African American Rhetoric as Transformative Performance in Literary Discourse
Session Coordinator: Anne Herbert
Dept. of English, Bradley University
1501 Bradley Ave. , Peoria, IL 61625
satya@bradley.edu

Resisting Romantic Racialism: Martin Delaney’s Discourses of Empowerment and Empire

Martin Delany is often viewed as a political and rhetorical alternative to his more famous colleague and rival, Frederick Douglass. Both were mid-nineteenth-century journalists and African American leaders. They co-edited The North Star, the first African American anti-slavery paper. But friction over their different agendas and professional jealousy eventually undermined their working relationship and friendship. Because Douglass has appeared to be the more consistent, powerful, and ultimately prescient leader, he has eclipsed Delany in studies of nineteenth-century American literature. A recent resurgence of critical interest in Martin Delany, however, dramatically changes the way that scholars understand the politics and possibilities of African American leadership.

My essay makes a case for the value of studying Delany, not just as an alternative to Douglass, the road not taken, but as someone who both used and refused Romantic discourses in order to developed a distinctive African American nationalism. This paper examines Delany’s fascinating use of the rhetoric of racial essentialism and, especially, colonialism to make a space for African American difference. Delany is, in a sense, the more “multicultural” of the two leaders and, therefore, more challenging for contemporary readers to understand.

Julie Husband
University of Northern Iowa
julie.husband@uni.edu

From Communism to Black Studies and Beyond: The Reception of Richard Wright's Native Son

 In "Fate," the last section of Richard Wright's Native Son, a thirteen page long speech by Max, the lawyer of Bigger Thomas, describes the centuries of African-American oppression which made Bigger terrified enough to kill Mary Dalton and Bessie Smears. What the highly divided critical response to this speech as well as Max's character suggests is that the radical politics of Max and the self-assertion of Bigger do not go together. T he eloquence of Max expresses the political commitments of Wright, who, in the 1930s, led the left-wing John Reed club and wrote articles for The Worker, the communist party newspaper. Max's speech also shows that Wright adopts the scientific naturalism of Theodore Dreiser. By contrast, Wright's positive depiction of Bigger anticipates Wright's later work, in which he accepts modernist existential and African national autonomy. In that sense, the positive character of Bigger anticipates the black aesthetics of the 1960s, when critics defended the formal autonomy of black culture and the aesthetic value of black studies. The novel's last section echoes, in other words, not just the changes in Wright's views but in modern views of him as well.

Philip Goldstein
University of Delaware
pgold@UDel.Edu

Albert Murray Brings It On Home: Revisioning Black Modernism in Train Whistle Guitar

This paper shows how Albert Murray’s 1974 novel Train Whistle Guitar uses past jazz styles to look back on the myths and expressivity that collect African American experience. Murray uses jazz to assert the enduring importance of the black vernacular, and, at the same time, to re-envision history, repositioning African American traditions more centrally in the American grain. That is, Train Whistle Guitar dramatizes Murray’s larger reconsideration of African American culture within the USA, articulated in both his fiction and his cultural criticism. While the novel is ostensibly a simple coming-of-age narrative, tracing the maturation of Scooter in the 1920s, the book also enacts a reconsideration of history, revising long-accepted cultural divisions between blacks and whites. As well, Murray’s adolescent hero recognizes conflicts between the “book history” of school and the black vernacular histories to which he is privy in Gasoline Point, Alabama. Ultimately, Murray’s novel is both informed by music in its vivid descriptions of musical performance, but also stylizes its narrative in a way that evokes jazz sound, through call-and-response figures, unorthodox semantics, and intertextual riffs. It is through jazz that the novel repeatedly asserts the vitality and complexity of African American life.

Michael Borshuk
University of Alberta
mborshuk@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca

Missing the Mark: Disidentification in Percival Everett’s Erasure

Looking at the ways the marked body is interpellated can allow us to recognize the interpellative hail as a site of normative, as well as transformative, possibilities. Percival Everett’s Erasure explores the crisis of interpellation by offering a protagonist, Monk, whose novels, reworkings of Greek tragedies, are not "black enough" for publication. When Monk sees J.M. Jenkins’ We’s Lives In Da Ghetto receive critical acclaim and a national book award, he decides to appropriate the identity of the stereotypical black man as defined by dominant discourse through Stagg R. Leigh, his pen name for his book My Pafology. Monk performs Stagg several times, when publishers want to meet him. I argue Monk is problematizing and expanding the role and possibilities of the "black man," not solely parodying with contempt the dominant definition of "black". Monk’s performance calls attention to the sedimentary and citational qualities of identity, thereby exposing identity as constructed through dominant discourse. Jose Munoz Esteban’s Disidentifications and Judith Butler’s understanding of agency – available paradoxically through the process of subjectivation – help us consider Monk’s appropriation of Stagg R. Leigh as a transformative performance.

Jamie Calhoun
Miami University
calhoujd@muohio.edu