The Unspeakable Speculative, Spoken

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 564-574
Author(s):  
Rebecca Wanzo
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Racial Representations ◽  
The Us ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Paradigm Shifting

Abstract Exploring various absences—what is or should not be represented in addition to the unspeakable in terms of racial representations—is the through line of three recent books about race and speculative fictions. Mark C. Jerng’s Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (2018) argues racial worldmaking has been at the center of speculative fictions in the US. In Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (2017), Kristen Lillvis takes one of the primary thematic concerns of black speculative fictions—the posthuman—and rereads some of the most canonical works in the black feminist literary canon through that lens. Lillvis addresses a traditional problem in the turn to discussions of the posthuman and nonhuman, namely, what does it mean to rethink black people’s humanity when they have traditionally been categorized as nonhuman? Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2018) speaks to the absence of a framework of disability in African American literature and cultural criticism. In addressing absence—or, perhaps silence—Schalk offers the most paradigm-shifting challenge to what is speakable and unspeakable: the problem of linking blackness with disability and how to reframe our treatment of these categories.

scholarly journals Analysis of Class-as-Race and Gender Ideology in the US Young Adult Sports Novel Racing Savannah (2013)

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 129-144
Author(s):  
Rocío Riestra-Camacho
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Adolescent Readers ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic ◽  
The Us ◽  
And Gender

Equine fiction is an established genre in the English juvenile literary canon. Current works in the field appeal to adolescent readers thanks to their interface between classic motifs of vintage and contemporary forms of equine narratives. Performing a close reading of selected passages in Miranda Kenneally’s Racing Savannah (2013), this paper acknowledges how this novel is a revitalization and a challenge to this pattern. Savannah, who is more gifted than her companions, is subordinate to the decisions of the junior of the household where she works. Jack Goodwin, the protagonist’s romantic lead, educated in a neocolonialist background of male jockeying, becomes Savannah’s marker of difference according to her sex and lower socioeconomic status, which lay at the root of her later racialization despite her being a white character. My analysis attempts to expose how these difficulties encountered by the protagonist to become a professional jockey articulate past and present constraints of the horse-racing ladder.

Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon A Case Study from the Twenties

1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lauter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
White Men ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Gender

In its original form this chapter was delivered at a late-1970s forum sponsored by the Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession of the Modern Language Association. It had a kind of underground, mimeographed existence for a few years before seeing print in Feminist Studies in 1983. It has made its way and continues, I think, to be useful for those studying the canon. I have therefore not undertaken to change it. Judith Fetterley has raised one important criticism of the piece. In her fine introduction to Provisions: A Reader From 19th-century American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 18–19) she argues that the exclusion of nineteenth-century women writers from the literary canon began far earlier than the 1920s, in fact during the nineteenth century itself. There is significant evidence to support that contention. John Macy’s 1911 volume The Spirit of American Literature, for example, devotes its sixteen chapters to sixteen white men, though his “Preface” expresses admiration for the work of Jewett, Freeman and Wharton, and even passingly for Stowe. Brander Matthews’ similar volume, An Introduction to the Study of American Literature (1896, rev. 1911), focuses fifteen chapters on individual white men and then devotes one to “other writers,” including Whitman and Stowe. These very likely reflected the state of much academic opinion, though volumes like An American Anthology, 1787–1900 (ed., Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1900) and Mildred Cabell Watkins’ young adult primer, American Literature (1894) offer countervailing evidence. And, of course, as I outline in the article, other older academics like Fred Lewis Pattee and Arthur Hobson Quinn offered a far wider version of American letters. Fetterley thus provides what I think is a useful corrective to broad generalizations about academic canons, especially with respect to early and mid-nineteenth-century writers. But the central point, in my view, is that dominantly male academic accounts of the American canon were far less weighty around the turn of the century than they became in and after the 1920s.

“You Got Tuh Go There Tuh Know There”

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-144
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Reluctant Reader

This chapter examines how African American literature models and promotes dual-witnessing by underscoring the necessity of primary witnessing and impelling the reluctant reader to witness the narrative experience secondarily. To explore this doubly testimonial orientation, the chapter analyzes two key texts: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)—in which the life-narrative of the protagonist, Janie, is witnessed dually through conversation with her friend Pheoby—and Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), which likewise embraces dual-witnessing and additionally moves the conversation from two speakers of the same community, race, and gender (e.g., Janie and Pheoby in Their Eyes Were Watching God) to many speakers who partake in an epic-scaled, multiethnic, multi-gendered, and multi-classed communal witnessing. In reading these novels together, the chapter considers how Their Eyes Were Watching God witnesses primarily to Jubilee, which in turn witnesses the earlier work secondarily and intertextually.

“To Be Free to Say So”

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-76
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender

This chapter examines Afra-American emancipatory narratives as fundamentally testimonial literature, foundational to ensuing readings of trauma, blackness, and womanhood. Specifically, the chapter analyzes Sojourner Truth’s Narrative (1850), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes (1868) to consider how black and female speakers witness through nineteenth-century emancipatory narratives. The chapter also considers an Afra-American narrator’s (in)ability to testify to her personal experience of the prevalence of sexual abuse in American slavery and the misogynoir it reflects; how the intrusion of an amanuensis, editor, or pseudonym into a narrative affects its witnessing potential; and how gender and race work together and against each other to help and hinder witnessing. Finally, the chapter considers how contemporary readers may respond to these narratives, laying a foundation for succeeding readings of trauma and reception theory and race and gender studies in (African) American literature.

Rethinking Spaces of Confinement Through Black Girl Embodiment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique C. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Justice System ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Feminist Organizing ◽  
The Relationship

Carcerality in educational settings tends to focus on the school-to-prison pipeline and other ways that bodies differentially marked by race, gender, and, more recently, sexuality and ability are punished and tracked into the juvenile justice system. The ongoing chain between marginalized bodies and criminality is evident in rates of incarceration based on race and gender specifically. Black lesbian feminist organizing of the late 20th century called attention to the relationship between social identities and carcerality. Expanding on this work, Black feminist scholarship argues that Black womxn and girls are inherently valuable and that liberation is necessary for autonomy. Scholarship, however, illustrates how freedom for Black womxn and girls are directly mediated by systems of race, gender, sexuality, class, as well as by the discourses created to maintain order through institutions such as schools and prisons. Building on the preceding connections between social identities and confinement, Black girls’ specific encounters with high-stakes policies, such as zero-tolerance, and school discipline reveal new textures and distinct qualities of carcerality that expand education’s understanding of carceral spaces and experiences. In a society that presumes Black girls need no protection because their Blackness is feared while their femininity remains unrealized, Black girls’ bodily deliberations and embodied choices are acts of resistance and self-definition.

African-American Shakespeares: Loving Blackness as Political Resistance

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
Jason M. Demeter
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Henry Iv

Can a Shakespeare course effectively historicize and challenge Shakespeare’s deployment in U.S. educational contexts “as an instrument of white racial consolidation and non-white marginalization”? Demeter offers a concise summary of Shakespeare’s positioning as the pinnacle of “universal” white, Western cultural values before detailing a course that combines Richard III, Henry IV Part I, and Othello with responses to Shakespeare’s works by black artists such as James Baldwin, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Djanet Sears. Though he hoped that placing African-American literature and Shakespeare “on equal footing” would provoke critical interrogations of Shakespeare’s privileged place in the literary canon, Demeter finds Shakespeare’s whiteness and universality difficult myths to dismantle, and offers his ambivalent experience as a way to frame key questions about the relation between Shakespeare pedagogy and social justice.

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