The Footprints of Ghosts: Fictional Folklorists in the Work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead

This chapter looks at the fictional folklorists who appear in the work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead. An interesting pattern emerges when you consider the works of these four writers side-by-side: each of the stories are structured through a metafictive, self-conscious framework, each ask the reader to think critically about notions of authenticity, and each are haunted by ghosts, both figurative and literal. The ghostly is not an arbitrary signifier here. It figures an absence that has something to do with knowledge and text, with literary tourism, and with the inability to ever know, really, the shape of a community’s past, present, or future. This chapter thus argues that the character of the folklorist serves as a metonymic signifier of the absence always present in the representation of cultures.

Every True Pleasure

Some of North Carolina's finest fiction and nonfiction writers come together in Every True Pleasure, including David Sedaris, Kelly Link, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, and more. Within the volume-featuring writers who identify as gay, trans, bisexual, and straight-are stories and essays that view the full spectrum of contemporary life though an LGBTQ lens. These writers, all native or connected to North Carolina, show the multifaceted challenges and joys of LGBTQ life, including young love and gay panic, the minefield of religion, military service, having children with a surrogate, family rejection, finding one's true gender, finding sex, and finding love. One of the only anthologies of its kind, Every True Pleasure speaks with insight and compassion about living LGBTQ in North Carolina and beyond. Contributors include Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Brian Blanchfield, Belle Boggs, Emily Chávez, Garrard Conley, John Pierre Craig, Diane Daniel, Allan Gurganus, MinroseGwin, Aaron Gwyn, Wayne Johns, Randall Kenan, Kelly Link, Zelda Lockhart, Toni Newman, Michael Parker, Penelope Robbins, David Sedaris, Eric Tran, and Alyssa Wong.

I Thought I Heard the Shuffle of Angels’ Feet

In I Thought I Heard the Shuffle of Angels' Feet, a short story by Randall Kenan, a gay architect mourning the death of his lover from AIDS unexpectedly finds a second chance at romantic happiness in the local mechanic's garage.

Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas

At the turn of the millennium, the Martinican novelist and critic Édouard Glissant offered the bold prediction that “Faulkner’s oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans,” a goal that “will be achieved by a radically ‘other’ reading.” In the spirit of Glissant’s prediction, Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas places William Faulkner’s literary oeuvre in dialogue with a hemispheric canon of black writing from the U.S. and the Caribbean. The volume’s seventeen essays and poetry selections chart lines of engagement, dialogue, and reciprocal resonance between Faulkner and his black precursors, contemporaries, and successors in the Americas. Contributors place Faulkner’s work in reciprocally illuminating conversation with writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Randall Kenan, Edward P. Jones, and Natasha Trethewey, and with the musical artistry of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton. In addition, a quintet of emerging African American poets offer their own creative responses to Faulkner’s writings, characters, verbal art, and historical example. In these ways, Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas develops a comparative approach to the Faulkner oeuvre that goes beyond the compelling but also limiting question of influence—who read whom, whose works draw from whose—to explore the confluences between Faulkner and black writing in the hemisphere: the common questions framed in their bodies of work, the responses to common problems, precursors, and events.

Contemporary Black Writing and Southern Social Belonging: Beyond the Faulknerian Shadow of Loss

This chapter examines how Randall Kenan responds to both the force and inadequacy of Faulkner’s gothic representations of white southern loss which have arguably functioned to export—and perhaps exploit—a sense of the South as a “wound culture.” The chapter argues that in confronting how representations of white loss might have been used to legitimize or excuse pervasive forms of exclusion, racism, and homogeneity, contemporary black writers such as Kenan address the function of the gothic, as a genre of loss, in fostering a culture held in the grip of slavery. Specifically, Kenan’s queer appropriation of the gothic in A Visitation of Spirits signifies on the regulatory implications of the genre, calling into question the orthodoxies of white Renascence fiction.