Nella Larsen: A Career Brief, a Mark Lasting

Much like her predecessor Phillis Wheatley and her contemporary, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen's early life and death are shrouded in pathos and tragedy. That Larsen's career assumed a similar trajectory as those women who came before her and alongside her in the literary world should be viewed as a testimony to the sometimes inescapable fate of the woman artist. Before 1970, women writers--particularly African American women writers--faced a formidable challenge when attempting to publish alongside their male contemporaries. While DuBois made the hue and cry of the Harlem Renaissance to make all "art propaganda," and to create for the purpose of racial uplift, gender uplift was lagging behind on the road to literary recognition. 

Nella Larsen. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten (featured here). 

Larsen's novellas, Quicksand and Passing were her solitary publications during her long life, but these narratives were significant in their treatment and interrogation of racial construct and the social and moral implications of the process called "passing." Not since Charles Chesnutt's novels of the late 1800s had an African American author taken on such a task. 

Larsen's lasting imprint is reflected in the words of scholars: 

"Of all the fiction published during the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) is arguably the most sophisticated attempt to question the very idea of race: the notion that there are identifiable differences among groups of human beings...Whereas George Schuyler's irreverent science fiction satire Black No More is unrelenting in its sending-up of the American hysteria around race in the period, Larsen's novel is notable for its psychological depth, its investigation of the moral complexity of 'passing'...and its focus on the implications of racial identity for women in particular" (Gates, et al 1079). 

Following her brief literary career, Larsen vacillated between working as a nurse, a marriage to husband, Dr. Elmer S. Imes, and traveling on a Guggenheim Fellowship (for which no writing developed). She withdrew almost totally from the public in her final years, and as our text points out, was found dead in her home just a few years before the extent of her literary impact was rediscovered (Gates, et al 1080). 

Southwest Students Learn About Famous African American Memphians at Elmwood Cemetery

On April 19, 2014, I had the privilege of accompanying my students on a trip to Elmwood Cemetery. At that time, Elmwood was hosting an annual African American History Tour that featured a guided tour of some of the most influential Memphians of African American descent. Students learned of the Walker family, who began the Universal Life Insurance Company on Vance and Danny Thomas, Aleda Condell, a former slave who became a Latin teacher, and of Robert Church, a prominent landowner and businessman, and father of activist Mary Church Terrell.

Our tour was the subject of an item in The Commercial Appeal.

The Church family crypt.

A student of mine, Angel Lacy, takes notes during the tour. 

The headstone of journalist L. Alex Wilson and his wife. Wilson was the editor of the Tri-State Defender, and was attacked by racists during his coverage of the Little Rock integration.

The headstone of Mary J. Langston, the beloved cook of Elvis Presley.

The director at Elmwood gives the history of African Americans in Memphis. 

David Walker's Appeal: An Anti-Slavery Tract

Perhaps one of the most intrepid and inflammatory anti-slavery documents ever written, David Walker's Appeal (1830) has been largely overlooked by historians, but lauded for its self-affirming, no-nonsense confrontation with white power structures over the issue of chattel slavery. Walker's act of open protest was, in many ways, one that was characteristic of an age of uprising, as Walker's words mirrored the courageous acts of other early civil rights martyrs such as Nat Turner, who led the historical slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, the following year.

Walker, the self-proclaimed "restless disturber of the peace" (Gates et al., 227) models his document after the United States Constitution, by presenting a preamble in which he decries the abhorrent state of his people. From the preamble Walker addresses the wrongs done to the colored people of the U.S. in articles and sections, denounces U.S. slavery as the most wretched manifestation of human bondage, and asserts his own humanity and that of his fellow bondsmen.

Like his predecessor, Olaudah Equiano, Walker engages the literary form and models imposed upon him by the dominant white culture to craft an act of rebellion. As you reflect on this document, compare and contrast Walker's Appeal to Equiano's Narrative. How does each author appeal to his readers' Enlightenment philosophies concerning democracy, human rights, and concepts of individual freedom? What references, or historical analogies does Walker use to reach his audience? Compare his tone and language to that of Equiano's. How do you respond to each?

Select some passages from Walker's Appeal that illustrate the ways the author attempts to provoke or persuade his audience on the themes of democracy and human rights. Which passages do you respond to the most, and why?

Harriet Wilson: The First African American Novelist

Harriet E. Wilson was born a free person of color in New Hampshire in 1825. A source encapsulates her early life, noting that she was born Harriet, “Hattie” Adams in Milford, New Hampshire, and was the biracial dauther of Margaret Adams Smith, an Irish woman, and Joshua Green, an African American. Her father died when Hattie was still a child, and her mother left her at the home of a wealthy New Hampshire farmer, where she was indentured to his family. This indenturement was, at the time, “a customary way for society at the time to arrange support and education for orphans. In exchange for labor, the orphan child would be given room, board and training in life skills, so that she could make her way in society” (1).

Harriet Wilson is now considered by many scholars to have been the first African American to have published a novel in the United States. The novel, published anonymously in 1859, was entitled Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, but received little acclaim until it was discovered by scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 1982 when it received widespread attention. Until this discovery, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or The President’s Daughter held distinction as the first novel to be published by an African American author; however Wilson’s was published in Boston, while Brown’s was published in the United Kingdom while he was still a fugitive slave. At the time of its publication, there was considerable controversy among Abolitionists as to whether or not Our Nig did not fit the profile of the traditional “Slave Narrative,” and therefore did not serve the propagandist purposes of the movement. Further, Wilson’s novel did not depict the image of the black woman as the submissive victim of miscegenation’s wicked consequences: the novel does not forecast freedom for its protagonist, and the heroine of the tale takes a stand against a white woman (2).

However, an interesting aspect of Wilson’s own life was her connection to the Spiritualist Church—an organization founded on the belief in contact with the spirit world. Its moorings can be found in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, whose lives’ works support the investigation of life after death. The Spiritualist Church also had connections with reform movements of the time, such as Abolition and Suffrage. At the time, women were disallowed from public speaking—that activity being one of the many components of the male sphere. Trance mediums, women who claimed to be able to communicate with the beyond, were often allowed audience in public speaking circuits because they were guided not by their own free will, but by the spirits who communicated through them. This practice, in its own way, became its own mode of signification: using performance as a means to surpass or subvert societal restrictions on behavior.

Cora L. V. Scott was a famous trance medium in the latter half of the nineteenth century. She wrote many books in which she attributed the writing to spirit guides

An active member of the Spiritualist Church, she was well-known and beloved among its members as an active participant in the Children’s Progressive Lyceum as an organizer and sponsor, participating in plays and singing in a quartet. Known as a spiritual healer and “clairvoyant nurse,” her reputation spread in Spiritualist circles as “the colored medium.”

Poet Jason McCall to Visit Southwest Tennessee Community College

Pierian and the Languages and Literature Department Present 

Poet Jason McCall

Friday, September 26, 2014

Union Campus, Parrish 100

1:00PM

Jason will read from his work and conduct a poetry workshop *
Jason McCall is the author of Dear Hero, (winner of the 2012 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize), Silver (Main Street Rag), I Can Explain (Finishing Line Press), and Mother, Less Child (winner of the 2013 Paper Nautilus Vella Chapbook Prize). He is from the great state of Alabama, where he currently teaches at the University of Alabama. He holds an MFA from the University of Miami, and his work has been featured in Cimarron Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Letters, The Rumpus, and other journals.

If you are interested in submitting your poems and participating in the workshop, please contact Jerome Wilson at 901-333-5215 or e-mail at wjwilson2@southwest.tn.edu.
*Participation is limited and preference is given to current Southwest students.
Funded by Student Activities

African American Folklore Performance

Edwidge Danticat: Postcolonial Feminism

It is not necessarily vital, but it is helpful, to understand the concept of Post-colonialism to appreciate more fully the literature of Edwidge Danticat. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1969, Edwidge was raised by her grandmother until her parents found work in the U.S. From the age of four she was raised in a Haitian-populated section of Brooklyn, New York. Among her many publications, she has produced a collection of short stories entitled Krik? Krak!, and the novels Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Farming of the Bones, and The Dew Breaker. She has also published numerous essays and literature for young adults (2). 

Post-Colonialism is a term that reaches across several disciplines, from anthropology, to history, to literary theory. Throughout, post-colonialist theorists concern themselves with the condition and aftermath of postcolonialism--and imperialism: a period in history in which powerful nations sought to subdue, enslave, and exploit the aboriginal people of countries of the globe. Post-colonialists also examine the machinations of imperialism in terms of the "creation, control, and distribution" of knowledge and of power that is used in maintaining post-colonial populations. While we in the U.S. have referred to Jim Crow segregation, the "one-drop rule," miscegenation, and the myriad functions of the white power structure to extend the virtual enslavement of blacks, post-colonialist look at these conditions elsewhere around the globe to Haiti, Jamaica, South Africa, Central and South America. Scholars of post colonial studies examine the way histories of segregation/apartheid, systemic abuses and inequality have contributed to identity formation among individuals within the subalternized groups (2). 

According to scholars at Postcolonial Studies@ Emery, Danticat has been widely acknowledged as the 'voice' of the Haitian diaspora--a sobriquet that she shrinks from, arguing that by referring to her as the single voice of her people, one "ignores and silences the multiple Haitian voices speaking Haiti into being across the globe" (3). Her consternation reflects the history of people of African descent across the globe--including those of the Americas--who struggle with the crisis of identity, of achieving voice and representation, and for feeling an ever-present feeling of 'twoness' that DuBois once described. How does Danticat's attitude toward being named 'the voice' coincide with or interrogate DuBois's notions of the "talented tenth"? On the other hand, how does her attitude reinforce the impulse of the woman of color to "speak herself into existence?" Below, Danticat talks of Katrina, of immigrants, and of the crisis of belonging--and not belonging--in one's native land. 

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

    Ralph Ellison 1914-1994

Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1914, Ralph Ellison was still just a young child when the Harlem Renaissance began to emerge on the national scene, and a teenager when the era had begun to dwindle; however, he was a Renaissance Man in quite another sense--as Gates points out. While still a child he became interested in music, learning to play the trumpet among other instruments. Ellison's artistic interests expanded at Tuskegee Institute, where he discovered a love of literature and applied art. However, his time at Tuskegee was cut short, Gates adds, due to funding, and the fact that Ellison became disillusioned by Tuskegee and found it "anti-intellectual and overly accommodationist." He soon found new horizons in New York, where he was introduced to author Richard Wright. The two writers became friends immediately, and several of Ellison's work was published with Wright's encouragement" (Gates, et al. 1535).

Though Ellison garnered much insight from his working relationship with Wright, the two ultimately differed in terms of philosophy when it came to ideological alliances. Ellison doubted the efficacy of Wright's Marxist Communism--as well as that of the Naturalism Wright frequently employed in his examinations of the self in contest with the world. While Wright's Bigger Thomas was the angry and disaffected product of racism, ignorance and other negative social forces, Ellison's protagonists were formed out of the writer's abiding insistence upon an image of the African American male as educated and erudite. One source observes that "[i]f Wright's characters were angry, uneducated, and inarticulate--the consequences of a society that oppressed them--Ellison's Invisible Man was educated, articulate, and self-aware" ("American Masters" pbs.org). Additionally, while Wright's Naturalist--and Urban Realist approach to understanding the effects of racism on the individual,  Ellison's text in Invisible Man ponders the question, "What is the value of self-knowledge?" (1537).

Specifications for Essay I

English 2650

Sections 150 and 201

Spring 2014

African American Literature

Essay I

So far this semester, we have read and discussed some of the key literary and creative productions of African Americans in the New World. We have encountered the trickster figure and the ‘signifying’ functions of the African American folktales and songs; the spiritual and gospel forms that provided solace and masking functions for the slave and his descendants. We have looked at examples of early African American biography’s antecedents in the Slave Narrative, beginning with Olaudah Equiano. These texts convey to us many of the prevailing themes and preoccupations that attended the African American struggle for freedom, recognition, and civil rights in the years leading up to the turn of the twentieth century. For this first formal essay, you are to choose at least one text that we have covered so far, and analyze that text in accordance with one (or two) of the themes we have covered. Your essay should be thesis-driven: that is, it should be shaped and structured along one central point or observation you wish to make about the texts you address in your essay, and the body paragraphs should strengthen and reinforce that idea.

The following are some prompts that you may follow:

o   Consider the peculiar situation of the female slave as characterized in the excerpt from Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. What ordeals did the female slave face according to Linda Brent’s narrative? How does Linda Brent’s narrative intersect thematically William Wells Brown’s depiction of the female slave’s experience? In your essay, you should reference passages or scenes in each narrative that illustrate these points of intersection.

o   In a similar vein, compare the experiences of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs. How did slavery attempt to define their respective roles as women and as mothers? How did the machinery of slavery use their gender against them—particularly in the case of the Mistress of the house?

o   Review the short stories we have read and discussed from Charles Chesnutt and William Wells Brown. What common concerns do these writers share over questions of race and color? How does each writer re-introduce the folk figure of the trickster to convey a poignant message concerning the condition of their characters?

o   Compare the projects of David Walker and Olaudah Equiano. While each writer addresses the horrors of chattel slavery, Walker and Equiano choose distinct methods in conveying that message. In what ways does each use language (the master’s tools) to denounce slavery (the master’s house)?

o   As we have discussed, the conventional slave narrative assumed a recognizable organization: each tends to be episodic, features an “I Moment,” and depicts the awfulness of slavery. Compare one of the slave narratives we have read so far to the film Twelve Years a Slave. In what ways does cinema contribute to the tradition of the slave narrative—particularly in its role as a mode of abolitionist propaganda?

You may use one of these prompts, or formulate an original thesis of your own that compares or contrasts two authors or texts. However, there must be a central point you wish to argue and prove.

You should use at least one outside source to argue your thesis. You are only permitted to use sources made available through the Southwest library’s website, our website, gotheretoknowthere, or the college or public library, and you must cite/credit those sources with MLA citation. You may not use SparkNotes, Wikipedia, Gradesavers, or any other commercial cite as reference. Plagiarism of any kind will result in a zero grade.

A Works Cited page is required.

*Essays should be formatted with one-inch margins, double-spaced, STAPLED, and typed in 12-point font.

Due Date: (201): Monday, March 17^th

                  (150): Tuesday, March 18^th

Slave Narrative: Dramatized

On a random search through YouTube, I discovered this very interesting piece that complements our present section quite well: a dramatic reenactment of slave memories that were recorded and transcribed. You may recognize the familiar voices and faces of some well-known and well-loved African American actors such as Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Basset, Robert Guillaume, Roscoe Lee Brown, and a popular talk show host, entrepreneur, philanthropist and owner of cocker spaniels...