African American Literature A: The Postmodern Tradition in/and African American Rhetoric
Session Coordinator: Anne Herbert
Dept. of English, Bradley University
1501 Bradley Ave. , Peoria, IL 61625
satya@bradley.edu
Parody, Transgression, and Racial Performance in Percival Everett’s Erasure
Percival Everett’s novel Erasure is a transgressive, multilayered, elusive text. Everett’s self-consciously black protagonist, Thelonious Monk Ellison, is the central voice in a novel about a black writer who is not “black enough.” Ellison is angered that his writing goes unacknowledged while the work of black writers of “ghetto fiction” rises to the top of bestseller lists. Ellison writes, under the pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh, a parody of black ghetto fiction that he entitles My Pafology. Random House offers $600,000 for the rights to publish the novel. Erasure comments on how Thelonious Monk Ellison’s performance as Stagg R. Lee is created and consumed by an adoring audience hungry for a racially inflected performance whose authenticity is perceived by that audience to be a function of primitive rawness. This paper will consider the irony of Erasure’s novelistic attempts to blur and otherwise obscure the uneasy relationship between the performance of race and novelistic form. As a way of examining those ideas, this paper will also consider what the novel does as it alternately articulates, denies, and transgresses the performative boundaries that ultimately give the work its meaning.
Sterling Bland
Rutgers University
slbland@andromeda.rutgers.edu
Re-Writing History: The Postmodern Question in Ishmael Reed’s and Yusef Komunyakaa’s Poetry
Ishmael Reed and Yusef Komunyakaa are African American poets engaged in the process of de-constructing and re-writing history from a hybrid, pluralist perspective. Their poststructuralist perception of the modern discursive patterns aims at what Lyotard would call the “demise of the grand narratives of modernization,” leaving instead an absence meant to be supplemented by an a-historical presence. Reed’s use of pastiche and bricolage, pop culture and “high” art, contrasting mythologies and religious cults, is part of a rhizomatic process, where modern discursive paradigms are deconstructed and re-invented towards an a-historical scope. Komunyakaa’s poetry, on the other hand, proceeds to de-center history and re-write it in correlation with an introspective discourse.
The two poets’ views of history are broad and encompassing, and translate criticism of the way historical narratives shape people’s destinies. Being inside or outside history with these poets becomes a matter of choice.
Roxana Galusca
Emporia State University
groxani@yahoo.com
Black Rhetoric as a Weapon in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
African American rhetoric has sometimes been privileged as a means of validating the African American perspective on American history. In her body of work, Toni Morrison embraces the black vernacular, and supports the notion that oral expression in particular is vital to black rhetorical tradition. However, Morrison also resists the critical tendency to privilege modes of African American discourse simply because they are the products of oppression. Nowhere is her exploration of the violent potential of black rhetoric more pointed than in her 1998 novel Paradise.
In this novel, Morrison speaks in important ways to the complex network of rhetorical strategies which define African American experience. Just as she acknowledges the roles that preaching, storytelling, and writing have played in constructing an African American narrative of history, she also dramatizes the danger of employing words as fixed signifiers of experience. While various forms of rhetoric—whether legal, cultural, or interpersonal—have been used by white people as tools of discrimination, Morrison reminds us of the uncomfortable fact that black people have also used language to discriminate against other communities and against each other, hence to create fissures in their communities from within.
Megan Musgrave
Loyola University in Chicago
MMUSGRA@wpo.it.luc.edu
Failed Utopias and the Creation of Paradise: Paradise as allegory for Black Aesthetic and Black Feminist Movements
In my article I interrogate Toni Morrison’s fictional renditions of the conflicts between the Black Aesthetic and black feminist movements of the 1970’s. Black women’s bodies and their sexuality become contested sites of conflict in the debates between these historical communities, as well as the fictional communities in the novel, Paradise. The social revolutions of the 1960’s and 70’s, with their critical rethinking of notions of race and gender, community and identity, have greatly affected the textual productions of contemporary black female writers like Morrison. As alliances formed and solidarity in various social groups became the key to revolution in this era, notions of what makes a successful black community went through a certain evolution. This evolution of communal formations, so crucial in the political shifts of the 1960’s and 70’s, finds its fictional counterpart in Morrison’s novel. In fact, Paradise replays with remarkable verisimilitude some of the problems experienced in the Black Aesthetic movement and its clashes with black feminism. By juxtaposing different newly developing communities, like the town and the Convent, Morrison is able to probe into the question of what it is that makes and unmakes a community—and of what really constitutes a Paradise.
Shuba Venugopal
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
shubhave@yahoo.com
African American Literature B: Fearless Speech: African American
Rhetorical Discourse in Theory and Praxis
Session Coordinator: Anne Herbert
Dept. of English, Bradley University
1501 Bradley Ave. , Peoria, IL 61625
satya@bradley.edu
Epic Trickster, Epic Trippin'(g), and Trash Talkin' Runners: Or, He Does the African Epics and Black Sports in Two Voice
Although often overlooked because of its transcendental action, a veritable sport of the gods, a significant part of the epic's narrative performance occurs earlier. At the outset, the epic protagonist and his family are deformed socially, politically, sometimes even physically, as subjects of oppressive state power. Reduced to a trickster-like struggle for survival, the "epic trickster's" only recourse is retreat—he runs into the diaspora.
This presentation explores this performative moment, the running epic trickster body, as a deformed, "blackened," and enslaved symptom of the African-American retention and transformation of the African epic. Running is troped here as the centuries-long, epic experience of Africans who were "running" as the newly enslaved on the middle passage, as "Black" slaves, as "citizens" struggling under the degradations and horrors of segregation, as inner-city residents, and, right into a telling feature of the modern American epic: Black professional sport performers, most notably the epic gridiron gladiators of the NFL and "flying" warriors of the parquet, and the racial legacy—epic trippin'(g)—behind their trash talkin'. I will conflate the scholarship on the muscularity of the trickster heroic with the linguistic felicity of the trickster proper, and posit the epic trickster as a heuristic useful for re-reading Black sports culture.
Gregory E. Rutledge
University of Wisconsin-Madison
gerutled@students.wisc.edu
A ‘Feather-Bed Resistance’ At Play: The ‘Deal’, The ‘Hustle’ and Performances of Black Masculinity
To some extent, the likelihood of Zora Neale Hurston, particularly because she was poor, black and female herself, arriving as ethnographer into those southern neighborhoods was a matter of luck. On one occasion, Hurston observed a Georgia Skin card game at a jook joint that her girlfriend Big Sweet was participating in. On this night, Hurston set out to document black masculinity.
What I find especially interesting here is the ease with which Big Sweet is able to perform black masculinity, undoubtedly because of the entire atmosphere of “play.” However, the real game that Hurston acknowledges is the social inequality of black economic disenfranchisement. While their poverty is masked by the “loose change” they appear to gamble casually, there is somewhat of a refusal on the part of these oppressed subjects to recognize whom the real lucky player is. Instead, intra-racial conflicts abound, as equally oppressed subjects fight for their position as topdog among underdogs.
This paper discusses similar ideas of play with respect to black masculinity in the plays A Raisin in The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry and Topdog/Underdog by Suzan Lori-Parks.
Tanji Gilliam
University of Chicago
tanji@uchicago.edu
“The Blues Playingest Dog You Ever Heard Of": Bluesy Blues, Jazzy Jazz, and Black Rhetorical Traditions in the (Children’s) Literature of Walter Dean Myers
“This here’s the story of Flats Brown, the blues playingest dog you ever heard of..” This is how the children’s book, The Blues of Flats Brown by Walter Dean Myers, begins. The story of these “blues playingest” dogs will be used to highlight the ways African American children’s literature reflects the major currents of African American literary theory, particularly pertaining to the Blues, Jazz, and Black verbal traditions as central organizing principles. Such children’s books are continually in dialogue with a larger canon of African American texts that span from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Social Arts Movement. Theorists covering a range of African American sociolinguistics, history, rhetoric, and literary analysis will be employed to examine the politics, form, and content of three texts by Myers. The presentation will close with the argument that pedagogical theories pertaining to African American students’ language and literacy must be in dialogue with the Black rhetorical traditions represented in these three texts. The simple tropes often deployed in educational theory disrupt and undermine the work of literary theorists, and therefore African American literatures, in terms of an in-depth understanding of Black Rhetorical traditions.
Carmen Kynard
Medgar Evers College
Ckynard@aol.com
African American Literature C: Black Rhetorical Strategies & Style in 19th and 20th Century African American Literature
Session Coordinator: Anne Herbert
Dept. of English, Bradley University
1501 Bradley Ave. , Peoria, IL 61625
satya@bradley.edu
Corporeal Construction to Vernacular Vocalization: Black Body and Voice in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman
As Karen Sanchez-Eppler has pointed out, with the passages of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments "the right to vote replaced the status of the human body as a sign of membership in the body politic" for African Americans. What, however, were some of the unforeseen ramifications of such a shift? Clearly, the (male) vote offered the hope for political representation; at the same time, though, it was premised on the assumption that one body could represent another, depending on the disembodiment of its constituents in order that they be "counted."
This political shift is mirrored in nineteenth century African American literature in the antebellum slave narrative and the postbellum black dialect tale. The slave narrative emphasizes the slave body as the site of authorial/narrative authenticity, so that bodily marks and processes continually verify Douglass' account. Douglass writes and claims a distinct, black body.
But the voice that is the means to self-possession in Douglass is transformed into the voice that is the means to self-dispossession in Chesnutt. While critics such as Houston Baker and Eric Sundquist have interpreted the stories' conjure as a source of power and liberation, they dismiss the danger in its metamorphoses. Like the disembodiment of the vote, this supposed means to liberation often ends in a permanent forfeiture of original bodily form and the subsequent imprisonment of subjectivity and voice within the very transformation that promised liberty. Julius' stories instead serve as warning, underscoring the danger in bodily metamorphosis that elides blackness, and through their deformations, give form to the challenges inherent in the realization of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments' proposition of disembodied voice.
Lindgren Johnson
University of Mississippi
lhjohnso@olemiss.edu
Race and Trope: Frances Harper and the Abolitionists
While Frances Harper’s antislavery poetry has been dismissed as strictly conventional, I argue that she radically revises abolitionist rhetoric. Resisting the traditional sympathetic appeal, Harper does not allow white readers to view black experience in terms of white experience ¾ e.g. understanding a slave mother on the auction block as a white mother being separated from her children ¾ but rather insists on the specificity of slave experience. She thus brings her readers into contact with the concrete experience of slavery not displaced or replaced by comparison. Harper’s work similarly distorts abolitionist poetic tropes: those metaphors or comparisons accepted as convention. By questioning established tropes, she politicizes cliché. I read Harper’s work against the rhetoric of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society, an organization she was denied full participation in due to her status as a single, black woman. As such, I compare Harper’s politicization of tropes to the specific rhetorical devices of this body of work, delineating how the institution’s politics and its rhetoric resonate with each other. By rereading Harper in this way, I approach tropes in a new way, combining formal analysis with historical research in order to place tropes in a cultural context and interrogate the politics of antislavery rhetoric.
Rebecca Entel
University of Wisconsin – Madison
bonvivant1977@yahoo.com
Jessie Fauset, Race, and the Promise of the Middle Class
My reading of Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929) reads the protagonist Angela’s moral decline from family to the pursuit of wealth and fame as an account of the limitations of shifts in middle-class values—defined by Karen Halttunen as a shift from character to duplicity by the late nineteenth century—and of female trickery—outlined by Lori Landay in appreciative terms. In suggesting such limitations, I argue that the novel promisingly models a middle-class consciousness that incorporates a communitarian ethos.
Fauset’s ideas about race loyalty intersect in interesting ways with middle-class consciousness as articulated by Stuart Blumin, who suggests that “a central paradox” emerges from attempts to build a collective consciousness within a class that defines itself “through the common embrace of an ideology of social atomism.” Fauset’s novels are morality tales of the middle class, yet they critique those who pursue success, often by passing, at the community’s expense: in Plum Bun, Angela is punished for betraying her community by finding herself lonely in New York. As such, the novel suggests the possibility of the collective in middle-class subject formation, which is in turn promising if we think about the possibilities of the middle class in addressing racial inequalities.
Jean Forst
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
j-forst@students.uiuc.edu
Signifying Revisions: The Centrality of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in African American Artistic Imagination
This paper examines the ways in which African American male writers and artists have historically responded to Uncle Tom's Cabin. These responses, which I term "signifying (re)visions," I argue, focus primarily on Stowe's titular character, Uncle Tom, whom they perceive as an assault on black masculinity. In interrogating this black male fixation with Stowe and her feminized hero, I ask the following questions: Why have black male writers found Stowe's presence so vexing that they repeatedly return the scene, if not the sense of her text? Do these revisionist texts seek to bring to surface their understanding of Stowe's repressed psychosexual responses to Uncle Tom and as such implicate her in the historic American obsession with black male sexuality? I answer these questions by suggesting that these revisions are ultimately about black male exploration of their masculinity and sexuality in relation to the white and the black feminine. In order to create their own varying visions of black masculinity and sexuality, visions in their works closely connected to property, black male artists not only fight Stowe with their pen, they also insist upon their right to hold the "keys to the cabin," as it were, as well the keys to their own cabins.
Joy Asekun
University of Virginia
aja5t@cms.mail.virginia.edu