Results by title

Felice D. Blake’s Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature highlights the pervasive representations of intraracial deceptions, cruelties, and contempt in Black literature. Literary criticism has tended to focus on Black solidarity and the ways that a racially linked fate has compelled Black people to counter notions of Black inferiority with unified notions of community driven by political commitments to creative rehumanization and collective affirmation. Blake shows how fictional depictions of intraracial conflict perform necessary work within the Black community, raising questions about why racial unity is so often established from the top down and how loyalty to Blackness can be manipulated to reinforce deleterious forms of subordination to oppressive gender, sexual, and class norms.
Most importantly, the book shows how literature constitutes an alternative public sphere for Black people. In a society largely controlled by white supremacist actors and institutions, Black authors have conjured fiction into a space where hard questions can be asked and answered and where the work of combatting collective, racist suppression can occur without replicating oppressive hierarchies. Intimate Antagonisms uncovers a key theme in Black fiction and argues that literature itself is a vital institutional site within Black life. Through the examination of intimate conflicts in a wide array of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, Blake demonstrates the centrality of intraracial relations to the complexity and vision of Black social movements and liberation struggles and the power and promise of Black narrative in reshaping struggle.
 
 

Ever since Bessie Smith’s powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women’s singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin.

Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith’s blues and Richard Wright’s neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers.

The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century’s most beloved and challenging voices.

Each Hour Redeem advances a major reinterpretation of African American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present by demonstrating how its authors are centrally concerned with racially different experiences of time. Daylanne K. English argues that, from Phillis Wheatley to Suzan-Lori Parks, African American writers have depicted distinctive forms of temporality to challenge racial injustices supported by dominant ideas of time. The first book to explore the representation of time throughout the African American literary canon, Each Hour Redeem illuminates how the pervasive and potent tropes of timekeeping provide the basis for an overarching new understanding of the tradition.

Combing literary, historical, legal, and philosophical approaches, Each Hour Redeem examines a wide range of genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, slave narratives, and other forms of nonfiction. English shows that much of African American literature is characterized by “strategic anachronism,” the use of prior literary forms to investigate contemporary political realities, as seen in Walter Mosley’s recent turn to hard-boiled detective fiction. By contrast, “strategic presentism” is exemplified in the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance and their investment in contemporary political potentialities, for example, in Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka’s adaptation of the jazz of their eras for poetic form and content. Overall, the book effectively demonstrates how African American writers have employed multiple and complex conceptions of time not only to trace racial injustice but also to help construct a powerful literary tradition across the centuries.

This thought-provoking cultural history explores how psychoanalytic theories shaped the works of important African American literary figures. Badia Sahar Ahad details how Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, Adrienne Kennedy, and Danzy Senna employed psychoanalytic terms and conceptual models to challenge notions of race and racism in twentieth-century America. Freud Upside Down explores the relationship between these authors and intellectuals and the psychoanalytic movement emerging in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Examining how psychoanalysis has functioned as a cultural phenomenon within African American literary intellectual communities since the 1920s, Ahad lays out the historiography of the intersections between African American literature and psychoanalysis and considers the creative approaches of African American writers to psychological thought in their work and their personal lives.

We live in a world of talk. Yet Race Sounds argues that we need to listen more—not just hear things, but actively listen—particularly in relation to how we engage race, gender, and class differences. Forging new ideas about the relationship between race and sound, Furlonge explores how black artists—including well-known figures such as writers Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, and singers Bettye LaVette and Aretha Franklin, among others—imagine listening. Drawing from a multimedia archive, Furlonge examines how many of the texts call on readers to “listen in print.” In the process, she gives us a new way to read and interpret these canonical, aurally inflected texts, and demonstrates how listening allows us to engage with the sonic lives of difference as readers, thinkers, and citizens. 

Intervening in discourses of African American and black feminist literatures, where sound and voice dominate, Furlonge shifts our attention to listening as an aural strategy of cultural, social, and civic engagement that not only enlivens how we read, write, and critique texts, but also informs how we might be more effective audiences for each other and against injustice in our midst. The result is a fascinating examination that brings new insights to African American literature and art, American literature, democratic philosophy, and sound studies. 

Telling Narratives analyzes key texts from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature to demonstrate how secrets and their many tellings have become slavery's legacy. By focusing on the ways secrets are told in texts by Jessie Fauset, Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, and others, Leslie W. Lewis suggests an alternative model to the feminist dichotomy of "breaking silence" in response to sexual violence. This fascinating study also suggests that masculine bias problematically ignores female experience in order to equate slavery with social death. In calling attention to the sexual behavior of slave masters in African American literature, Lewis highlights its importance to slavery’s legacy and offers a new understanding of the origins of self-consciousness within African American experience.

In this groundbreaking work, Patrice D. Rankine asserts that the classics need not be a mark of Eurocentrism, as they have long been considered. Instead, the classical tradition can be part of a self-conscious, prideful approach to African American culture, esthetics, and identity. Ulysses in Black demonstrates that, similar to their white counterparts, African American authors have been students of classical languages, literature, and mythologies by such writers as Homer, Euripides, and Seneca.

Ulysses in Black closely analyzes classical themes (the nature of love and its relationship to the social, Dionysus in myth as a parallel to the black protagonist in the American scene, misplaced Ulyssean manhood) as seen in the works of such African American writers as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen. Rankine finds that the merging of a black esthetic with the classics—contrary to expectations throughout American culture—has often been a radical addressing of concerns including violence against blacks, racism, and oppression. Ultimately, this unique study of black classicism becomes an exploration of America’s broader cultural integrity, one that is inclusive and historic.

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine