When the evening comes : a novel, and And it begins like this : essays

When the Evening Comes explores African American experience in the rural North Carolina south. The book centers around the interracial relationship of two characters--Ben Groves and Mary Holden--after they find the body of a man left in an abandoned tobacco barn where they used to meet. They disagree over the decision to notify the authorities, a decision that leads to their breakup as Mary goes off to college and Ben is left behind to take care of his dying mother. After her death Ben learns that his birth father, a man he's never known, is black. Ben, who has always known himself to be white, is forced to reexamine his own identity as a biracial (but who can pass for white) man. This new understanding of his identity is a catalyst for him--he goes looking for Mary at her college where he navigates between roles as both a black and white-passing man, and becomes involved in the racial unrest on the campus. When the Evening Comes not only reconfigures the passing trope in a contemporary landscape, but revisits long-lasting questions pertaining to race that are embedded in our history. And It Begins Like This, weaves together personal anecdote, history, genealogy records, passages from the Bible, literary theory and criticism, and recollections to examine the generational effects of slavery as they relate to an understanding of black female identity.

Azealia Banks's “212”: Black Female Identity and the White Gaze in Contemporary Hip-Hop

Azealia Banks's 2011 hit single “212” established her as one of hip-hop's rising stars, with critics highlighting the song's provocative lyrics and Banks's ability as an MC as standout qualities. Banks would later receive attention for her public dispute with white rapper Iggy Azalea, whom she accused of exploiting black musical culture. This article integrates an analysis of “212” with a discussion of Banks's recent public rhetoric in order to examine the ways in which Banks rearticulates the figure of the black female rapper and criticizes white fascination with black female sexuality and black cultural forms. I conclude by situating this discussion within the broader context of contemporary “post-racial” politics, in which the political elements of hip-hop and the systemic racial inequalities they address have become increasingly marginalized in favor of “color-blind” conceptions of United States society and popular culture.

Octavia Butler and the Aesthetics of the Novel

Octavia Butler depicts a character with physical or mental disability in each of her works. Yet scholars hesitate to discuss her work in terms that emphasize the intersection with disability. Two salient questions arise: How might it change Butler scholarship if we situated intersectional embodied experience as a central locus for understanding her work? Once we privilege such intersectionality, how might this transform our understanding of the aesthetics of the novel? In this paper, I reorient the criticism of Butler's work such that disability becomes one of the social categories under consideration. I read two prominent analyses of Butler's work because their interpretations—black feminist in orientation—centralize black female identity as a category of analysis. I contend these analyses grapple with ideas that can only be fully understood with disability as an integral portion of the discussion. Since categories of analysis like race, disability, and gender require and create cultural tropes and challenge accepted forms, I outline three components of Butler's aesthetic: open‐ended conclusions that frustrate the narrative cohesion associated with the novel form, intricate depictions of power that potentially alienate the able‐bodied reader, and contained literary chaos that upends the idea of ontological fixity.

“I wanted to live in that music:” Blues, Bessie Smith and Improvised Identities in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees

This paper explores the link between the improvisatory nature of blues music and resistance to socially prescribed expectations for gender and sexuality in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s first novel, Fall on Your Knees (1996). When Kathleen Piper, one of the main characters in the novel, leaves her home in Cape Breton in1918 to pursue a classical singing career in New York, she finds herself transfixed, and subsequently transformed, by a performance by Jessie Hogan (a fictional character clearly modeled on Bessie Smith), in large part because of her remarkable improvised vocals. Hogan’s performance points to the rich history of the great blues women of this time period, women who, through their songs, costumes, and improvised lyrics and melodies, explicitly and implicitly tackled issues such as domestic violence and poverty, and challenged normative ideas of black female identity and sexual orientation. This history provides a critical context for Kathleen’s growing sense of autonomy and sexual identity, and this paper argues that the representation of Bessie Smith in the novel (in the guise of Hogan) enables possibilities for improvising new social relations and sexual identities.