Two years ago I inherited a project at the college where I teach. The brainchild of my former colleague, Mary Brown, the project is a precursor to many state, county, city, and library programs that attempt to bridge the literacy gap in the community by selecting a book for an entire community to read. The project at my college is "The Book Bridge Project."
This academic year we will be reading The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper. This is an intriguing story that connects those Africans who left the United States for Liberia with their most recent trials and tribulations during and following the last coup in Liberia. Cooper's memoir is of a girl and woman of the privileged class; however, it will help some U.S. Africans understand the tensions inherent between former enslaved and free U.S. Africans returning to the continent and indigenous Africans.
Tune in to this blog or go to Book Bridge Book Bridge on Facebook for a list of events this fall.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Laurence Fishburne in "Thurgood" and Late Spring and Reprieve
The taste of late spring on the skin is better than homemade, hand churned ice cream or a cupcake from Buzz Bakery in Alexandria, Virginia. Spring is delicious this year, even when the air becomes heavy with pollution and the weathermen remind us that it is code orange, which is a euphemism for if you are a breathing human, don't go outside without grave consequences to your respiratory system. Although the weathermen only warn the young, elderly, and persons already suffering from respiratory ailments to avoid prolonged exposure to the air outside, code orange days can affect anyone. So tell me why do I see folks jogging on these days in the middle of the afternoon with the heat index at 95 degrees or higher?
Who ever thought that we, supposedly as the most advanced and intelligent species on Earth, would create hazardous conditions where we live. Even primitive woman, I believe, knew better than to defecate near her food source. Yet, we continue to defile the Earth, defecate in our own home, and pray that somehow the Earth will heal itself.
As my poet friend reminds me, this is a nutty place, like "Blade Runner" revisited. It is a nutty place, but I don't recall a time in my life when it wasn't: from the paint factory that blew up near my home when I was four or five sending my baby sister sailing off the dining room table to the floor (I think she was perched on the table because either my father or mother was tying her shoes) to the film of black soot that used to settle on the car whenever I ventured to southwest Detroit, a neighborhood that was a toxic wasteland when I was a child.
Environmental racism, pollution, defilement of the Earth--humans, being all too human. But we defile our bodies too with all kinds of toxic substances, thus can we really expect humans to honor the Earth when we will not honor our bodies? Hum!
Anyway it is a lovely late spring night in metro DC. The air is crisp and cool, the slugs are as thick and long as my middle finger, and the sunflowers on my dining room table are wondering why someone cut them from their stalks to be sold in the local grocery store.
Laurence Fishburne is phenomenal in "Thurgood" at the Kennedy Center. While the script could have been more engaging, Fishburne's ability to stay in character for 90 minutes reminds me why I have always regarded him as an incredible stage actor, remembering the times when I saw him perform in Atlanta when the town sported one or two repertory theaters. Check out Juan Williams book on Marshall.
Just received my brochure for the 2010-2011 lineup at the Arena Stage in DC. Of interest to me, and perhaps to some of you, are the stagings of "Every Tongue Confess" by Marcus Gardley and directed by Kenny Leon, "Let Me Down Easy" by Anna Deavere Smith, and "Ruined" by Lynn Nottage. Check out the complete season line up at http://www.arenastage.org/about/news/1011-season.shtml
See you at the theater next season.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Facebook Dissed Me, Censored My Speech
I normally do not engage in political discussions on the Internet, and I often reserve these conversations for having with only close friends and family.
See here is the deal. I was censored at a very young age to keep my thoughts about politics, but not religion, to myself. My mother used to tell me stories about her cousin who was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee when this cousin was a professor at Temple University. While I have not attempted to verify the veracity of my mother's statements (simply because everything that I have verified that she has told me thus far has been true), her cautionary tale kept me in check.
When I enrolled in undergrad at Wayne State University and came home with one of the leftist, if not Marxist, publications, my mother again gave me a cautionary tale about how my activity in any leftist ---particularly Marxist, Communist, or Socialist--organization could jeopardize my father's security clearance.
When I finally transferred and completed my undergraduate degree at Georgia State University and had to sign an oath as a student that I would not engage in treasons acts against the U.S. government (remember Georgia seceded from the nation), I better understood my mother's concerns.
But the benefits of my entrenched habit of keeping a lid on political activity and discourse that revealed my streak of radical thought became crystal clear while on an interview with the U.S. State department when an official asked me, "have you ever published anything that advocated an overthrow of the U.S. government?; have you ever published anything that was critical of the U.S. government?; have you ever participated in any activity that advocated overthrowing the U.S. government?" I proudly answered NO to all inquiries about being critical of the U.S. government in any public forum.
So guess how surprised I was when Facebook warned me that my language in a private chat with a high school buddy could be abusive or harassing to others. What were we talking about? Well, my high school buddy innocently said, "I'm watching Fox News. They are too much." Or something to that effect. In response to his comment, I replied that "whites are going to be a political minority, and the 2010 census will reveal that they are a racial minority too. It will be nice for blacks to be part of a majority culture. Perhaps we can become a political majority too." Or something to this effect.
I thought the conversation was pretty benign. This is one of those friends who is like family, so he has sat at my mother's dining room table and engaged in those heated political debates that were part of the discourse in our household, with jazz playing in the background and usually good food on the table. Thus, he knows how intense the conversation can get, which is why an exchange like the one above is extremely benign for us.
Hum, Facebook censors speech. Now I am curious about how many right wing, gun toting, militia, anti-govenment groups have Facebook pages and are actively engaged in posting news feeds and other information on Facebook. If you know of any, do send me their names because it is time to compose a letter to Facebook.
I hate to shut down my Facebook page because it is my main source of contact with my younger cousins, nieces, and nephews: those generation X, Y, and Z folks (are we at Z yet?). Not engaging in Facebook will cut me off from these relatives. I know you are asking: why don't you just call or write them? Well, they don't call or write, they text and interact on Facebook. Also, my students are more likely to "hit me up" on Facebook to ask a question about a course than they are to come to office hours.
Facebook has a right to protect members against harassing and abusive speech. But I also have the right to cease communicating with someone in a private chat who is verbally harassing or abusing me. I wonder if this is a First Amendment issue. I wonder which words are programmed into Facebook's software that spawn that pink warning sign about abusive and harassing language. I wonder if I hurtle anti-black and racial epithets and invectives will Facebook display that pink warning sign. I wonder if Facebook is using the color pink because they think pink is a less offensive color.
Well, I wonder. But I do know that there is something wrong about the pink warning sign that subsequently warned me that my chat would be shut down for five minutes. It also caused me to wonder where is the line between critical inquiry and abusive speech. Perhaps I will walk to this line again and step over it just to see how quickly my speech is censored. The problem is, I am unsure where the line is drawn.
Certainly, I have been quiet long enough and have not had any reason to be sanctioned or censored because of my speech. But perhaps this is the problem. Perhaps it is time for me to speak up. But as I recall, I was always getting in trouble with my English teachers and professors about something I read or said, and I thought that what I was saying or was reading was benign too. I suppose it is all about perspective. If you are reading Franz Fanon in a public school in the 10th grade, this could be a problem to some folks.
Okay, if you know of any right wing, militia, racist, anti-government groups on Facebook, please forward their names to me at michelelsimms@yahoo.com. Let the research and protest begin!
Friday, February 12, 2010
Essay on Book "Deans and Truants" by Gene Andrew Jarrett
Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature by Gene Andrew Jarrett. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. ISBN: 13: 978-0-8122-3973-7; ISBN: 10:0-8122-3973-3
It is Not Black Enough: Anomalous Texts and U.S. African Writers
In an era when some literary critics and scholars are calling for the end of race as we know it, and arguing that the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States signals a post-racial milieu, Jarrett’s book seems not only timely but also in conversation with an ever-increasing perception of a certain kind of black racial hegemony that marginalizes black artists, critics, and intellectuals who espouse centrist politics that ignore or minimize the impact of race on U.S. Africans. In short, Jarrett’s argument in Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (2007) rests upon the sole premise that from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s, certain male writers and critics defined the aesthetic terrain upon which African American writers could create imaginative texts. Jarrett regards these critics as the deans of the African American literary aesthetics, while U.S. African writers who did not toe the aesthetic line are considered truants. Such writers, according to Jarrett, “break the chains of reality by writing anomalous fiction that resisted and sometimes critiqued the conventional restrictions of authentic African American literature to racial realism” [author’s emphasis] (1). Jarrett identifies William Dean Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka as the deans. In contrast, he cites that Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the artist Henry Ossawa Turner, George Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison produce works that classify their texts and themselves as truants. Although Jarrett’s premise appears to be tantalizing, serious fallacies challenge the credulity of his argument that I will examine below.
Early in his treatise Jarrett cites Ward Connerly, who contends that black writers are “racially profiled” (2-3) in the publishing industry and bookstores. Likewise, Jarrett also questions the efficacy of having sections of bookstores exclusively devoted to African American literature. Both statements challenge how the publishing and bookselling industries package as well as market and at times exploit U.S. African writers. This is not a new issue and is not adequately dealt with in Jarrett’s examination of the relations between publishers and U.S. African writers. Nonetheless, Jarrett framing his work with a quote from and reference to Ward Connerly lays the foundation for a project that unjustly accuses certain writers as black ideologues and perpetuates whites as being devoid of race, more human than Africans, and universal, thereby ignoring the realities of the market and the lack of power that U.S. Africans have both inside and outside the publishing industry. Marginalization or “racial profiling” of U.S. African writers by the publishing industry has been grappled with by many writers since the beginning of the African American literary canon. One only has to recall the circumstances of production, the degree to which Phillis Wheatley was interrogated by a court of prominent whites, and the themes and imagery of many poems by Wheatley to recall that African writers, since the nascency of producing texts in the colonies to the present day, have neither dealt exclusively with what Jarrett terms “racial realism” nor have they necessarily maintained control over the aesthetic timbre of their works.
While these insights that initiate Jarrett’s text are controversial and establish the possibilities for an engaged analysis of some of the issues that beset U.S. African writers, he elides these issues by not thoroughly interrogating the power and role of the publishing industry in defining and dictating the production and distribution of texts by U.S. African writers in a capitalist economy. That there has always been a paucity of publishing houses owned and operated by U.S. Africans complicates issues regarding production and distribution, but more importantly this lack also limits the aesthetic possibilities for U.S. African writers also remains undisputed by many U.S. African scholars, critics, book reviewers, and the writers themselves. But this issue is somewhat ignored, or unsatisfactorily dealt with, in Jarrett’s analysis. Further, Jarrett ultimately excludes novels by U.S. African women writers from major concern and examination in his study of racial realism who, I argue, have always constructed subversive and anomalous texts because of their lack of power within the publishing industry and as well as their marginalization within U.S. society. Jarrett dedicates his book to Claudia Tate, a feminist and advocate of recovering and critically assessing the place of black women’s literature within the African American canon, and whose work Jarrett appears to be heavily reliant upon. However, the over-representation of U.S. African male writers in general in Jarrett’s study speaks loudly to the selective nature of his work rather than to the historical accuracy of the literature; or to Jarrett’s desire to trump Tate’s stupendous work.
Jarrett begins his study by examining the historical record and evoking Tate’s study Psychoanalysis and Black Novels (1998). He initiates the historical analysis of African American literature by privileging William Dean Howells as the dean of realism and the person who ultimately determined the parameters within which U.S. Africans writers would aesthetically abide, beginning with Paul Laurence Dunbar, so Jarrett asserts. Jarrett contends that because of Howells, characterology and an author’s phenotype have over-determined whether or not the text is considered black or African American. He evokes Tate’s Psychoanalyis and argues that Tate’s theoretical foundation for her interrogation of anomalous texts by African American writers is unstable because it is based on the readers’ “vague feelings of emotional discomfort” (qtd. in Jarrett 13). In addition to these “vague feelings,” Tate further asserts that her project examines those texts that “do not abide by traditional rules of racial representation and therefore do not make racial politics their centermost concern” (7). Jarrett’s choice to reduce Tate’s precise and complex thesis to one statement suggests his duplicitous and selective reading of her work.
Nonetheless, Jarrett argues that he hopes to accomplish what he claims that Tate does not do in Psychoanalysis by examining the “protocols of race” (here he appropriates Tate’s language) and how the aforementioned deans of African American literature demanded adherence to such protocols by African American writers, thereby marginalizing those texts that did not adhere to such racial protocols. According to Jarrett: "[b]oth traditional and revisionist anthologies of African American literature, however, have kept in place something that continues to authenticate black-authored literature. By clinging to it, they have ignored the history of many black authors, some indeed canonical, who have tried to transcend or write beyond it. That thing is racial realism" (6- 7). Jarrett’s interrogation of what he terms racial realism and anomalous texts by African American writers initiates with examining how Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s photo on the front of his second collection of published poetry Majors and Minors (1895) helped to characterize Dunbar as a true African, unlike Charles Chesnutt, whose phenotype according to Howells, allowed him to be mistaken as something other than an African. Jarrett argues that the purported dean of realism, William Dean Howell’s, seeing Dunbar’s photograph, grasped hold of Dunbar’s allegedly African legitimacy, and perpetuated making phenotype, signifying Africanness, the requisite for experiencing and writing the authentic U.S. African experience. Hence, Howells becomes the arbiter of black literature and Jarrett fails sufficiently to analyze these power dynamics inherent in a U.S. European establishing who is a true African and what the aesthetics for Africanness will be in the black literary imagination. A U.S. European, rather than a U.S. African, incarcerates the literary imagination of a U.S. African as well as the continuous captivity of his humanity. According to Jarrett, in an effort to escape the strictures of racial realism into which Dunbar perceived himself being pigeon-holed by Howells and ostensibly the U.S. European publishing industry, Dunbar wrote and published his first novel, The Uncalled (1898). Jarrett contends that The Uncalled challenges and escapes racial realism in its portrayal of all white major characters, as well as Dunbar’s concentration on regional, rather than racial, culture for the use of dialect. Jarrett argues that Dunbar’s decision to write outside of racial realism has marginalized this novel and prevented literary critics, unconsciously steeped in the discourse of racial realism, from seriously considering the merit of The Uncalled, thereby leaving Dunbar’s first published novel beyond the pale of canonical African American literature. However, what seriously needs to be addressed is not whether Dunbar’s novel is marginalized by contemporary arbiters of the African American literary canon because it reaches beyond the boundaries of racial realism, but whether the novel is a good piece of literature. While the criteria may be subjective, there are basic elements of good literature that remain undisputed. Of course, some of these elements are: does the writer tell a good story? Are the major characters developed? Is the narrative compelling? And does the novel hold readers’ interest? Jarrett argues that early reviews of The Uncalled were mostly positive; therefore, the ongoing marginalization of The Uncalled must be solely attributable to critics’ and scholars’ inability to read and analyze beyond the strictures of racial realism. But Dunbar’s novel has not withstood the test of time, not because it is an anomalous text as Jarrett argues, but rather because it is not representative of being one of Dunbar’s best novels. In fact, Dunbar does not reach his peak in terms of his ability to write a good novel until The Sport of the Gods (1902). Although this novel will qualify as adhering to Jarrett’s conception of racial realism, it is undisputedly a better novel than The Uncalled. For this reason more so than its adherence to racial realism, The Sport of the Gods is canonized.
While Dunbar may have written beyond racial realism in The Uncalled and examined dialect as a product of regional culture, Alain Locke, the alleged dean of the New Negro modernism according to Jarrett, in fact embraced dialect as not only authenticating the language of the black folk, but also as a way to imbue modernism with U.S. African realism. Under Locke, the strictures of racial realism begin to narrow, and visual art becomes subjected to its purview. Initially Jarrett’s position about Locke seems quite plausible given Locke’s primacy in allegedly ushering in the New Negro and Harlem Renaissance. However, one wonders how much more influence did Locke have than W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois not only penned “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), but along with Jessie Fauset he often controlled black writers’ and artists’ access to publication and income as editor of The Crisis magazine. Nonetheless, Jarrett examines Locke’s response to and dismissal of the work of the U.S. African artist Henry Ossawa Tanner because Tanner’s paintings did not support racial realism. Jarrett claims that Locke disregarded U.S. African artists and writers engaging in metropolitanism. Locke classified Tanner as such an artist. Tanner’s images of Europeans and landscape in his paintings as well as his “attraction to American ‘genre’ realism in the early to mid-1890s” in The Bagpipe Lesson (1892-93), The Banjo Lesson (1893), and The Thankful Poor (1894), according to Jarrett, did not merit Locke’s wholesale dismissal of Tanner as a U.S. African painter of merit (Jarrett 83) . Jarrett writes: “Locke’s dismissal of these painting as shallow, if not also stereotypical, neglected their significant racial-political context and themes” (Jarrett 83). Jarrett argues that although Tanner engages in genre painting, he is working against the depiction of the U.S. African as minstrel, therefore adding both dignity and humanity to the image of the African in the late nineteenth century. Yet, an overwhelming majority of the paintings in Tanner’s oeuvre consists of biblical themes portraying Europeans rather than Africans. Jarrett contends that this seems to be one of the major reasons that Locke dismisses Tanner’s contribution to African American art of the period as well as Tanner’s objective to escape ghettoization in order to gain artistic freedom. Jarrett writes: “These paintings ostensibly avoid explicit representations of blacks in order to tell more universal stories of humanity” (86). Here Jarrett posits images of Europeans, rather than of Africans, as “more universal stories of humanity,” thus privileging paradigms that Locke sought to deconstruct and that Jarrett himself seems to be advocating. Or, he is suggesting that it was more politically astute and tactful for U.S. African artists, like Tanner, to cling to a European aesthetic and imagery to garner both critical acclaim and financial reward. Jarrett’s argument regarding Tanner is unconvincing and irrelevant in a critical study about literature. Eventually Jarrett contrasts Locke and Tanner as a way to buttress his argument regarding Locke’s adherence to racial realism despite the fact that it is a matter of historical record that Locke was also charged by Zora Neale Hurston to “knowing nothing about Negroes.”
Yet, if there is a writer from this period whom Jarrett argues takes Locke, and others like Charles Johnson and James Weldon Johnson, to task for their demand of and adherence to racial realism, it is the satirist George Schuyler. Jarrett claims that Schuyler “began an iconoclastic campaign” against Locke and his “ambassadorial status” (93). From his dispersion of calling blacks “lamp-black Anglo Saxons” to his promulgation of cultural monism in the United States, Schuyler’s belief that “color is incidental” (Jarrett 104) is underscored in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926), to which Langston Hughes responds in his essay “Negro Art and the Racial Mountain” (1926). Obviously, Schuyler is one of those canonical writers, like Dunbar, whom Jarrett contends has been marginalized because of his attempts to skate the doctrines of racial realism. While Schuyler’s essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” appears in both the 1st and 2nd editions of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the late Nellie Y. McKay, Jarrett is correct that no excerpt from Schuyler’s novel Black No More; Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free (1931) appears in either edition of the Norton Anthology. Finally, Jarrett contends that for Schuyler only class and regionalism demarcate “Negro” culture or American culture, and not race. But race is inextricably and overwhelmingly linked to both class and culture, at least in the United States; and too many U.S. Africans existed within a caste system well into the late twentieth century. Schuyler’s satire of race in Black No More culminates his position about the transience of race, a transience that he detaches from historical, social, and economic realities and one in which only a person of relative privilege could imagine and write. Schuyler’s marriage to a U.S. European woman suggests the unspoken challenges he had with negotiating both the racial realism of his existence as a U.S. African and in his imaginative texts during the 1920s and 1930s in a social climate that made it difficult for interracial marriages to exist without considerable public disapproval. When the critic Dorothy Van Doren negatively reviews Schuyler’s Black No More because “the novel tries to debunk the values that she and other traditionalists of Negro art held so dear,” it is Josephine Schuyler, the wife of George Schuyler, who responds to such criticism arguing that the novel is “an allegory of how the African American novel could cross the taxonomic color line from ‘racial literature’ to ‘national or sectional literature’” (qtd. in Jarrett 108). Hence, it is Schuyler’s U.S. European wife who ultimately voices the place, role, and possibilities for racial, that is, African American literature.
If any of the deans attempts to deconstruct the relations among class, race and culture, no one does this better than Richard Wright, while he simultaneously, according to Jarrett, erects strict boundaries that made it nearly impossible for African American writers who were his contemporaries to breach the tenets of racial realism, although undoubtedly, some did. Jarrett contends that as a result of Wright’s prescriptive in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) and the subsequent commercial success of Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), two aesthetic camps evolved. These camps consisted of those writers who considered racial realism a handicap towards Americanizing Afro-American literature and those who promulgated the universal possibilities of Wright’s work, especially through his character, Bigger Thomas, who becomes emblematic of all oppressed people. Jarrett argues that Frank Yerby, whom he considers the truant in Wright’s generation of writers, joins the former group. After unsuccessful attempts to enter into the school as a racial realist and embrace the ideologies ostensibly promulgated by Wright, Yerby insists in a letter written to Michel Fabre regarding Yerby’s relationship with Wright “the race problem was not a theme for me” (qtd. in Jarrett 143). “[Yerby’s] first published novel, The Foxes of Harrow, signifies a philosophical turn toward an anomalous aesthetic and away from the racial realism of the period” [author’s emphasis] (Jarrett 144).
Yerby’s insistence on writing anomalous novels that do not examine Africans or persons of African descent as central characters substantiates, argues Jarrett, not only Yerby being excised from the African American literary canon, but also the inattention that critics have paid to his oeuvre. While Jarrett’s claims might have merit, one only has to consider that rarely does popular literature, particularly “costume novels of historical romance” (Jarrett 145), become the fodder of academic canons contemporaneously. Perhaps the jury is still out on Yerby’s oeuvre since Jarrett does not consider broader cultural or political conventions that also transcend race; for instance, a writer’s desire to be economically self sufficient and writing to the market that has historically been perceived as white and middle class. For example, Jarrett fails to consider how Wright’s own aesthetics about racial realism were radically altered throughout his career and is evidenced in his novel Savage Holiday (1954). Not only does Jarrett not address this novel at all, but he ignores the work that Tate does in Psychoanalysis in her analysis of Wright’s anomalous novel and how the novel like Wright’s The Long Dream (1958) “accentuates [Wright’s] personal and unsocialized desire” (Tate 9) . Thus Jarrett’s positioning of Wright as a dean, yet ignoring Wright’s own desire to break out of the tenets of racial realism, makes Jarrett’s argument about Yerby tenuous at best.
Moving from Wright and Yerby’s relationship, the last dean and truant relationship that Jarrett examines is the one purportedly to be between Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison during the 1980s. Jarrett casts Baraka as the omnipotent voice of the Black Arts Movement: an editor, critic, poet, dramatist, and essayist who—along with Addison Gayle, Larry Neal, and Hoyt Fuller— levied a prescriptive for U.S. African art and a Black Aesthetic that not only re-inscribed racial realism, he argues, but also ups the ante. Much ink has been spilled by critics regarding the limitations of the black aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement, as well as the
movement’s and Baraka’s discourses of misogyny, bigotry, and homophobia. That Jarrett would continue to argue the impact of these aesthetics of the late 1960s and 1970s on Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif,” published in 1983 in Confirmation: An Anthology of AfricanAmerican, co- edited by Baraka and his wife, Amina Baraka, either pronounces Jarrett’s misperception of Baraka’s sphere of influence or Jarrett’s inability to examine, or his ability to ignore, how Baraka himself, by 1983, had begun to repudiate his earlier discourse of racial realism and anti-feminism. In “Recitatif,” Morrison successfully problematizes the use of language that enables readers easily to identify which race the characters are. However, “Recitatif” is neither Morrison’s first nor last engagement with expanding language and images beyond their racial strictures. She also attempts to do this in one of her least critically successful novels, Tar Baby (1981), as Morrison examines class hierarchy within U.S. and Caribbean African communities. Far too many critics ignore the intraracial class antagonisms that exist between the protagonist Jadine and Son, the anti-hero, as if class is not an inherent element in U.S. African literature. That Morrison would expand the Jadine characterology one step further by writing “Recitatif,” which is devoid of language and images that will ensure the main characters’ racial origins for the reader, speaks more to Morrison’s own quest to deconstruct language than it does to her conscious desire to write outside of racial realism, as Jarrett suggests. For by 1983, is it not appropriate to at least entertain the idea that non-Africans are raced, too? Thus to write beyond racial realism in 1983 is to deconstruct race completely and acknowledge the way that race, itself, is not just non-Europeans, but is also a social construct. This seems to be the main impetus of Morrison’s short story rather than her writing beyond racial realism, which only seems to apply to U.S. African writers, black racial characterology, and protocols widely accepted by readers as signifiers of black reality. Although Jarrett employs a very canonical approach in examining the aesthetic power that Baraka wielded during the 1960s and 1970s, to establish Baraka as a dean is also to ignore Baraka’s own delving into writing beyond racial realism during his beat period when he was” heavily influenced by the white avant-garde” (xviii) poets, according to William J. Harris, editor of The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1991).
Ultimately, Jarrett’s study is about culture. It is also about who exercised influence over, and representation and dissemination of, U.S. African visual art and literature from the late-nineteenth century to the 1980s. Jarrett’s disingenuousness study begins with the emblazoning of the frontispiece of his book with Claudia Tate’s name, to the errors in the endnotes of chapter as well as the incorrect date for Wright’s expatriation from the United States to Paris.1 Jarrett capitalizes on Tate’s premise about the protocols of race, that he dubs “racial realism,” which is so well constructed by Tate, but without the tenacity and perseverance, fine acuity for detail, and superb research that Tate was known for throughout her career. As Tate argues so pointedly:
that the broadly held critical consensus about Negro literature during Wright’s lifetime [are]: race and Negro are mutually signifying; race is the central preoccupation of the black imagination; a nonracial novel is one with white characters; and presumably, only nonracial novels address so-called universal themes” (87) suggests the challenge that U.S. African writers had with negotiating both the breadth of their imaginations and garnering financial recompense, since all of the male writers that Jarrett studies sought to support themselves solely by their pens. What continues to be problematic is the inability to interrogate the impact of economics on the aesthetic choices that Dunbar, Tanner, Schuyler, and Yerby made. I exclude Morrison because she worked full time as an editor for Random House in 1983. And even after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 hercareer as a professor suggests that financial security had not compelled her to remove herself from the everyday world of work in the same way that the aforementioned male writers and artist desired to do. While it is unnecessarily within the purview of scholarship to honor one’s elders, particularly one whom Jarrett purports to have compelled his awareness into how to approach the “anomalous” works of fiction that his study addresses, Jarrett dismisses Tate’s insightful analysis as easily as he ignores the works of Chester Himes (Yerby’s and Wright’s contemporary), as well as women writers like Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Andrea Lee, and Ntozake Shange who have published anomalous texts, or have iconoclastic approaches to their writings, that continue to beg critical attention. After all, as Houston Baker so succinctly stated nearly three decades ago in The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature (1980) in his analysis of not only black literature but what he terms the “anthropology of art,” that, “[…] art must be studied with an attention to the methods and findings of discipline which enable one to address such concerns as the status of the artistic object, the relationship of art to other cultural systems, and the nature and function of artistic creation and perception in a given society” (xvi). Jarrett’s project fails to satisfy these minimalist criteria. Finally, it is unfortunate that Tate’s death prevents her from responding to Jarrett’s work; however, I am certain that her response would not have been a positive one.
Footnote
1. Jarrett contends that Wright permanently leaves New York City for Paris in 1946. But according to Wright’s biographer, Michel Fabre, Wright only visits Paris in 1946, and it is in 1947 when he permanently expatriates to Paris with his wife, Ellen and daughter, Julia. See Fabre 313-24.
Works Cited
Baker, Jr. Houston A. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Translated from the French by Isabel Barzum. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1973.
Harris, William J., ed. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991.
Jarrett, Gene Andrew. Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
It is Not Black Enough: Anomalous Texts and U.S. African Writers
In an era when some literary critics and scholars are calling for the end of race as we know it, and arguing that the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States signals a post-racial milieu, Jarrett’s book seems not only timely but also in conversation with an ever-increasing perception of a certain kind of black racial hegemony that marginalizes black artists, critics, and intellectuals who espouse centrist politics that ignore or minimize the impact of race on U.S. Africans. In short, Jarrett’s argument in Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (2007) rests upon the sole premise that from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s, certain male writers and critics defined the aesthetic terrain upon which African American writers could create imaginative texts. Jarrett regards these critics as the deans of the African American literary aesthetics, while U.S. African writers who did not toe the aesthetic line are considered truants. Such writers, according to Jarrett, “break the chains of reality by writing anomalous fiction that resisted and sometimes critiqued the conventional restrictions of authentic African American literature to racial realism” [author’s emphasis] (1). Jarrett identifies William Dean Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka as the deans. In contrast, he cites that Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the artist Henry Ossawa Turner, George Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison produce works that classify their texts and themselves as truants. Although Jarrett’s premise appears to be tantalizing, serious fallacies challenge the credulity of his argument that I will examine below.
Early in his treatise Jarrett cites Ward Connerly, who contends that black writers are “racially profiled” (2-3) in the publishing industry and bookstores. Likewise, Jarrett also questions the efficacy of having sections of bookstores exclusively devoted to African American literature. Both statements challenge how the publishing and bookselling industries package as well as market and at times exploit U.S. African writers. This is not a new issue and is not adequately dealt with in Jarrett’s examination of the relations between publishers and U.S. African writers. Nonetheless, Jarrett framing his work with a quote from and reference to Ward Connerly lays the foundation for a project that unjustly accuses certain writers as black ideologues and perpetuates whites as being devoid of race, more human than Africans, and universal, thereby ignoring the realities of the market and the lack of power that U.S. Africans have both inside and outside the publishing industry. Marginalization or “racial profiling” of U.S. African writers by the publishing industry has been grappled with by many writers since the beginning of the African American literary canon. One only has to recall the circumstances of production, the degree to which Phillis Wheatley was interrogated by a court of prominent whites, and the themes and imagery of many poems by Wheatley to recall that African writers, since the nascency of producing texts in the colonies to the present day, have neither dealt exclusively with what Jarrett terms “racial realism” nor have they necessarily maintained control over the aesthetic timbre of their works.
While these insights that initiate Jarrett’s text are controversial and establish the possibilities for an engaged analysis of some of the issues that beset U.S. African writers, he elides these issues by not thoroughly interrogating the power and role of the publishing industry in defining and dictating the production and distribution of texts by U.S. African writers in a capitalist economy. That there has always been a paucity of publishing houses owned and operated by U.S. Africans complicates issues regarding production and distribution, but more importantly this lack also limits the aesthetic possibilities for U.S. African writers also remains undisputed by many U.S. African scholars, critics, book reviewers, and the writers themselves. But this issue is somewhat ignored, or unsatisfactorily dealt with, in Jarrett’s analysis. Further, Jarrett ultimately excludes novels by U.S. African women writers from major concern and examination in his study of racial realism who, I argue, have always constructed subversive and anomalous texts because of their lack of power within the publishing industry and as well as their marginalization within U.S. society. Jarrett dedicates his book to Claudia Tate, a feminist and advocate of recovering and critically assessing the place of black women’s literature within the African American canon, and whose work Jarrett appears to be heavily reliant upon. However, the over-representation of U.S. African male writers in general in Jarrett’s study speaks loudly to the selective nature of his work rather than to the historical accuracy of the literature; or to Jarrett’s desire to trump Tate’s stupendous work.
Jarrett begins his study by examining the historical record and evoking Tate’s study Psychoanalysis and Black Novels (1998). He initiates the historical analysis of African American literature by privileging William Dean Howells as the dean of realism and the person who ultimately determined the parameters within which U.S. Africans writers would aesthetically abide, beginning with Paul Laurence Dunbar, so Jarrett asserts. Jarrett contends that because of Howells, characterology and an author’s phenotype have over-determined whether or not the text is considered black or African American. He evokes Tate’s Psychoanalyis and argues that Tate’s theoretical foundation for her interrogation of anomalous texts by African American writers is unstable because it is based on the readers’ “vague feelings of emotional discomfort” (qtd. in Jarrett 13). In addition to these “vague feelings,” Tate further asserts that her project examines those texts that “do not abide by traditional rules of racial representation and therefore do not make racial politics their centermost concern” (7). Jarrett’s choice to reduce Tate’s precise and complex thesis to one statement suggests his duplicitous and selective reading of her work.
Nonetheless, Jarrett argues that he hopes to accomplish what he claims that Tate does not do in Psychoanalysis by examining the “protocols of race” (here he appropriates Tate’s language) and how the aforementioned deans of African American literature demanded adherence to such protocols by African American writers, thereby marginalizing those texts that did not adhere to such racial protocols. According to Jarrett: "[b]oth traditional and revisionist anthologies of African American literature, however, have kept in place something that continues to authenticate black-authored literature. By clinging to it, they have ignored the history of many black authors, some indeed canonical, who have tried to transcend or write beyond it. That thing is racial realism" (6- 7). Jarrett’s interrogation of what he terms racial realism and anomalous texts by African American writers initiates with examining how Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s photo on the front of his second collection of published poetry Majors and Minors (1895) helped to characterize Dunbar as a true African, unlike Charles Chesnutt, whose phenotype according to Howells, allowed him to be mistaken as something other than an African. Jarrett argues that the purported dean of realism, William Dean Howell’s, seeing Dunbar’s photograph, grasped hold of Dunbar’s allegedly African legitimacy, and perpetuated making phenotype, signifying Africanness, the requisite for experiencing and writing the authentic U.S. African experience. Hence, Howells becomes the arbiter of black literature and Jarrett fails sufficiently to analyze these power dynamics inherent in a U.S. European establishing who is a true African and what the aesthetics for Africanness will be in the black literary imagination. A U.S. European, rather than a U.S. African, incarcerates the literary imagination of a U.S. African as well as the continuous captivity of his humanity. According to Jarrett, in an effort to escape the strictures of racial realism into which Dunbar perceived himself being pigeon-holed by Howells and ostensibly the U.S. European publishing industry, Dunbar wrote and published his first novel, The Uncalled (1898). Jarrett contends that The Uncalled challenges and escapes racial realism in its portrayal of all white major characters, as well as Dunbar’s concentration on regional, rather than racial, culture for the use of dialect. Jarrett argues that Dunbar’s decision to write outside of racial realism has marginalized this novel and prevented literary critics, unconsciously steeped in the discourse of racial realism, from seriously considering the merit of The Uncalled, thereby leaving Dunbar’s first published novel beyond the pale of canonical African American literature. However, what seriously needs to be addressed is not whether Dunbar’s novel is marginalized by contemporary arbiters of the African American literary canon because it reaches beyond the boundaries of racial realism, but whether the novel is a good piece of literature. While the criteria may be subjective, there are basic elements of good literature that remain undisputed. Of course, some of these elements are: does the writer tell a good story? Are the major characters developed? Is the narrative compelling? And does the novel hold readers’ interest? Jarrett argues that early reviews of The Uncalled were mostly positive; therefore, the ongoing marginalization of The Uncalled must be solely attributable to critics’ and scholars’ inability to read and analyze beyond the strictures of racial realism. But Dunbar’s novel has not withstood the test of time, not because it is an anomalous text as Jarrett argues, but rather because it is not representative of being one of Dunbar’s best novels. In fact, Dunbar does not reach his peak in terms of his ability to write a good novel until The Sport of the Gods (1902). Although this novel will qualify as adhering to Jarrett’s conception of racial realism, it is undisputedly a better novel than The Uncalled. For this reason more so than its adherence to racial realism, The Sport of the Gods is canonized.
While Dunbar may have written beyond racial realism in The Uncalled and examined dialect as a product of regional culture, Alain Locke, the alleged dean of the New Negro modernism according to Jarrett, in fact embraced dialect as not only authenticating the language of the black folk, but also as a way to imbue modernism with U.S. African realism. Under Locke, the strictures of racial realism begin to narrow, and visual art becomes subjected to its purview. Initially Jarrett’s position about Locke seems quite plausible given Locke’s primacy in allegedly ushering in the New Negro and Harlem Renaissance. However, one wonders how much more influence did Locke have than W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois not only penned “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), but along with Jessie Fauset he often controlled black writers’ and artists’ access to publication and income as editor of The Crisis magazine. Nonetheless, Jarrett examines Locke’s response to and dismissal of the work of the U.S. African artist Henry Ossawa Tanner because Tanner’s paintings did not support racial realism. Jarrett claims that Locke disregarded U.S. African artists and writers engaging in metropolitanism. Locke classified Tanner as such an artist. Tanner’s images of Europeans and landscape in his paintings as well as his “attraction to American ‘genre’ realism in the early to mid-1890s” in The Bagpipe Lesson (1892-93), The Banjo Lesson (1893), and The Thankful Poor (1894), according to Jarrett, did not merit Locke’s wholesale dismissal of Tanner as a U.S. African painter of merit (Jarrett 83) . Jarrett writes: “Locke’s dismissal of these painting as shallow, if not also stereotypical, neglected their significant racial-political context and themes” (Jarrett 83). Jarrett argues that although Tanner engages in genre painting, he is working against the depiction of the U.S. African as minstrel, therefore adding both dignity and humanity to the image of the African in the late nineteenth century. Yet, an overwhelming majority of the paintings in Tanner’s oeuvre consists of biblical themes portraying Europeans rather than Africans. Jarrett contends that this seems to be one of the major reasons that Locke dismisses Tanner’s contribution to African American art of the period as well as Tanner’s objective to escape ghettoization in order to gain artistic freedom. Jarrett writes: “These paintings ostensibly avoid explicit representations of blacks in order to tell more universal stories of humanity” (86). Here Jarrett posits images of Europeans, rather than of Africans, as “more universal stories of humanity,” thus privileging paradigms that Locke sought to deconstruct and that Jarrett himself seems to be advocating. Or, he is suggesting that it was more politically astute and tactful for U.S. African artists, like Tanner, to cling to a European aesthetic and imagery to garner both critical acclaim and financial reward. Jarrett’s argument regarding Tanner is unconvincing and irrelevant in a critical study about literature. Eventually Jarrett contrasts Locke and Tanner as a way to buttress his argument regarding Locke’s adherence to racial realism despite the fact that it is a matter of historical record that Locke was also charged by Zora Neale Hurston to “knowing nothing about Negroes.”
Yet, if there is a writer from this period whom Jarrett argues takes Locke, and others like Charles Johnson and James Weldon Johnson, to task for their demand of and adherence to racial realism, it is the satirist George Schuyler. Jarrett claims that Schuyler “began an iconoclastic campaign” against Locke and his “ambassadorial status” (93). From his dispersion of calling blacks “lamp-black Anglo Saxons” to his promulgation of cultural monism in the United States, Schuyler’s belief that “color is incidental” (Jarrett 104) is underscored in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926), to which Langston Hughes responds in his essay “Negro Art and the Racial Mountain” (1926). Obviously, Schuyler is one of those canonical writers, like Dunbar, whom Jarrett contends has been marginalized because of his attempts to skate the doctrines of racial realism. While Schuyler’s essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” appears in both the 1st and 2nd editions of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the late Nellie Y. McKay, Jarrett is correct that no excerpt from Schuyler’s novel Black No More; Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free (1931) appears in either edition of the Norton Anthology. Finally, Jarrett contends that for Schuyler only class and regionalism demarcate “Negro” culture or American culture, and not race. But race is inextricably and overwhelmingly linked to both class and culture, at least in the United States; and too many U.S. Africans existed within a caste system well into the late twentieth century. Schuyler’s satire of race in Black No More culminates his position about the transience of race, a transience that he detaches from historical, social, and economic realities and one in which only a person of relative privilege could imagine and write. Schuyler’s marriage to a U.S. European woman suggests the unspoken challenges he had with negotiating both the racial realism of his existence as a U.S. African and in his imaginative texts during the 1920s and 1930s in a social climate that made it difficult for interracial marriages to exist without considerable public disapproval. When the critic Dorothy Van Doren negatively reviews Schuyler’s Black No More because “the novel tries to debunk the values that she and other traditionalists of Negro art held so dear,” it is Josephine Schuyler, the wife of George Schuyler, who responds to such criticism arguing that the novel is “an allegory of how the African American novel could cross the taxonomic color line from ‘racial literature’ to ‘national or sectional literature’” (qtd. in Jarrett 108). Hence, it is Schuyler’s U.S. European wife who ultimately voices the place, role, and possibilities for racial, that is, African American literature.
If any of the deans attempts to deconstruct the relations among class, race and culture, no one does this better than Richard Wright, while he simultaneously, according to Jarrett, erects strict boundaries that made it nearly impossible for African American writers who were his contemporaries to breach the tenets of racial realism, although undoubtedly, some did. Jarrett contends that as a result of Wright’s prescriptive in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) and the subsequent commercial success of Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), two aesthetic camps evolved. These camps consisted of those writers who considered racial realism a handicap towards Americanizing Afro-American literature and those who promulgated the universal possibilities of Wright’s work, especially through his character, Bigger Thomas, who becomes emblematic of all oppressed people. Jarrett argues that Frank Yerby, whom he considers the truant in Wright’s generation of writers, joins the former group. After unsuccessful attempts to enter into the school as a racial realist and embrace the ideologies ostensibly promulgated by Wright, Yerby insists in a letter written to Michel Fabre regarding Yerby’s relationship with Wright “the race problem was not a theme for me” (qtd. in Jarrett 143). “[Yerby’s] first published novel, The Foxes of Harrow, signifies a philosophical turn toward an anomalous aesthetic and away from the racial realism of the period” [author’s emphasis] (Jarrett 144).
Yerby’s insistence on writing anomalous novels that do not examine Africans or persons of African descent as central characters substantiates, argues Jarrett, not only Yerby being excised from the African American literary canon, but also the inattention that critics have paid to his oeuvre. While Jarrett’s claims might have merit, one only has to consider that rarely does popular literature, particularly “costume novels of historical romance” (Jarrett 145), become the fodder of academic canons contemporaneously. Perhaps the jury is still out on Yerby’s oeuvre since Jarrett does not consider broader cultural or political conventions that also transcend race; for instance, a writer’s desire to be economically self sufficient and writing to the market that has historically been perceived as white and middle class. For example, Jarrett fails to consider how Wright’s own aesthetics about racial realism were radically altered throughout his career and is evidenced in his novel Savage Holiday (1954). Not only does Jarrett not address this novel at all, but he ignores the work that Tate does in Psychoanalysis in her analysis of Wright’s anomalous novel and how the novel like Wright’s The Long Dream (1958) “accentuates [Wright’s] personal and unsocialized desire” (Tate 9) . Thus Jarrett’s positioning of Wright as a dean, yet ignoring Wright’s own desire to break out of the tenets of racial realism, makes Jarrett’s argument about Yerby tenuous at best.
Moving from Wright and Yerby’s relationship, the last dean and truant relationship that Jarrett examines is the one purportedly to be between Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison during the 1980s. Jarrett casts Baraka as the omnipotent voice of the Black Arts Movement: an editor, critic, poet, dramatist, and essayist who—along with Addison Gayle, Larry Neal, and Hoyt Fuller— levied a prescriptive for U.S. African art and a Black Aesthetic that not only re-inscribed racial realism, he argues, but also ups the ante. Much ink has been spilled by critics regarding the limitations of the black aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement, as well as the
movement’s and Baraka’s discourses of misogyny, bigotry, and homophobia. That Jarrett would continue to argue the impact of these aesthetics of the late 1960s and 1970s on Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif,” published in 1983 in Confirmation: An Anthology of AfricanAmerican, co- edited by Baraka and his wife, Amina Baraka, either pronounces Jarrett’s misperception of Baraka’s sphere of influence or Jarrett’s inability to examine, or his ability to ignore, how Baraka himself, by 1983, had begun to repudiate his earlier discourse of racial realism and anti-feminism. In “Recitatif,” Morrison successfully problematizes the use of language that enables readers easily to identify which race the characters are. However, “Recitatif” is neither Morrison’s first nor last engagement with expanding language and images beyond their racial strictures. She also attempts to do this in one of her least critically successful novels, Tar Baby (1981), as Morrison examines class hierarchy within U.S. and Caribbean African communities. Far too many critics ignore the intraracial class antagonisms that exist between the protagonist Jadine and Son, the anti-hero, as if class is not an inherent element in U.S. African literature. That Morrison would expand the Jadine characterology one step further by writing “Recitatif,” which is devoid of language and images that will ensure the main characters’ racial origins for the reader, speaks more to Morrison’s own quest to deconstruct language than it does to her conscious desire to write outside of racial realism, as Jarrett suggests. For by 1983, is it not appropriate to at least entertain the idea that non-Africans are raced, too? Thus to write beyond racial realism in 1983 is to deconstruct race completely and acknowledge the way that race, itself, is not just non-Europeans, but is also a social construct. This seems to be the main impetus of Morrison’s short story rather than her writing beyond racial realism, which only seems to apply to U.S. African writers, black racial characterology, and protocols widely accepted by readers as signifiers of black reality. Although Jarrett employs a very canonical approach in examining the aesthetic power that Baraka wielded during the 1960s and 1970s, to establish Baraka as a dean is also to ignore Baraka’s own delving into writing beyond racial realism during his beat period when he was” heavily influenced by the white avant-garde” (xviii) poets, according to William J. Harris, editor of The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1991).
Ultimately, Jarrett’s study is about culture. It is also about who exercised influence over, and representation and dissemination of, U.S. African visual art and literature from the late-nineteenth century to the 1980s. Jarrett’s disingenuousness study begins with the emblazoning of the frontispiece of his book with Claudia Tate’s name, to the errors in the endnotes of chapter as well as the incorrect date for Wright’s expatriation from the United States to Paris.1 Jarrett capitalizes on Tate’s premise about the protocols of race, that he dubs “racial realism,” which is so well constructed by Tate, but without the tenacity and perseverance, fine acuity for detail, and superb research that Tate was known for throughout her career. As Tate argues so pointedly:
that the broadly held critical consensus about Negro literature during Wright’s lifetime [are]: race and Negro are mutually signifying; race is the central preoccupation of the black imagination; a nonracial novel is one with white characters; and presumably, only nonracial novels address so-called universal themes” (87) suggests the challenge that U.S. African writers had with negotiating both the breadth of their imaginations and garnering financial recompense, since all of the male writers that Jarrett studies sought to support themselves solely by their pens. What continues to be problematic is the inability to interrogate the impact of economics on the aesthetic choices that Dunbar, Tanner, Schuyler, and Yerby made. I exclude Morrison because she worked full time as an editor for Random House in 1983. And even after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 hercareer as a professor suggests that financial security had not compelled her to remove herself from the everyday world of work in the same way that the aforementioned male writers and artist desired to do. While it is unnecessarily within the purview of scholarship to honor one’s elders, particularly one whom Jarrett purports to have compelled his awareness into how to approach the “anomalous” works of fiction that his study addresses, Jarrett dismisses Tate’s insightful analysis as easily as he ignores the works of Chester Himes (Yerby’s and Wright’s contemporary), as well as women writers like Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Andrea Lee, and Ntozake Shange who have published anomalous texts, or have iconoclastic approaches to their writings, that continue to beg critical attention. After all, as Houston Baker so succinctly stated nearly three decades ago in The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature (1980) in his analysis of not only black literature but what he terms the “anthropology of art,” that, “[…] art must be studied with an attention to the methods and findings of discipline which enable one to address such concerns as the status of the artistic object, the relationship of art to other cultural systems, and the nature and function of artistic creation and perception in a given society” (xvi). Jarrett’s project fails to satisfy these minimalist criteria. Finally, it is unfortunate that Tate’s death prevents her from responding to Jarrett’s work; however, I am certain that her response would not have been a positive one.
Footnote
1. Jarrett contends that Wright permanently leaves New York City for Paris in 1946. But according to Wright’s biographer, Michel Fabre, Wright only visits Paris in 1946, and it is in 1947 when he permanently expatriates to Paris with his wife, Ellen and daughter, Julia. See Fabre 313-24.
Works Cited
Baker, Jr. Houston A. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Translated from the French by Isabel Barzum. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1973.
Harris, William J., ed. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991.
Jarrett, Gene Andrew. Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Hopes for a Better Year in 2010
For some of us, 2009 was a horrendous year. Most of my friends are making it, but a few have lost their jobs and their sources of income. We help each other out with coffee cards, meals, and get togethers. This sort of help, while not major, lends in maintaining some degree of continuity and hope, I suppose. I recall that in 2004 when I was laid off from the University of Michigan, my greatest pleasure was my morning coffee at the Starbucks on Washtenaw. While this pleasure might have seemed like an indulgence I could ill afford, it did provide me with the reserve needed to continue seeking employment, rearing my child, and remaining hopeful. More important, though, maintaining my routine of my morning coffee helped me to remain in touch with friends and acquaintances who were always willing to help me out. Steve Carpman helped me move my 2,000 or so books out my office and stored them in his barn (heated, cooled, and ventilated--what a barn); Ramsey Jiddou provided me with an opportunity to learn mortgage brokering and with someplace to go in the mornings after I drank my coffee; and Nicole and her four kids gave me all the laughter I needed to mitigate what seemed to be an overwhelming experience. I had been unemployed before, but never with a child to support. Needless to say, I was scared shitless, and I was doubly afraid that my unemployment would prompt my son's father to seek custody. So no matter what, I had to appear to be stable even if I had only child support and unemployment to carry me until I found a job.
I weathered that storm as I see my friends weathering their storms. The most positive aspect of being in metro DC is that work is always available. Unlike in Michigan, you do not have to be chronically unemployed in metro DC, although you can find yourself underemployed and working two or three jobs to meet your living expenses. This is what I have taken to doing to meet the cost of living and pay my child's tuition. I feel that I am lucky though because I could still be in Michigan and the situation could be a lot graver. My goal is that my attitude towards work and my situation will shift. While I cannot control the economy, I can control how I respond to life's challenges. I tell my son this all the time, as my parents told me; so now I have to embrace what I already know. But sometimes it is very hard.
My son and I talked about how the older generation views his generation. He mentioned that far too many of the elders always remind his generation how they are not amounting to anything, yet these same elders do not offer any support or help to the people in his generation. He says that he and his friends discuss this all the time. I must mention that he and his cadre of African American male friends are either at the university or working full time. None of them are slackers, and I marvel at their commitment to their education and work, a level of commitment that I know I did not possess at their age. My son and I discussed possible remedies. He stated that he would like to see more of the elders mentoring young men in his generation and overall lending a helping hand. We also discussed the lack of presence of Howard alumni in the lives of students as a perfect example of the failure to give back to the community. We know that some alumni do give back, but my son concluded that far too many Howard students are left on their own to fend for themselves. That given the historical relevancy of Howard University and the success of so many Howard alumni, he concluded that alumni need to be more assertive in their assistance to and mentoring of Howard students. I suggested that he draft a letter to the board of trustees and alumni association expressing his concerns.
The semester begins on Monday for my son and I: he as a student, me as a professor. For some reason this year, we are both dreading returning to the university. Perhaps it was the snow storm. Perhaps the break was too short. Either way, I am feeling worn out and so is my son. We both want 2010 to be a better year, not because we are wedded to the idea of progress, but we both had our own challenges in 2009 and do not want a repeat performance. Only time will tell as we focus and make our way through another year.
I weathered that storm as I see my friends weathering their storms. The most positive aspect of being in metro DC is that work is always available. Unlike in Michigan, you do not have to be chronically unemployed in metro DC, although you can find yourself underemployed and working two or three jobs to meet your living expenses. This is what I have taken to doing to meet the cost of living and pay my child's tuition. I feel that I am lucky though because I could still be in Michigan and the situation could be a lot graver. My goal is that my attitude towards work and my situation will shift. While I cannot control the economy, I can control how I respond to life's challenges. I tell my son this all the time, as my parents told me; so now I have to embrace what I already know. But sometimes it is very hard.
My son and I talked about how the older generation views his generation. He mentioned that far too many of the elders always remind his generation how they are not amounting to anything, yet these same elders do not offer any support or help to the people in his generation. He says that he and his friends discuss this all the time. I must mention that he and his cadre of African American male friends are either at the university or working full time. None of them are slackers, and I marvel at their commitment to their education and work, a level of commitment that I know I did not possess at their age. My son and I discussed possible remedies. He stated that he would like to see more of the elders mentoring young men in his generation and overall lending a helping hand. We also discussed the lack of presence of Howard alumni in the lives of students as a perfect example of the failure to give back to the community. We know that some alumni do give back, but my son concluded that far too many Howard students are left on their own to fend for themselves. That given the historical relevancy of Howard University and the success of so many Howard alumni, he concluded that alumni need to be more assertive in their assistance to and mentoring of Howard students. I suggested that he draft a letter to the board of trustees and alumni association expressing his concerns.
The semester begins on Monday for my son and I: he as a student, me as a professor. For some reason this year, we are both dreading returning to the university. Perhaps it was the snow storm. Perhaps the break was too short. Either way, I am feeling worn out and so is my son. We both want 2010 to be a better year, not because we are wedded to the idea of progress, but we both had our own challenges in 2009 and do not want a repeat performance. Only time will tell as we focus and make our way through another year.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Back from Summer Break and Ghana
I have been quiet all summer, not because I have not been writing, but because I have been teaching so much that my writing has become particularly cryptic, and comprehensible only to me. Now that fall has come, the teaching is still with me, but there is something oppressive, for me, about teaching a full course load in the summer. I will never, ever again teach more than one course in the summer; I do not care who asks me to do it.
Ghana. I chaired a session at the 5th Biennial Conference for the Association of the Study of the Worldwide Diaspora (ASWAD) in Accra, Ghana, this summer. Twelve days before I departed, I herniated two discs in my cervical spine and was highly recommended to have "spinal surgery" immediately. My philosophy about surgery is that if there is minimal function in the injured body part, I will avoid any invasive procedures. Thus far, this philosophy has kept me relatively healthy, alive, mobile, and free of pain. But the pain from having two herniated cervical discs was nearly unbearable. Yet I went to Ghana anyway with topical lotions from my massage therapists, heat pads from the drugstore, and lots of prayers from friends, family, and neighbors.
The roads in Ghana, chock full of potholes, did not help my spine at all; however, I distracted myself with examining the hawkers: some old; but, most were young, school aged children. Making eye contact with a hawker guaranteed your obligation to buy, well at least for a Westerner like me who had not developed the thick skin and quick tongue that was needed to "shoo" away the hawkers. "Roll up the window," the van driver warned me as we stopped at a red light near Nkrumah Circle and the hawkers immediately descend on us, pressing their hands through the windows with plastic sacks of "purified water," certified by the government of Ghana, fried plantain chips, and other delicacies that I could not properly investigate with my eyes because this signaled my tacit agreement to purchase the goods. Changing U.S. dollars on the black market, courtesy of the conference van driver who guaranteed that finding an exchange bureau would be impossible, seemed to be the best way to get Ghanaian cedis; further, the banks would not change my money unless I had an account. Needless to say, my experience was that the van driver was correct because I could never find an exchange bureau despite being directed to one in the Osu district and the prospect of giving my money to the hotel front desk clerk so that she could bring me cedis the next morning went against my U.S. cultural mode of money exchange and capitalism. Besides, the hotel clerk, too, would go to the black market to exchange my money, but quoted me an exchange rate that was insulting, to say the least.
A herd of cattle in the middle of the city, chickens pecking underfoot and in the rain gutters, and goats bleating challenged my perception of what is proper in a city landscape. The acrid, choking smell of burning rubbish each night filled the nostrils until, after the second night in Accra, I looked forward to stepping outside the hotel and sucking in the night air for the smell reminded me of fall in the midwest when we would burn the leaves at the curb after having raked the lawns.
I heard the Moslem "Call to Prayer" at 4:30 a.m. Not cow or bull horns being blown, just a chant rising like the incoming tide and the blossoming morning sky. At first, I mistakenly thought the sonorous singing came from the women, men, and children setting up their makeshift markets along the roads (all of Accra seems to be one endless market), but a British couple standing outside the hotel waiting for a taxi informed me that a mosque was a few blocks away, and I was hearing the call to prayer.
My visit was punctuated not by the presentations at the conference, but by two day trips I took with other participants at the conference: one to the slave dungeons at Elmina and Cape Coast and the other to the Village of Aburi. The commercialization of these two dungeons, which are Unesco sites; my own connection to the transatlantic slave trade as one whose family survived this inhumane trafficking in humans; and the dire poverty around both sites all coalesced not only to leave me in a state of pain and confusion but also cognizant enough to thank my ancestors for having the tenacity to survive, for without their survival there would have been no ME.
The conference participants were warmly received by the chief and his court in the Village of Aburi. We were properly entertained and fed, and I was very appreciative of the hospitality the chief and his court extended to us. But my eyes and heart kept looking at the villagers, the commoners, who surrounded us and were disallowed from participating in any of the events. Yet, as soon as the events ended, the villagers descended on us, and I found myself attempting to negotiate the various requests for U.S. dollars, to purchase goods, or for my e-mail address or telephone number because the person really wanted to come to the States. How to discern who is genuine when so many appear to be in need?
I received five marriage proposals and one indecent proposal from a man from Burkina Faso. One 22 year old Ghanaian, in particular, confessed to me that it was "love at first sight." I was not flattered, and mildly suggested that he would be better off asking me for sponsorship for his education particularly since I had a 19 year old son in the States. Imagine this 22 year old attempting to be a stepfather to my 19 year old son. What a hoot! This young Ghanaian did not know the kind of trouble he was asking for :)
Home. I hailed a taxi at Reagan National Airport with the help of a Ghanaian. "I just returned from your country, Ghana," I told the porter. He laughed and asked, "How do you know I am from Ghana?" "Your tribal mark," I responded. We talked about my experience as I waited for the taxi. My taxi driver was a middle-aged gentleman from Pakistan. I told him about my experience of hearing the morning call for prayer for the first time. He agreed that it is a pleasant sound to hear at dawn break. Then I said to him, "this is a very rich country, isn't it?" "Yes, it is," he said, as he expertly guided the four door, Ford sedan south on I-395 on smooth asphalt that made me feel luxurious for one of the few times in my life.
Ghana. I chaired a session at the 5th Biennial Conference for the Association of the Study of the Worldwide Diaspora (ASWAD) in Accra, Ghana, this summer. Twelve days before I departed, I herniated two discs in my cervical spine and was highly recommended to have "spinal surgery" immediately. My philosophy about surgery is that if there is minimal function in the injured body part, I will avoid any invasive procedures. Thus far, this philosophy has kept me relatively healthy, alive, mobile, and free of pain. But the pain from having two herniated cervical discs was nearly unbearable. Yet I went to Ghana anyway with topical lotions from my massage therapists, heat pads from the drugstore, and lots of prayers from friends, family, and neighbors.
The roads in Ghana, chock full of potholes, did not help my spine at all; however, I distracted myself with examining the hawkers: some old; but, most were young, school aged children. Making eye contact with a hawker guaranteed your obligation to buy, well at least for a Westerner like me who had not developed the thick skin and quick tongue that was needed to "shoo" away the hawkers. "Roll up the window," the van driver warned me as we stopped at a red light near Nkrumah Circle and the hawkers immediately descend on us, pressing their hands through the windows with plastic sacks of "purified water," certified by the government of Ghana, fried plantain chips, and other delicacies that I could not properly investigate with my eyes because this signaled my tacit agreement to purchase the goods. Changing U.S. dollars on the black market, courtesy of the conference van driver who guaranteed that finding an exchange bureau would be impossible, seemed to be the best way to get Ghanaian cedis; further, the banks would not change my money unless I had an account. Needless to say, my experience was that the van driver was correct because I could never find an exchange bureau despite being directed to one in the Osu district and the prospect of giving my money to the hotel front desk clerk so that she could bring me cedis the next morning went against my U.S. cultural mode of money exchange and capitalism. Besides, the hotel clerk, too, would go to the black market to exchange my money, but quoted me an exchange rate that was insulting, to say the least.
A herd of cattle in the middle of the city, chickens pecking underfoot and in the rain gutters, and goats bleating challenged my perception of what is proper in a city landscape. The acrid, choking smell of burning rubbish each night filled the nostrils until, after the second night in Accra, I looked forward to stepping outside the hotel and sucking in the night air for the smell reminded me of fall in the midwest when we would burn the leaves at the curb after having raked the lawns.
I heard the Moslem "Call to Prayer" at 4:30 a.m. Not cow or bull horns being blown, just a chant rising like the incoming tide and the blossoming morning sky. At first, I mistakenly thought the sonorous singing came from the women, men, and children setting up their makeshift markets along the roads (all of Accra seems to be one endless market), but a British couple standing outside the hotel waiting for a taxi informed me that a mosque was a few blocks away, and I was hearing the call to prayer.
My visit was punctuated not by the presentations at the conference, but by two day trips I took with other participants at the conference: one to the slave dungeons at Elmina and Cape Coast and the other to the Village of Aburi. The commercialization of these two dungeons, which are Unesco sites; my own connection to the transatlantic slave trade as one whose family survived this inhumane trafficking in humans; and the dire poverty around both sites all coalesced not only to leave me in a state of pain and confusion but also cognizant enough to thank my ancestors for having the tenacity to survive, for without their survival there would have been no ME.
The conference participants were warmly received by the chief and his court in the Village of Aburi. We were properly entertained and fed, and I was very appreciative of the hospitality the chief and his court extended to us. But my eyes and heart kept looking at the villagers, the commoners, who surrounded us and were disallowed from participating in any of the events. Yet, as soon as the events ended, the villagers descended on us, and I found myself attempting to negotiate the various requests for U.S. dollars, to purchase goods, or for my e-mail address or telephone number because the person really wanted to come to the States. How to discern who is genuine when so many appear to be in need?
I received five marriage proposals and one indecent proposal from a man from Burkina Faso. One 22 year old Ghanaian, in particular, confessed to me that it was "love at first sight." I was not flattered, and mildly suggested that he would be better off asking me for sponsorship for his education particularly since I had a 19 year old son in the States. Imagine this 22 year old attempting to be a stepfather to my 19 year old son. What a hoot! This young Ghanaian did not know the kind of trouble he was asking for :)
Home. I hailed a taxi at Reagan National Airport with the help of a Ghanaian. "I just returned from your country, Ghana," I told the porter. He laughed and asked, "How do you know I am from Ghana?" "Your tribal mark," I responded. We talked about my experience as I waited for the taxi. My taxi driver was a middle-aged gentleman from Pakistan. I told him about my experience of hearing the morning call for prayer for the first time. He agreed that it is a pleasant sound to hear at dawn break. Then I said to him, "this is a very rich country, isn't it?" "Yes, it is," he said, as he expertly guided the four door, Ford sedan south on I-395 on smooth asphalt that made me feel luxurious for one of the few times in my life.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Sunmer and Fun
I've been quiet for awhile. The end of the semester has its own set of challenges: fielding student e-mail messages and convincing them that yes, the grade that they received is the grade that they earned and the one I calculated; there is no gray area. I do not subjectively grade. I have grading rubrics for every assignment (something that none of my professors used when I was in undergrad); use a formula to calculate their final grades; and only round up grades according to how my many math teachers taught me. This way, I can eliminate as much bias as possible when I am assigning student's grades. Three weeks after the semester has ended, I think that I can stop checking my e-mail for student messages about grades for the summer.
My son is HOME!!!!!!! Yes, I am screaming. He's such a delightful young man, and he has had a very successful freshman year. He is far more disciplined than I was at his age, so I am very, very proud of him. He still hasn't found a summer job; so if any of you out there know of any summer positions any place in the U.S. please let me know. I've had to drag my son out of the house for fear that he wasn't getting enough vitamin D. He admitted to me that he was a bit depressed about not finding summer employment. I've given him a few strategies: like going door-to-door and inquiring about employment at all of the businesses in the neighborhood. We live between a strip mall and a town center. There must be no less than 50 businesses between the two venues; he should be able to secure some type of employment.
Yoga and hiking are going well. A good friend gave me a retro bicycle recently. So I'll be adding cycling to my exercise program as soon as a buy a helmet so that the Fairfax County police won't ticket me. Will start kayaking soon. The Sierra Club offers free kayaking and canoeing lessons every Thursday evening at 6:30 p.m. I'm trying to make myself drive into the District soon because tonight is the first night for free canoeing and kayaking this season. I'm just waiting another hour or so to see what the weather holds for us. Thunderstorms are being forecasted, and we won't be in the water if a storm arises.
Went to my nephew's high school graduation; he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and did not even say anything; and did not stand up when the "Beta" club members were called. This sort of keen ability not to honor one's accomplishments runs in the family. I'm trying to get the younger generation not to be this way. For example, when my father retired, there was an acknowledgment/retirement luncheon that I did not know about. Perhaps this event still would not be part of my knowledge if I had not spied a U.S. flag some weeks later in my father's study. When I inquired about it, he told me with a great degree of reservation that it was the flag flown over the U.S. Capitol on the day he retired, and was given to him to honor his many years of service to the U.S. government. Okay, I felt really humble. I also wished that on some level he would have shared his accomplishments with his children (I don't doubt that he discussed them with my mom). But my dad raised us to understand that you always give your best effort, for doing so is about your integrity and has nothing to do with being acknowledged or receiving awards. So I suppose that my siblings, nieces and nephews, and I are the same as my dad. Therefore, I should not be surprised when my nephew does not stand to acknowledge that he is Phi Beta Kappa, or when a local fraternity acknowledges my son's high academic achievement and he refuses to attend the award ceremony, or when I have to be convinced to attend my own hooding ceremony. It is in our blood. Ultimately, the only one to judge my accomplishments is me, and I am, as my friend told me yesterday, hard on myself.
My nephew wants to be a stockbroker. My son just wants to finish undergrad; although he recently asked me questions about graduate school. I'm going back to U Mass-Boston to train as an instructional designer. I'm tired of online courses being 90% text based; there is too much technology available for these universities and colleges to upload only text and call it an "online course." It's a travesty and only addresses the needs of the most astute visual learners. If you are an aural learner, please avoid online classes. My goal is to mitigate this by learning not only to design but the psychology behind learning. Wish me luck. Wish my nephew and son success. They have so much energy and enthusiasm. And they are two very focused individuals!
My son is HOME!!!!!!! Yes, I am screaming. He's such a delightful young man, and he has had a very successful freshman year. He is far more disciplined than I was at his age, so I am very, very proud of him. He still hasn't found a summer job; so if any of you out there know of any summer positions any place in the U.S. please let me know. I've had to drag my son out of the house for fear that he wasn't getting enough vitamin D. He admitted to me that he was a bit depressed about not finding summer employment. I've given him a few strategies: like going door-to-door and inquiring about employment at all of the businesses in the neighborhood. We live between a strip mall and a town center. There must be no less than 50 businesses between the two venues; he should be able to secure some type of employment.
Yoga and hiking are going well. A good friend gave me a retro bicycle recently. So I'll be adding cycling to my exercise program as soon as a buy a helmet so that the Fairfax County police won't ticket me. Will start kayaking soon. The Sierra Club offers free kayaking and canoeing lessons every Thursday evening at 6:30 p.m. I'm trying to make myself drive into the District soon because tonight is the first night for free canoeing and kayaking this season. I'm just waiting another hour or so to see what the weather holds for us. Thunderstorms are being forecasted, and we won't be in the water if a storm arises.
Went to my nephew's high school graduation; he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and did not even say anything; and did not stand up when the "Beta" club members were called. This sort of keen ability not to honor one's accomplishments runs in the family. I'm trying to get the younger generation not to be this way. For example, when my father retired, there was an acknowledgment/retirement luncheon that I did not know about. Perhaps this event still would not be part of my knowledge if I had not spied a U.S. flag some weeks later in my father's study. When I inquired about it, he told me with a great degree of reservation that it was the flag flown over the U.S. Capitol on the day he retired, and was given to him to honor his many years of service to the U.S. government. Okay, I felt really humble. I also wished that on some level he would have shared his accomplishments with his children (I don't doubt that he discussed them with my mom). But my dad raised us to understand that you always give your best effort, for doing so is about your integrity and has nothing to do with being acknowledged or receiving awards. So I suppose that my siblings, nieces and nephews, and I are the same as my dad. Therefore, I should not be surprised when my nephew does not stand to acknowledge that he is Phi Beta Kappa, or when a local fraternity acknowledges my son's high academic achievement and he refuses to attend the award ceremony, or when I have to be convinced to attend my own hooding ceremony. It is in our blood. Ultimately, the only one to judge my accomplishments is me, and I am, as my friend told me yesterday, hard on myself.
My nephew wants to be a stockbroker. My son just wants to finish undergrad; although he recently asked me questions about graduate school. I'm going back to U Mass-Boston to train as an instructional designer. I'm tired of online courses being 90% text based; there is too much technology available for these universities and colleges to upload only text and call it an "online course." It's a travesty and only addresses the needs of the most astute visual learners. If you are an aural learner, please avoid online classes. My goal is to mitigate this by learning not only to design but the psychology behind learning. Wish me luck. Wish my nephew and son success. They have so much energy and enthusiasm. And they are two very focused individuals!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
