Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice

Chapter 2 traces formal and thematic connections between naturalist fiction and environmental justice narratives by analyzing their pervasive, underexamined references to smell. In representative works by Frank Norris, Ann Petry, and Helena María Viramontes, descriptions of noxious odors indicate spaces and experiences of atmospheric intoxication as characters take airborne particulates into their bodies. Thus, olfactory references—whether they take the form of extensive or offhand descriptions, and whether or not characters are fully conscious of their implications—stage the biopolitical effects of unevenly distributed atmospheric risks.

Novel Reviews

Ann Petry, The Street (London: Virago, 2019), 416pp., £9.99 (soft back)Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004), xxi +239 pp. $16.99 (paperback).

Novel Reviews

Ann Petry, The Street (London: Virago, 2019), 416pp., £9.99 (soft back) Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004), xxi +239 pp. $16.99 (paperback).

Sounding Harlem: Ann Petry’s The Street and the Experience of “Dwelling”

The essay focuses on the thematic coming into being of a place mapped through practices of listening. Sound, noise, and music are seen as part of the racially informed urban “everyday.” The reading depends on the isovist narration of The Street (1946) by Ann Petry, documenting Harlem during the 1940s. The text develops a narrative predicated on the use of aurality as a means of “dwelling upon” the site of a home; a place to live, but where the idea of habitation is compromised by the need to reside. The figural horizon created by Petry anticipates dwelling as Heideggerian habitation rather than as occupation. For Heidegger, the conventional edifice of housing illustrates the forced settling of land. This contradicts his principle of dwelling as a way to remain in a place, leaving us perpetually in search of the dwelling that is more than home. The streets of Harlem cite, among other instruments, the nomadism of such residing, as it attempts to breach the conflicting boundaries of “white” ownership. The trajectory of this subversive foray draws upon the improvisations of a Harlem soundscape, as it works out a means of dwelling anew.

Aesthetic Slippage in Realism and Naturalism

This chapter considers slippages in realist and naturalist aesthetics that transcend traditionally defined genres, terrains, and time periods. It examines realism’s and naturalism’s fluctuating acceptances and critiques of the “natural” order, bringing nineteenth-century imperialist discourse into dialogue with Darwinian themes typical of literary naturalism. The chapter proposes better understanding of the relation between realistic and naturalistic modes by examining inclusion and exclusion based on assumptions about the “natural” in analysis of slippages between representations of civilization and savagery in Jack London and Zitkala-Ša; restraint, compulsion, and the beast within the divided self in Frank Norris, Henry James, and Theodore Dreiser; and evolutionary discourse and environmental determinism in Angelina Weld Grimké, Nella Larsen, and Ann Petry. Finally, TV’s Breaking Bad and The Wire suggest that we are still grappling with the intersectional forces of race, class, and gender that define territories of privilege and limitations of the American dream.

Existentialism in America

This chapter examines the transformation of postwar liberalism by identifying the development of an American idiom within the existential thought that became influential after the Second World War. I frame the concerns and historical development of American existentialism through the work of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and Stanley Donen’s film Funny Face (starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire). Contrasts are drawn between Ellison and two other writers: Carlos Bulosan and Ann Petry. In addition, the chapter discuses Cold War containment politics, McCarthy era anxieties about communism, changes in perceptions of organized labor, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and cultural attitudes regarding the American welfare state and political action.

Jazz Internationalism

Jazz Internationalism argues for the critical significance of jazz in Afro-modernist literature, from the beginning of the Great Depression through the radical social movements of the 1960s. Through consideration of literary texts that feature jazz as a mode of social criticism as well as artistic expression, it examines how jazz functions as a discourse of radical internationalism and Afro-modernism during the Long Civil Rights Movement. This book redefines the importance of jazz for African American literary history, as it relates recent jazz historiography to current theoretical articulations of black internationalism, including articulations of socialist, diasporic, and Black Atlantic paradigms. In discussing how jazz is invoked as a mode of social criticism in radical African American writing, it considers how writers such as Claude McKay, Frank Marshall Davis, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, and Paule Marshall dramatize the possibilities and challenges of black internationalism through their innovative adaptations of black music.