalysis of neurotics, “we are accustomed to find that anal and urethral sensations are closely related to infantile impulses of love,” though these feelings can also develop into sadistic impulses and the release of unbearable unconscious affect.6 Bodily processes are intimately tied to psychic processes. In short, psychoanalytic accounts of bodily procedure augment Laporte’s understanding of socialization and its undoing through waste. Developing a reading of The Help through Abraham’s theories of excretion, Sigmund Freud’s “anal character,” and Sándor Ferenczi’s concept of “hysterical materialization,” I argue that the frequency with...

O dilema Sola Scriptura no Adventismo

Although they are not direct descendants of the Protestant Reformation, Adventists describe themselves as continuers of the Reformation. From the beginning, prevailed in Adventism a radical Anabaptist/restorationist concept of sola Scriptura of some of its leading pioneers, and this vision has become majority and officially accepted by Seventh-day Adventist Church (SDA). But, because of the strong influence of the Methodism and his Wesleyan quadrilateral in Adventism, and to reconcile the impact of the Ellen White's writings in Adventist theology, some authors have recently proposed a concept of prima Scriptura as replacement of sola Scriptura . Through the method of literature review, this study will evaluate the recent debate about the position of the Bible as a source of doctrinal truths in SDA. For this, the official position of Adventist theology on the subject will be exposed, and the tension between Adventist theologians around sola Scriptura and prima Scriptura definitions will be analyzed. It will also be described the Ellen White position, and the consequences of the debate from the perspective of SDA will be evaluated. Finally, will be suggested a definition of sola Scriptura to do justice to the historic position of the SDA on the authority of Scripture. This discussion is important because sola Scriptura affects the relationship between the writings of Ellen White and the Bible in Adventist theology and Adventist claim to be continuers of the Reformation.

The Rules of the Game: An Editor's Note

This dossier on race and innovation collects a diverse group of poets who engage the following questions in their work: Is there perhaps something about innovation or experimentation that gives race a new name, a new dimension? Is there room for black-hand sides, coon play, other difficult (sometimes painful) racial humor? Is there something about being “of a darker hue” and the social experience in the world accompanying that bodily existence that compels an increasing number of writers of color to dance in the fields of experiment, play, irony, and other boundary-pushing modes? In other words, what use are innovative forms and approaches in telling raced or unraced stories by raced subjects? Conversely, what's at stake for the white writer who takes up racial subjects without hedging, pleasing, or apology? And, lastly, is there something about the contemporary moment that necessitates working outside of conventional constraints?

Dealing with a Troubled Rhodesian Past: Narrative Detachment and Intimacy in Peter Godwin's Mukiwa (1996)

SummaryThis article argues that one of the challenges white Zimbabwean writers have to deal with in their narratives is a troubled colonial past. In Peter Godwin's Mukiwa, A White Boy in Africa, there is a plain acknowledgement that Rhodesia had problems of legitimacy, which made the treatment of blacks before and during the war unjustified. Godwin's rendition of the past is therefore informed by this recognition, compelling the author to employ narrative strategies which make it possible for him to embrace certain aspects of the past while simultaneously distancing himself from others. This analysis of Godwin's Mukiwa shows how a re-imagined childhood consciousness enables an understanding of the Rhodesian past. Through this narrative strategy, Godwin is supposedly faithful in rendering the past, including its imperfections. Furthermore, the Rhodesian past is depicted as a baneful entity that estranges whites from the Zimbabwean present.

John Brown's Spirit: The Abolitionist Aesthetic of Emancipatory Martyrdom in Early Antilynching Protest Literature

Before his execution in 1859, the radical abolitionist John Brown wrote a series of prison letters that – along with his death itself – helped to cement the abolitionist aesthetic of emancipatory martyrdom. This article charts the adaptation of that aesthetic in antilynching protest literature during the decades that followed. It reveals Brown's own presence in antilynching speeches, sermons, articles, and fiction, and the endurance of the emancipatory martyr symbol that he helped to inaugurate. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, black and white writers imagined lynching's ritual violence as a crucifixion and drew upon the John Brown aesthetic of emancipatory martyrdom, including Frederick Douglass, Stephen Graham, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, black Baptist ministers, and black educators and journalists. Fusing martyrdom and messianism, these antilynching writers made the black Christ of their texts an avenging liberatory angel. The testamentary body of this messianic martyr figure marks the nation for violent retribution. Turning the black Christ into a Brown-like prophetic sign of God's vengeful judgment, antilynching writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries warned of disaster, demanded a change of course, challenged white southern notions of redemption, and insisted that African Americans must reemancipate themselves and redeem the nation.

Violent Black Man and the Myth of Black Macho in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Dreamy Kid”

The aim of this article is the investigation of the extent to which Eugene O’Neill, in his drama The Dreamy Kid, (re)constructs, or employs, the black macho myth, which negatively images black men as marginalized and violent. This undertaking questions O’Neill’s self-proclaimed progressive racial attitudes and stated focus on the universal nature of human existence, which he professed to express through drama. Moreover, the article challenges the mainstream view of The Dreamy Kid as progressive. Although the play focalizes the experience of a marginalized black man, which could be interpreted as the playwright’s concern with the unjust racial and class stratification of American society, O’Neill’s production, unfortunately, contains a number of pervasive stereotypes relative to black people’s alleged moral degeneracy, primitiveness, and violent behavior, which threatens the white dominated constructed order. In terms of gendered racial politics, in the article attention is given to O’Neill’s presentation of black male negotiations with the white patriarchal power structure, embodied by the police forces, and with black matriarchy, represented by O’Neill’s stereotypical character portrayal of a dominant elderly black woman. Lastly, an overall analysis is performed in light of the call for an autonomous black art, which emerged among black artists in opposition to the demeaning, unrealistic, stereotypical portrayals of black victims of oppression by white American writers.

Redefining Shared Narrative in Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Questions of ownership occupy a central place in recent South African fiction. On one hand, novelists seek ways to develop a new sense of ownership for those dispossessed by racism and poverty. Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 (2006), Kopano Matlwa's Coconut (2007), and Sifiso Mzobe's Young Blood (2010) exemplify this concern. On other hand, numerous writers struggle to own up to history of apartheid in face of denials that characterized apartheid system. Thus, while literary critics have celebrated freedom to explore a broader range of subjects than apartheid and its legacies (see, for example, Chapman; Frenkel and MacKenzie), a dominant strain in fiction of past fifteen years has nevertheless returned to violence of past in order to analyze nuances of guilt and responsibility. Yet paradoxically, such efforts to confront a history of violence often end in reinscribing a desire for control over that history. Emphasizing a commonality of experience, many of these novels deflect attention from different ways of experiencing same events and ongoing inequalities that underlie such differences. In 2000, Michiel Heyns analyzed how several confessional narratives by white writers, including Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples (1993) and Jo-Anne Richards's The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1998), exculpated their protagonists--and by extension white beneficiaries of apartheid-while seemingly acknowledging varied forms of complicity apartheid had engendered. Novels with more complex approaches to guilt and responsibility have sometimes left same blind spots. Published in first decade of new millennium, Jann Turner's Southern Cross (2002), Sarah Penny's The Beneficiaries (2002), which was well reviewed by Heyns, and Rachel Zadok's highly praised debut Gem Squash Tokoloshe (2005) explore interconnections between privilege, oppression, and culpability as a means of taking ownership for authors' own complicities. But each ultimately relegates questions of responsibility to past. These texts illustrate a pervasive desire to reclaim individual and collective feelings of belonging through shared narratives of past and its implications; yet they also reveal how that desire for belonging can entrench further divisions. Lisa Fugard's Skinner's Drift and Zoe Wicomb's Playing in Light, both published in 2006 by expatriate South African writers, explore alternatives to this quandary. This is not to suggest that Fugard and Wicomb are only South African writers to grapple with importance and risks of shared narrative as a foundation for reconciliation. Their approaches to this issue position them within a literary community that includes authors such as J. M. Coetzee and Achmat Dangor, who interrogate the idea that past trauma may be wrapped up and put to rest and acknowledge that remembered violence does not necessarily lead to reconciliation (Barnard 659-60). Like their contemporaries, Fugard and Wicomb insist on importance of excavating traces of past in order to create new narratives for future. But they consider how predicating reconciliations on shared accounts of past can oversimplify complexities of present. Taken together, novels intimate that shared narratives with power to build new relationships require ceding control over limits of one's story in a necessarily incomplete responsibility for voices of others--the stories they have to tell, experiences they have undergone, and conditions in which they live. At same time, Wicomb complicates this vision. She explores ways in which an ethics of self-dispropriation, whereby a person is dispossessed of his or her identity in order to enact hospitality toward someone else, wars with need for those who still face unequal opportunities to reappropriate their identities and surroundings. …

Steampunk Poe

Steampunk Poe

“A Stake in the Story”: Kathryn Stockett’s The Help , Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby , and the Politics of Southern Storytelling

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In afterword to bestselling 2009 novel The Help, titled Little, Too Late, author Kathryn Stockett voices a certain trepidation about a terrible line, writing in voice of a black person and worries that she has told both too much and too little in her of African American domestics and white southern ladies they work for in 1960s Mississippi. She concludes her afterword, though, by suggesting benefits of crossing that line, benefits that included discovering commonality of black and white stories and ephemerality of racial difference. Above all, she asserts that novel enabled her to ask her real-life African American maid Demetrie, long since deceased, unspoken question of her childhood--what was it like working for Stockett's fragmented white family? I've spent years imagining what her answer would be, her afterword concludes. And that's why I wrote this book. (1) Those concluding words appear to resolve her initial doubts--and therein lies one of most disturbing aspects of The Help and its staggering success, especially when contrasted with another novel by a white writer about a white employer and her black maid in 1960s Mississippi, Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You, Baby. Published in 1988, Douglas's novel was greeted with respectful critical, sometimes conflicting, reviews but virtually none of popular acclaim that has made The Help such a striking cultural phenomenon. Stockett's wildly popular novel quite simply appropriates an African American and turns it into one of white guilt, redemption, reconciliation, and triumph, a transformation that is all too common in white southern storytelling and that is thrown into sharp relief by Douglas's highly self-conscious postmodern novel. Can't Quit You, Baby offers none of resolution and reassurance that The Help displays to a contemporary audience eager for confirmation that country's legacy of racism and injustice has been left safely in past. If anything, Douglas's novel, in words of critic Karen Jacobsen, to foreground what most of us would like to forget, ignore, or deny--the continued difficulty that black and white women have in forming friendships with each other. (2) Unlike Stockett, Douglas does so by consistently and uncomfortably questioning her own narrative authority to tell stories crossing racial lines and brings attention again and again to all those long-simmering tensions lying just beneath surface of her storytelling--silences, habits of willed deafness and amnesia, refusals, and outright disavowals, and she does so by asking again and again what her own in story is--and by implication, reader's stake in as well. (3) Josephine Haxton started raising uncomfortable questions for herself and her readers from outset of her career, when she made decision to publish under pseudonym of Ellen Douglas to avoid potentially embarrassing her conservative, devout family. (4) That decision may also have had a good deal to do with her response to Brown v. Board of Education, which, she notes in her 2004 essay collection Witnessing, had a lasting impact on all her reading and writing to follow, particularly her stunning 1963 short collection Black Cloud, White Cloud. (5) In that collection, after exposes hierarchical, volatile, and sometimes explosive relationship of white employers and African American employees in a segregated society--what she herself called later the world of black and white people together--the terrible world of masters and servants. (6) But it was in 1988 that Douglas published her experimental and self-interrogative novel Can't Quit You, Baby about that most traditional of relationships, that of a privileged white woman and her African American housekeeper. Douglas's novel, like The Help, is set in Mississippi in 1960s, albeit a few years after height of Civil Rights Movement, and like The Help again Can't Quit You, Baby focuses on layers of habit, antipathy, resentment, suspicion, attachment, and silence linking white employer and black employee--but in ways that are far more unsettling than portrayed in The Help. …

The Divided Reception of The Help

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] reception of Kathryn Stockett's Help (2009) calls to mind the reception of two other novels about race relations by southern white writers: Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936) and William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Like Gone With the Wind, Help has been a pop culture phenomenon--prominent in bookstores and box offices, and the darling of book clubs everywhere. In January 2012 when I asked students in my Women in Modern Literature class what was the best book they had recently read by a woman, most named either Help or Hunger Games. And not surprisingly. Help was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year after its publication in 2009. Similarly, the movie held the number one spot in box offices for several weeks after it was released in August 2011, thereby propelling the trade paperback back up the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained a year later. By the time the movie was released, the book had sold 3 million copies, spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list, and been published in 35 countries and translated into three languages. Three months after the film's release, it had grossed $160 million at the box office. Both novel and film have been discussed in likely television venues, such as View, as well as in unlikely ones, such as Hardball (Chris Matthews it). Add to that, DVD purchases, Netflix rentals, and e-books (one of the most downloaded e-books of all time), and readership and viewership of Help may someday surpass that of Gone With the Wind. Readers from coast to coast made it the most checked-out book in the country for 2010 and 2011. Both novel and film were nominated for awards. novel won prizes at home (BookExpo America's Indies Choice Award, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Award for Fiction, the state of Georgia's Townsend Prize) and abroad (the UK's Orange Prize, South Africa's Boeke Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award). And director Tate Taylor received the Writers Guild of America, West's Paul Selvin Award for his adapted screenplay. While Help did not win the Oscar for best picture or Viola Davis for best actress, Octavia Spencer did win for best supporting actress, and the film walked away with the most kudos at the 43rd NAACP Image Awards, taking home the top prize for outstanding motion picture and nabbing actress and supporting actress honors for Davis and Spencer. (1) But despite these accolades from both predominantly white and black organizations, Nkiru Nzegwu, the editor of JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies, sees a black-white dividing line in the film's reception: White viewers see complexity where many black viewers see crass simplification. Whites believe they have finally grasped the existential pathos of black southern life in the 1960s but blacks beg to differ, pointing to the cavalier dismissal of white supremacist violence and the tone-deaf representation that fails to see or acknowledge their humanity, as well as refuses to grasp the manner in which white privilege is propped up by institutionalized racism and racial bigotry. Whites hope that Help has revealed the common humanity of all, while African Americans fear that the crudely sketched images of themselves may end up reinforcing old stereotypes. (2) However, judging from viewers' comments on polling websites, the reception of the film is not as polarized or predictable as critics of popular culture have imagined. Although many white viewers have loved the film, and no doubt for some of the reasons Nzegwu mentions, a good many white viewers have panned it, as Mary did on Amazon.com, Sugary sweet, (3) hankie tear-jerker, crowd pleasing & deeply dishonest. Judging Help as yet another entry to the Driving Miss Daisy genre of feel-good, simplistic examinations of topics that in truth are not easy, simple, Mary goes on to say, The solace I have, as I reflect on Help, is that there WERE brave, noble white people who wanted to bring equality to South: Andrew Goodman & Michael Schwerner. …

Subjectivity and Belonging in the Poetry of Bart Wolffe

In his work Bart Wolffe, the exiled white Zimbabwean writer, talks of his explorations of the mountains, hills and forests of Zimbabwe and his experiences with nature (especially as a child). The works, especially the ones he has written while in exile, show that his longing and nostalgia for the lost paradisiacal world of his childhood has more to do with his disconnection or displacement from the Zimbabwean world of nature than any other form of loss. The argument in this paper is that Wolffe's description of the Zimbabwean landscape and his attachment to the land and its animals in his poetry is an act of self-inscription onto the landscape to claim a white Zimbabwean and, by extension, a white African identity.

Ruth First: a revolutionary life in revolutionary times

Writing about the life of Olive Schreiner, Ruth First hoped that biography could capture the dilemmas of a white South African woman and writer at the turn of the twentieth century, caught in a world that made her, but in which she could not bear to live as it was. Ruth First too struggled her entire life against the injustices of race and class in southern Africa, but she did so with a confidence, joy and energy that Schreiner never achieved. Written on the basis of conversations with Ruth First in Mozambique in the last period of her life, this paper explores the possibilities and dilemmas posed by her commitment to a disciplined collective revolutionary project embedded in strong nationalist movements.

Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900 by Bill Hardwig (review)

Reviewed by: Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900 by Bill Hardwig Mark Noonan Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900. By Bill Hardwig. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. 192 pp. $49.50, $24.50. In the last twenty years, several scholarly books redirected the study of American literary regionalism. Richard Brodhead’s Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (1993) argued that the aim of regional writing was not so much to document the characteristics of any particular region or to “mourn lost cultures,” but to narrate a unified vision of modern nationhood. Stephanie Foote’s Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2001) asserted that regionalism offered a robust alternative to nationalism, helping the nation absorb and accept colorful local differences and markers of foreignness. Judith Fetterley’s and Majorie Pryse’s Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (2003) claimed that the geographic determinism of the term regionalism had distracted readers from recognizing the form as “a location for critique and resistance,” often a uniquely feminist one. Another seminal work was Brad Evans’s Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920 (2005), which emphasized the distinction between region and regionalism, the latter being a commodity that circulated, often in periodicals, and sought to glamorize ethnographic alterity and subcultures in new, “chic” ways. Adding to this list of groundbreaking works on regionalism, and building on its connection with periodicals, is Bill Hardwig’s Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900. The first aim of Hardwig’s book is to dismantle simplistic categories and canonical divisions that all too often limit our understanding of the actual literary landscape of a particular era and region. Focusing on the writings of George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lafcadio Hearn, Mary Noailles Murfee, and Thomas Nelson Page, Hardwig seeks to re-imagine regionalism as a highly porous genre whose meanings are linked closely with the editorial aims of the magazines in which they were originally published, as well as their intended audiences. These authors were often published in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and the Century, alongside William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James, at a time when the canon had not yet sorted writers as major or minor. Also significant was the inclusion of writings on the South in northern magazines for mostly upper-class readers. As Hardwig posits, local color writing was similar to travel writing about the South, in that readers of both genres sought the thrill of the exotic and the “authentic.” Yet what constituted authenticity proved difficult to discern. For example, Mary Noailles Murfee published her stories under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock, depicting the rough and tumble world of Appalachian life. Murfee’s [End Page 100] stories were a sensation, but when the author came to the offices of the Atlantic Monthly, editors were stunned to find a “pleasant young lady” instead of a brawny, rough-necked male. When the author’s gender became known to the critical establishment, attention shifted from the verisimilitude of the tales to analyses of how a woman could write like a man. The confusion caused by Murfee’s charade came at a time of growing anxiety over changing definitions of race, gender, class, and culture. The unveiling of Charles Chesnutt’s race caused a similar commotion. Initially, his conjure stories had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and were assumed to have been penned by a white writer in a realist vein. But when his race was revealed in the Bookman, he became a black writer whose anger suggested that he was not a realist writer at all but a propagandist, performing the role of spokesperson for his race. Chesnutt’s and Murfee’s writings were disruptive indeed, especially for elites who did not like their expectations being thwarted. By pairing Murfee and Chesnutt for analysis, Hardwig calls attention to the tendency in literary studies to overemphasize race and gender at the expense of other dynamic tensions latent in local color writing. In a similar vein, his work strives to resist traditional studies of...

Native American Literature and the Intricacies of its Recognition

During the second half of the twentieth century mainstream white American approach to ethnic and minority writers changed considerably. Different writers that had been ignored due to racial prejudice started to make an impact upon the mainstream American readership. Among these groups of ethnic writers that arose during the times, different Native American writers emerged who led to opening up the mainstream perception towards literature to the effect that Native American literature that had been denied a respectful status earned it in the American academia. However, the emergence of Native American literature in the mainstream literary circles was not eulogized by all the indigenous scholars. These scholars argued in favour of seeing the heterogeneity of Native literatures besides realizing their continuity from the past when these literatures had been denied any value and significance. For centuries indigenous peoples had produced oral literatures that kept on changing and adapting to help the indigenous people survive and sustain their identity despite ideological and intellectual oppression exerted by the white immigrants. These oral literatures later on provided the aesthetic base for the Natives in their endeavour of producing literatures in written form. In comparison, literature produced by the early immigrants and later on by mainstream white American writers primarily relied upon the non existence of the Native people and their aesthetics. Indigenous peoples portrayed through the white narratives obliterated the true Native and instead created a homogenized caricature figure that was meant to serve the purpose of the white American rather than represent the diversity and richness of the Indigenous cultures. These caricature figures helped the white immigrants to justify the displacement of Natives from the American land and also certify their genocide by the whites as a noble endeavour. In this context, recognition of Native American literature in the white literary circles was interpreted by these scholars as another example of colonial appropriation. Therefore, with their reintegration in the sixties and afterwards, many Native scholars indulged in a process of redefinition thereby producing valuable insights that have helped the readers to better understand the intricate relationship between the mainstream and indigenous literatures. These scholars contest the very meaning of literature and elaborate the inherent problems in homogenizing heterogeneous indigenous literatures as “Indian literature”.

The Haitian Revolution in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes

Faulkner Journal Adam Long The Haitian Revolution in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom; and George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes I n his 2014 study The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radi­ cal Horizons, Conservative Constraints, Philip Kaisary argues that since the 1930s black writers in both the United States and the Caribbean have found that “the recuperation and representation ofthe events of 1791 -1804 offered the opportunity to articulate a narrative ofemancipation in which black agency and universal intent were central” (1-2). For these writers, “one of the major attractions of recuperating the narrative of the Haitian Revolution . . . is that radical reconfigurations of the Haitian Revolution directly undermines the hegemony of the still massively influential cultural and historical body of works where the values ofthe slave society have been romantically condoned or sanitized” (12). On the other hand, for white writers, who remain largely com­ mitted to this hegemony, the Haitian Revolution has remained a silent influ­ ence. Because of this, it sometimes appears in surprising ways. George Wash­ ington Cable sets his novel The Grandissimes in the period ofthe revolution and makes a fugitive slave (an embodiment of the fear that the Revolution created in slave owners in the United States) central to the novel’s plot. Similarly, the narrators ofWilliam Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! create a Creole past, tied to the Haitian Revolution, for the character Charles Bon. Though both Cable and Faulkner include Haiti in important ways, they do so for different purposes. While Cable is able to use the Haitian Revolution to re-imagine the Creole and make assimilation possible, Faulkner’s narrators, particularly Quentin Comp­ son, remain incapable of accepting such assimilation. Though both Faulkner and Cable use Haiti as a narrative trope, like other Southern writers, they erase large elements of the actual history, turning Haiti into a literary landscape on which they can write their own narratives of as­ similation. As Edward E. Baptist notes, “Haiti’s relationship to US History re­ mains . . . invisible in American discussions of the Carribean nation’s” history (16). The actual history ofthe Haitian Revolution, when not erased, is strongly tied to the history of the United States. Not only did the Revolution happen geographically near the American South, there was also tremendous cultural exchange between displaced Haitians and Southerners. Nathalie Dessens cites the large change in the population of New Orleans as an example: “There is 79 80 Adam Long The Haitian Revolution in Faulkner and Cable no doubt that these ten thousand new arrivals [Haitian refugees] had an enor­ mous influence on a city whose population in 1805 was only eight thousand” (29). This “enabled it to resist much longer the Americanization that followed the Louisiana Purchase” (35). Thus, New Orleans became connected with the Haitian Revolution in the Southern mind, becoming a place of the Other, a place that resists assimilation. Hegemonic US identity has, in turn, attempted to erase this Otherness, to assimilate it. Michael Kreyling summarizes: “We can’t let any thing, any place be the sovereign Other, beyond the hegemonic reach of our modes of knowing, of gridding and ordering both factual and symbolic orders. We always send in the marines, or Fred and Ginger, or a com­ pany of literary and cultural critics” (120-21). In this case, Faulkner and Cable are the cultural critics. Both transform the details of the Haitian Revolution in order to turn the Haitian into a blank slate on which they can examine the dif­ fering narratives of American assimilation. Their narratives of assimilation are explored on an individual level. Nei­ ther Cable nor Faulkner portrays a migration, a mass arrival of Haitian ref­ ugees doubling the population of a US city and thus changing its character. Instead, both authors conceive of a character of mixed race possibly upsetting the hierarchy of two single families, the Grandissimes and the Sutpens. The character ofmixed blood is perceived as a threat to the assimilation ofthe fam­ ily in much the same way that the presence of Haitian refugees is perceived as a threat to the nation. Barbara Ladd argues that the character of mixed race carries “within himself or herself, the repressed history associated with...

Interrogating whiteness: A precarious cross-cultural/racial creative writing PhD journey

This article explores my coming-to-consciousness and dismantling of whiteness – of white privilege and power – in my self and in my writing during my Creative Writing PhD candidature. Throughout the course of my PhD, I embarked on a cross-cultural/racial project, which involved myself, as a white writer, grappling with the ethical uncertainties of writing about African Australians and of placing the (white) self into the racial problem. Initially, my enquiry began by exploring ways in which I might convey an accurate and dynamic picture of African Australians in my creative work; however, as I progressed in my candidature, and as I tried to find an ethical balance for representing the intercultural/racial encounters between my black African and white Australian characters, questions about the “other” turned to an interrogation of the “self”. Had I been reflecting, albeit unconsciously, my ingrained whiteness in my PhD novella? And how might I fracture whiteness in my writing (and in my self) in an attempt to establish a writing position that interrupts my unconscious acts of narrativising whiteness?