What Does it Mean to Be White in America: My Multi-Metamorphoses

Gil Fagiani is a storyteller by nature and by craft, both of which he employs in his essay My Muli-Metamorphoses, a version of which originally appeared in the anthology What Does it Mean to Be White in America (Two Leaf Press). Fagiani traces the dramatic arc of his transformation from a clueless White suburban middle class boy from Connecticut to a left-wing urban revolutionary who co-founded White Lightning, a Bronx-based organization that sought to radicalize white, working-class people. By working side by side with minority ethnic groups as an aide at the Bronx Psychiatric Center; a first marriage to a woman of color; and as the Director of a substance abuse program, Fagiani paves a path that binds his ethnicity with his progressive politics. As a writer, much influenced by Puerto Rican and Black writers, his work reflects the thorny racial separateness that makes trust and understanding distant goals.

NOISY SOUNDS! It’s a Listening Affair: Jazz Aesthetic, Improvisation, and Womanism in M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks

Black writers adapted jazz music to “say the unsayable” or employed the “jazz aesthetic,” which includes improvisation, citation, and variation as a stylistic device to distance their literature from European forms of narration. These elements can also be found in M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1988) which rigorously challenges the way language and words are perceived. Philip denounces the Western ideology of non-ambiguity, dichotomies, and narration altogether by engaging the reader as jazz musicians engage their audience. What role did music play in the Black resistance? What is the “jazz aesthetic” and how is it incorporated into Black diasporic literature? How does jazz music create community and how did Black female musicians speak up in a rather hypermasculine jazz universe? How does Philip incorporate the jazz aesthetic, improvisation, and womanist thoughts in her poems? And what is the intention of noise, dissonance, and (musical) violence?

Seeing Blackness through Black Expressive Culture: A Reading of Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama – Hail the Dark Lioness

This article examines visual and textual representation of blackness in contemporary black expressive culture. Its primary objective is to discern what blackness means and looks like when seen from the point of view of contemporary black expressive culture. To assess this, I first, briefly, analyze and interpret blackness. Second, I interrogate how contemporary black practitioners critique European ideas of blackness and mirror the complex multidimensionality of black subjecthood by conducting a formal analysis of two pieces of South African artist Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama – Hail the Dark Lioness series. Third, I explore the relationship between visual and textual imagery and their involvement in discourses on race. My intention is to reveal the role text and images play and have played in shaping the concept, perception, and representation of blackness; the visual effect they have had on the black imagination; and the heavy responsibility placed on black writers and artists not only to correct these images but to create images for the collective more often than for themselves.

Ethnic Irony in Melvin B. Tolson's “Dark Symphony”

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson's poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson's Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet's attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem's relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem's sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.'s study of “mastery and deformation,” theorizes the poet's tone. While prior critics have read the poem's lofty conclusion as sincerely aspirational toward assimilation, this article emphasizes the ambiguity, or irony, that Tolson develops: he embraces the symphony's capacity as a symbol to encompass multiple meanings, using the genre metaphorically as a mark of achievement, even as he implicates such usage as a practice rooted in conservative thought. The “symphony,” celebrated as a symbol of pluralistic democracy and liberal progress, meanwhile functions to reinforce racialized difference and inequality—a duality that becomes apparent when this poem is read alongside Tolson's concurrent poems, notes, and criticism. Such analysis demonstrates that “Dark Symphony” functions as a site for heightened consciousness of racialized musical language, giving shape to Tolson's ideas as a critic, educator, and advocate for public health.

The marvellous life of a Haitian refugee: James Noël’s Belle merveille

This article examines the marvellous realism of two Haitian writers, past and present. Building on earlier schools of literary and socio-ethnographic thought, including Haitian indigenism, French surrealism and the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s ‘marvellous real’, Jacques Stephen Alexis theorized marvellous realism at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956. Some 60 years later, James Noël published Belle merveille, a novel that depicts a refugee who survives the earthquake of 2010 and embarks on a journey to understand his place among international aid groups that proliferate in the aftermath. The article suggests that Noël’s novel is both a tribute to and a creative rethinking of Alexis’s ideological commitment to the intersection of literary and social realism. It argues that by filtering events through the imaginary of the refugee, Noël interrogates the very categories of the marvellous and the real undergirding Alexis’s aesthetic and political project. After providing theoretical and historical context for Noël’s work, the article carries out close readings of Belle merveille to illuminate the ways in which its redeployment of marvellous realism delivers a critique of humanitarian aid.

Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) as a Transgressive White-Life Novel

"James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) as a Transgressive White-Life Novel. In the wake of the Second World War, American literature saw the rise of a type of novel that is little known today: the white-life novel. This type of novel is written by black writers but describes white characters acting in a mostly white milieu. While at the time African-American critics praised this new way of writing as a sign of maturity, many have since criticized it for being regressive by pandering to white tastes. This paper sets out to analyze the most famous of these novels, namely James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). It is my contention that Giovanni’s Room connects blackness and queerness through the use of visual metaphors in the novel, disrupting thus the post-war consensus on ideals of white masculinity. The novel, while seemingly abandoning black protagonists, enacts a subtle critique of white heteronormativity akin to Baldwin’s own positioning within American thought of the post-war era. Keywords: blackness, James Baldwin, post-war fiction, queer, white-life novel "

Greatness and the Convertibility of Literary Capital: W. D. Howells and Black Writers

Opening with James Weldon Johnson’s discourse on artistic greatness, I discuss William Dean Howells’s assessment of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt through the lens of the convertibility of literary capital, developed with Pierre Bourdieu. From within the racial taxonomy and with white middle-class readers as implied addressees, Howells conceives of both writers as participating in a literary market, a field structured by the tenets of realism. Howells endows Dunbar with universal literary capital and creates a regional affiliation that breaches the color line, before he singles out his poems written in vernacular notation as lasting contributions and asserts the valence of such notation as general poetic practice. On Chesnutt he bestows literary capital by marking and converting two innovations: the genre of the short story and the representation of a world in-between the racial divide. In turn, the convertibility of that world is secured by a comparison of social class habits.

Literature’s Vexed Democratization

This article examines the contradictions of the contemporary literary field that appears both increasingly capacious and more exclusionary than in the past. Discussing the expansion of publishing enabled by digital and online technologies, we note that these changes did not reshape the demographics of most published works in the US, which remain overwhelmingly white authored. We then turn to literary prizes as an indicator of who writes prestige literature, narrating the twentieth-century formation of a racially segregated field and its slow changes against the backdrop of publishing overproduction. Combining a history of prestige literary culture with a demographic analysis of prizewinning writers (1918–2019), we discuss how a mostly white, New Critic-dominated field became the much more diverse and wide-ranging scene of the present. While this area has importantly opened up to writers of different backgrounds, our data show that the inequities of earlier prizegiving now take shape as drastic educational barriers to entry. Observing that a great deal of contemporary literature dramatizes the peculiarity of performing racial difference—often under the auspices of white audiences—we argue that the path to “excellence” has never been more narrow for writers who are not white, and Black writers in particular.