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This study of atheist African American writers poses a substantive challenge to those who see atheism in despairing and nihilistic terms. The author argues that while most white atheists mourn the loss of faith, many black atheists — believing the “God-concept” spawns racism and oppression — consider the death of God a cause for personal and political hope. Focusing on a little-discussed aspect of African American literature, this analysis of African American atheists' treatment of God fills a huge gap in studies that consistently ignore their contributions. Examining how a belief in God and His “chosen people” necessitates a politics of superiority and inferiority, the author considers the degree to which religious faith is responsible for justifying oppression, even acts of physical and psychological violence. In their secular vision of social and political justice, black atheists argue that only when the culture adopts and internalizes a truly atheist politics — one based on pluralism, tolerance, and freedom — will radical democracy be achieved.

Some of the most famous African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die,” Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “First fight. Then fiddle.” Few readers realize that these poems come from a rich tradition of more than a thousand sonnets written by African American poets over a century and a half. The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research, the study demonstrates that closer attention to the sonnet modifies our understanding of key developments in African American literary history. Each chapter addresses such a development: the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the post-war period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and the disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry. Throughout this rich history, the study argues, sonnets have been “troubling spaces” in more ways than one. The sonnet became a contested space when black poets appropriated the “scanty plot of ground” (Wordsworth) from which they had long been excluded. The sonnets written by these poets troubled the material and discursive boundaries African Americans have been facing in a society organized around racial inequality. The confrontation and subversion of boundaries is inscribed into the very structure of the sonnet, which made it a preferred testing ground for such strategies in the literary realm.

Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. This book delves into African spiritual traditions, explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison's novels. The result is a critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz. While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, the author of this study explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. She writes this book, not only as a literary critic but also as a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. She analyzes tensions between communal and individual values and moral codes as represented in Morrison's novels. She also uses interviews with and non-fiction written by Morrison to further build her critical paradigm.

Alain L. Locke (1886–1954), in his famous 1925 anthology The New Negro, declared that “the pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.” Often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance, he had his finger directly on that pulse, promoting, influencing, and sparring with such figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey. This biography of an extraordinarily gifted philosopher and writer narrates the story of Locke's impact on twentieth-century America's cultural and intellectual life. It traces this story through Locke's Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at Harvard University—where William James helped spark his influential engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of the narrative illuminates Locke's heady years in 1920s New York City and his forty-year career at Howard University, where he helped spearhead the adult education movement of the 1930s and wrote on topics ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of democracy. The book shows that throughout this illustrious career—despite a formal manner that many observers interpreted as elitist or distant—Locke remained a warm and effective teacher and mentor, as well as a fierce champion of literature and art as means of breaking down barriers between communities. The multifaceted portrait that emerges from this account effectively reclaims Locke's place in the pantheon of America's most important minds.

This book provides a full-length study of John Edgar Wideman’s entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Wideman engages with three crucial themes—history, myth, and trauma—throughout his career, showing how they intertwine. The book argues that, for four decades, the influential African American writer has endeavored to create a version of the African American experience that runs counter to mainstream interpretations, using history and myth to confront and then heal the trauma caused by slavery and racism. Wideman’s work intentionally blurs boundaries between fiction and autobiography, myth and history, particularly as that history relates to African American experience in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The fusion of fiction, national history, and Wideman’s personal life is characteristic of his style, which—due to its complexity and smudging of genre distinctions—has presented analytic difficulties for literary scholars. Despite winning the PEN/Faulkner award twice, for Sent for You Yesterday and Philadelphia Fire, Wideman remains understudied. Of particular value is the book’s analysis of the many ways in which Wideman alludes to his previous works. This intertextuality allows Wideman to engage his books in direct, intentional dialogue with each other through repeated characters, images, folktales, and songs. In Wideman’s challenging of a monolithic view of history and presenting alternative perspectives to it, the book finds an author firm in his notion that all stories and all perspectives have merit.

The book examines how James Baldwin’s fiction and nonfiction shaped and responded to key political and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. It is animated by an examination of how external forces molded Baldwin’s personal, political, and psychological development and gave shape to his writing. The book views Baldwin through a cultural-historical lens alongside a more traditional literary critical approach. Crucially, it breaks through the established critical difficulties caused by Baldwin’s geographical, ideological, and artistic multiplicity by analyzing his life and work against the radically transformative politics of his time. The book explores under-researched areas in Baldwin’s life and work—his relationship to the Left, his FBI files, and the significance of Africa in his writing—while also contributing to wider discussions about race, identity, love and sexuality in postwar US culture. In this way, the book contributes to a broader understanding of some key twentieth-century themes—including the Cold War, African American literary history, conflicts between spirituality and organized religion, and transnationalism—but also brings a number of academically isolated disciplines into dialogue with each other. By viewing Baldwin as a subject in flux, rather than trying to fix his life and work into a single paradigm, the project contradicts the accepted critical paradigm that Baldwin’s life and work are too ambiguous to make sense of. It argues that it is precisely by studying Baldwin as an individual and an artist in flux that one begins to uncover the ways in which his work coheres.

This book investigates the shaping influence of the American slave narrative on the Victorian novel in the years between the British Abolition Act and the American Emancipation Proclamation. In a period when few books sold more than five hundred copies, slave narratives sold in the tens of thousands, providing British readers vivid accounts of the violence and privation experienced by American slaves. The book argues that Charlotte Brontë, W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson integrated into their works generic elements of the slave narrative, from the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, to the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, to the ethics of resistance over submission. It contends that Victorian novelists were attempting to access the slave narrative's paradigm of resistance, illuminate the transnational dimension of slavery, and articulate Britain's role in the global community. The slave narrative becomes part of the textual network of the English novel, making visible how black literary, as well as economic, production contributed to English culture.

This book analyzes twenty-first century African American fiction through the proliferation of post categories that arose in the new millennium. These post categories—post-black, post-racialism, post-Soul—articulate a shift away from the racial aesthetics associated with the Black Arts Movement and argue for the individual agency of Black artists over the meaning of racial identity in their work. Analyzing key works by Colson Whitehead, Alice Randall, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and Kiese Laymon, this book argues that twenty-first century African American fiction highlights the push and pull between claims of post-civil rights progress and the recognition of the entrenchment of structural racism. The book contextualizes this shift through the rise of, and presidency of, Barack Obama and the revision of Du Boisian double consciousness. It examines Obama through an analysis of the discourse surrounding his rise, Obama’s own writings, and his appearance as a character. The book concludes that while the claims of progress associated with Barack Obama’s presidency and the post era categories to which it was connected were overly optimistic, they represent a major shift towards an individualistic conception of racial identity that continues to resist claims of responsibility imposed on Black artists.

This book describes how the social and political movements that grew out of the Depression facilitated the left turn of several African American artists and writers. The Communist-led John Reed Clubs brought together black and white writers in writing collectives. The Congress of Industrial Organizations’s effort to recruit black workers inspired growing interest in the labor movement. One of the most concerted efforts was made by the National Negro Congress (NNC), a coalition of civil rights and labor organizations, which held cultural panels at its national conferences, fought segregation in the culture industries, promoted cultural education, and involved writers and artists in staging mass rallies during World War II. The formation of a black cultural front is examined by looking at the works of poet Langston Hughes, novelist Chester Himes, and cartoonist Ollie Harrington. While none of them were card-carrying members of the Communist Party, they all participated in the Left at one point in their careers. Interestingly, they all turned to creating popular culture in order to reach the black masses, who were captivated by the movies, radio, newspapers, and detective novels. There are chapters on the Hughes’ “Simple” stories, Himes’ detective fiction, and Harrington’s “Bootsie” cartoons. Collectively, the experience of these three figures contributes to the story of a “long” movement for African American freedom that flourished during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Yet this book also stresses the impact that McCarthyism had on dismantling the Black Left.

This is the first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans. The book delves into nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artistic and journalistic depictions of Ethiopia, illuminating the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power. It navigates texts by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Harry Dean, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, and others, alongside images and performances that show the intersection of African America with Ethiopia during historic political shifts. From a description of a notorious 1920 Star Order of Ethiopia flag-burning demonstration in Chicago to a discussion of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as Time magazine's Man of the Year for 1935, the book illuminates the growing complications that modern Ethiopia posed for American writers and activists. American media coverage of the African nation exposed a clear contrast between the Pan-African ideal and the modern reality of Ethiopia as an antidemocratic imperialist state: Did Ethiopia represent the black nation of the future, or one of an inert and static past? Revising current understandings of black transnationalism, the book presents a well-rounded exploration of an era when Ethiopia's presence in African American culture was at its height.

This book explores the development of the Christian Recorder during and just after the American Civil War. As a study of the official African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper (a periodical of national reach and scope among free African Americans), this book is thus at once a massive recovery effort of a publication by African Americans for African Americans, a consideration of the nexus of African Americanist inquiry and print culture studies, and an intervention in the study of literatures of the Civil War, faith communities, and periodicals. The book pairs a longitudinal sense of the Recorder’s ideological, political, and aesthetic development with the fullest account available of how the physical paper moved from composition to real, traceable subscribers. It builds from this cultural and material history of a key early Black newspaper to recover and analyze diverse and often unknown texts published in the Recorder including letters, poems, and a serialized novel—texts that were crucial to the development of African American literature, African American history, and African American culture and that challenge our senses of genre, authorship, and community. This book offers a case study for understanding how African Americans inserted themselves in an often-hostile American print culture in the midst of the most complex conflict the young nation had yet seen, and it thus calls for a significant rewriting of our senses of African American—and so American—literary history to reflect the power of the Black press.

This book addresses the specific conditions under and the pointed implications with which an ancient story about different orders of gods dueling over the fate of humanity became such a prominent fixture of Atlantic modernity. The Prometheus myth, for several reasons—its fortuitous geographical associations with both Africa and the Caucasus; its resonant iconography of bodily suffering; and its longue-duree function as a limit case for a Platonic-cum-Christian political theology of the Absolute, became a crucial site for conceptualizing human liberation in the immanent space of a finite globe structured by white domination and black slavery. The titan’s defiant theft of fire from the regnant gods was translated through a high-stakes racial coding either as an “African” revolt against the cosmic status quo that augured a pure autonomy—a black revolutionary immanence against which idealist philosophers like Hegel defined their projects and slaveholders defended their lives and positions—or as a “Caucasian” reflection of the divine power evidently working in favor of Euro-Christian civilization that transmuted the naked egoism of conquest into a righteous heteronomy—Euro-Christian civilization’s mobilization by the Absolute or its internalization of a transcendent principle of universal Reason. The Prometheus myth was available and attractive to its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalists and reinventors—from canonical figures like Voltaire, Percy Shelley, Frederick Douglass, and Karl Marx to anonymous contributors of ephemera to abolitionist periodicals—not so much as a handy emblem of an abstract humanism but as the potential linchpin of a racialist philosophy of history.

Black Well-Being analyzes conflicting, oftentimes messy, articulations of black selfhood. From the classical healthy mind-in-body ideal to the disabled physique, the portrayals of black physicality in the literature analyzed here offer a striking range of strategic approaches to creating a nineteenth-century politics of well-being opposed to as well as independent of medically and legally informed systems of subjugation. These authors’ wide-ranging analyses of black well-being expose the instability of national and colonial, social and geopolitical constructs and the mythologies that support them, such as, for example, American exceptionalism, the civilizing enterprise of imperial Britain, and colonial Canada’s role as a safe haven from American slavery and racism. Their considerations of well-being, a fundamental, desirable aspect of selfhood, demonstrate the broad and complex scope of their early-to-mid-nineteenth-century black political philosophy. Their varied articulations bolster the need for an urgent reassessment of our twenty-first-century approaches to biopolitics, health, law, literature, personhood, and humanness toward the development of theories and models of ethical practice that truly account for the contextually discursive composition of the self.

Ann Petry (1908–1997) achieved prominence during a period in which few black women were published with regularity in America. Her novels Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1988), along with various short stories and nonfiction, poignantly described the struggles and triumphs of middle-class blacks living in primarily white communities. Petry’s ancestors, the James family, served as inspiration for much of her fiction. This collection of more than four hundred family letters, edited by Petry’s daughter, is an engaging portrait of black family life from the 1890s to the early twentieth century, a period not often documented by African American voices. Petry’s maternal grandfather, Willis Samuel James, was a slave taught by his children to read and write. He believed “the best place for the negro is as near the white man as he can get,” and followed that “truth,” working as coachman for a Connecticut governor and buying a house in a white neighborhood in Hartford. Willis had sixteen children by three wives. The letters in this collection are from him and his second wife, Anna E. Houston James, and five of Anna’s children, of whom novelist Petry’s mother, Bertha James Lane, was the eldest. History is made and remade by the availability of new documents, sources, and interpretations. This book contributes a great deal to this process. The experiences of the James family as documented in their letters challenge representations of black people at the turn of the century.

Social and political change is impossible in the absence of gifted male charismatic leadership—this is the fiction that shaped African American culture throughout the twentieth century. If we understand this, this book tells us, we will better appreciate the dramatic variations within both the modern black freedom struggle and the black literary tradition. By considering leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Barack Obama as both historical personages and narrative inventions of contemporary American culture, this book brings to the study of black politics the tools of intertextual narrative analysis as well as deconstruction and close reading. Examining a number of literary restagings of black leadership in African American fiction by W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, William Melvin Kelley, Paul Beatty, and Toni Morrison, the book demonstrates how African American literature has contested charisma as a structuring fiction of modern black politics.

“Sasha” was the code name adopted by Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay (1889–1948) to foil investigations of his life and work. Over a period of two decades, the FBI, U.S. State Department, British police and intelligence, and French law enforcement and colonial authorities took turns harassing McKay, an openly gay, Marxist, Jamaican expatriate who had left the United States and was living in Europe. This study of four of McKay's texts—a literary, cultural, and historical analysis to address the multilayered “queer black anarchism” in McKay's writings—argues that McKay's “fringe” perspective not only targeted him for investigation but also contributed to a declining literary reputation. Perceived as mystifying and unacceptable because of his dedication to communism, McKay is perplexing and difficult to classify within the traditional constructs of the Harlem Renaissance. This book analyzes three of the most important works in McKay's career—the Jazz Age bestseller Home to Harlem, the négritude manifesto Banjo, and the unpublished Romance in Marseille. The book uncovers ways in which Home to Harlem assembles a home-front queer black anarchism, and treats Banjo as a novel that portrays Marxist internationalist sexual dissidence. It assesses the consequence of McKay's landmark Romance in Marseille, a text that is, despite its absence from broad public access for nearly 80 years, conceivably the most significant early black Diaspora text. Finally, it examines McKay's extensive FBI file and his late-1930s autobiography,A Long Way from Home, in which McKay disguises his past as a means of eluding his harassers.

A daring cultural and literary studies investigation, this book explores the legacy of unresolved grief produced by ongoing racial oppression and resistance in the United States. Using analysis of literature, drama, musical performance, and film, the book demonstrates how rituals of racialization and resistance transfer and transform grief discreetly across time, consolidating racial identities and communities along the way. It also argues that this form of impossible mourning binds racialized identities across time and social space by way of cultural resistance efforts. The book develops the concept of “cultural melancholy” as a critical response to scholarship that calls for the clinical separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis; excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures; and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic inquiry and theorization. In doing so, the book weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues—psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective—for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency.

Why did African American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the 19th century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the centre of this book’s examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. The book is a literary study, but also a social and intellectual history—a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan has called “the Dark Ages of recent American history.” Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, the book argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine’s happiness and economic prosperity. More importantly, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative—a domestic allegory—about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked in these novels, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African Americans’ collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into consummations of civil liberty.

Each Hour Redeem will be the first monograph to focus on how time has been represented materially, politically, and philosophically throughout the African American literary tradition. It therefore offers a unified, though not a uniform, model through which to understand that tradition. This book argues that “strategic anachronism,” the use of prior literary forms to explore contemporary political realities and injustices, characterizes much African American literature, as in Walter Mosley’s recent use of hard-boiled detective fiction; it argues, by contrast, that “strategic presentism” characterizes the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance and the two movements’ investment in present-day political potentialities, as in Hughes’s and Baraka’s use of the jazz of their respective eras for their poetic form and content. Overall, Political Fictions argues that across genre and era, African American writers have shown how time and justice work together as interdependent “political fictions,” to adapt a useful phrase from Pauline Hopkins’s 1900 novel, Contending Forces, wherein her African American hero declares, “Constitutional equity is a political fiction."