New Books in African American Studies

What does it mean to be black?  In From Bourgeois to Boojie:  Black Middle-Class Performances (Wayne State University Press, 2011) editor Vershawn Ashanti Young and assistant editor Bridget Harris Tsemo ask the more accurate question:  what does it mean to perform blackness?  And, what is the relationship between race performance and belonging in the U.S.?  While we know that race is a social construct, we also know that how society perceives one’s race coupled with class carries very real outcomes.  Thus, to act “black” (or not) and/or to act “boojie” (or not) is a lesson many learn from a young age.  In this text, Professor Young brings together a group of heavy hitters who signify on race performances, how one’s socio-economic status alter them, in what contexts, and why. InFrom Bourgeois to Boojie Professor Young, performance artist, and professor of African American Studies, English, and Performance Studies at University of Kentucky brings together an esteemed group of artists and/or scholars such as Amiri Baraka, Houston A. Baker, Jr, and E. Patrick Johnson, to name but a few.  The collection is arranged in four sections—Performing Responsibility, Performing Womanhood, Performing Media, and Performing Sexuality—in which all contributors riff off the terms ‘boojie’ and ‘bourgeois’—the former derived from the latter.  Deliciously multi-layered, From Bourgeois to Boojie contains various genres like visual art, essay, poetry, personal reflections, short story, and play scripts.  All readers can easily find something that will help them along the path to answer the questions Professor Young asks in his Introduction. In a time of ostensible post-racialism, Bourgeois to Boojie will highlight the history of race and class as performance in the US, and how they still impact perceived citizenry in the 21st century.

Elizabeth West has written an insightful study about the presence of African spirituality in the autobiographies, poetry, speeches and novels of African American women, ranging from Phylis Wheatley to Harriet Wilson to Zora Neale Hurston. West’s book is titled African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being (Lexington Books, 2011). It’s a powerful read! West’s two blubists, literary critics Georgene Bess Montgomery and Dana Williams, do not hold back in expressing their admiration of the work . Both detail how useful the book is to readers, students, and teachers of African American studies. Montgomery writes that “while [the authors West studies] have received much critical attention and analysis, [West’s] analysis is quite original and provocative.” And Williams adds that West’s book “is an important first step in advancing new frameworks through which to read African American literature.” This provocative examination of how Motherland spirituality inflects, influences, and sometimes challenges and often times mingles with Anglo-Christianity as a rhetorical device for black female authors is too important to miss.

There is no better description of poet Makalani Bandele’s debut book Hellfightin’ (Willow Books, 2012) than the one found on his comprehensive website: “Derived from the nickname the French Army gave the all-Black 369th Infantry Regiment in World War I, the Hellfighters . . . is a tour de force of lyricism, mysticism, jive philosophy, and discursive narrative as blues lick. The title of the book, Hellfightin’, as a term is best understood in the context of the critical framework of the Blues …” Bandele’s Hellfightin’, then, is a poetic education in the African American musical, cultural and historical traditions, and one of the latest installments from the famous creative ensemble known as the Affrilachian Poets. Bandele couldn’t be among better company than those poets who seek to bring attention to the black literary tradition within the Appalachian territories. Hellfightin’ does all that and more. Listen to how Bandele tells us how.

One lesson that the ever-present trickster figure in African American folklore teaches is how to use signifying to protect one’s intimate self. A challenge of writing Dorothy West’s life is getting beyond the masks she presents before the ever-prying gaze. To get around the problem, the biographer must think in unconventional ways. In Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (Rutgers University Press, 2012), Cherene Sherrard-Johnson abandons the old battle between fact versus fiction; instead, she focuses on Dorothy West’s masks and what they show. Sherrard-Johnson respectfully evades West’s tactics of elusion and reveals a black woman artist with an acute awareness of the performative nature of class, and a keen sense of the intricacies of intra-racial identity. Dorothy West arrived to New York at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance. Although her first novel, The Living Is Easy (1948) was critically acclaimed it was not until the re-issue of her novel in 1982 that literary scholars and readers alike began to take a closer look at what she had to say. Publication of The Wedding (1995), as well as Oprah Winfrey’s TV miniseries based on the novel three years later, placed West in the limelight before she passed away in 1998. Sherrard-Johnson, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin ­Madison, offers readers more than the conventional biography that begins and ends with the birth and death of the subject.  As she maps West’s movement from Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard to Moscow, Russia and back again, Sherrard-Johnson treats readers to a myriad of responses to the question Dorothy West asks in the epigraph of her introduction: “Why would anybody write a book about me?” Should you desire to see one way to meet the challenge of catching an elusive figure while being mindful of the intrusive gaze, a good start is to read Cherene Sherrard-Johnson’s fine book.

Vorris Nunley’s Keepin it Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric (Wayne State University Press, 2011), uses the black barbershop as a trope to discuss black talk within literary, cultural, and political sites. Nunley’s brilliant analysis of Aaron McGruder’s cartoon Boondocks, the well-known play Ceremonies in Dark Old Men by Lonne Elder III, and Barack Obama’s Race Speech, substantiates his bold claim that “to not know [African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric] is to not know Black people, their subjectivities, their perspectives” (3). By reading this book you will understand just how African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric is specific to black people, generated by them, and speaks to their worldviews and experiences—even when black talk is directed to white people. As I understand it, Hush Harbor Rhetoric is often undervalued and grossly misunderstood in the mainstream because whites sometimes prefer to hear what Nunley calls the African American Podium-Auction Block Rhetoric, racially domesticated talk that both caters to and comforts white sensibilities and concerns. While hush harbor rhetoric is criticized sometimes for not being as palatable as podium-auction block rhetoric, Nunley’s book underscores why “palatable” is in the ears of the beholder. He encourages us to stop finding unnecessary fault with black people’s philosophical tongues and start listening more astutely to the type of talk they express, particularly in that corner barbershop on the West Side of Chicago.

Jafari S. Allen’s !Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Duke University Press, 2011) is a meticulously researched and exquisitely theorized ethnography that begins with a queer speculation of the revolutionary inevitable. That is, the cover art to the book, a self-portrait of a the tuxedoed artist Rena Pena, engaging Tarot cards and other visionary practices, can be read as the search for the means to enact the revolution that Afro-Cubans know they will achieve. That’s Venceremos. Or as one of Allen’s informants says, “Here we are fucked, but sill happy ….We are freer than most but cannot leave the Island.” So Allen looks to and theorizes the gender and sexually queer Afro-Cuban subjects in order to locate the possibilities for the “larger freedom” they seek in Cuba. But what’s truly magnificent about this study is the auto-ethnographic impulse Allen endows (“I asked myself how I could justify asking people intimate details about their sex lives, and not share my own”) as well the many reverberations that his fieldwork in Cuba holds for thinking about and working through the politics and the political struggles of African Americans in the U.S. You’ll enjoy reading !Venceremos? as much as I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to Allen talk about it.

Jerald Walker’s critical autobiography, Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption (Bantam, 2010), is a sheer pleasure to read. A book-length series of vignettes, reflections that alternate between his present life (he’s currently an English professor at Emerson College) and his life as a wannabe thug and habitual drug user on the streets of Chicago, Walker ponders thorny questions of racial identity in such chapters as “Orientation,” where he decides it’s better to identify with other writers (who happen to be white) than with fellow blacks. However, Walker isn’t always this decisive. Indeed the book is filled with stony ambivalence. But the beauty of Walker’s writing is that he uses sharp, seering prose not to probe but to crack ambivalence in the face and ape its gory middle. Although he ends up at times sounding just like the black neo-conservative Shelby Steele, Walker is much more complicated—since he also sounds sometimes like the black radical, Al Sharpton! Ultimately treating such subjects as interracial dating, adolescent rebellion, disability, dooms-day religious cults, homophobia, college education, myths about black sexual prowess, and, yes, love (if nothing else, you know he unequivocally loves his wife, Brenda), Walker’s Street Shadows is a very good book.

Daniel Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011) is the latest and perhaps best book in the growing genre of neo-passing narratives. The Invisible Line easily rests between Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and Blis Broyard’s One Drop, though it is different and in ways richer than both. Part American history, part legal analysis (Sharfstein is a legal scholar), part ethnographic study, it is a wholly gripping and exquisitely written narrative that tracks the racial passing of three black families over several centuries, leading us right up to their living “white” descendents today. You will certainly learn a lot about the history of race in the United States from The Invisible Line and, if you’re like me, you won’t be able to put it down.

In his new book, The Agony of Masculinity: Race, Gender, and Education in the Age of the “New” Racism and Patriarchy (Peter Lang, 2010), Pierre Orelus analyzes the “heartfelt stories of fifty men of African descent who vary in age, social class, family status, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, and ability” (1). One of the purposes of the book is to allow black men to share how they both perpetuate and are negatively impacted by heteronormativity, that is, the oppression of women and other men on the basis of how well they perform heterosexuality. During my interview with Pierre, I was surprised that he labeled some of the men as closeted bisexuals and homosexuals simply because they did not disclose their sexualities to him. This was surprising since the book itself seeks to undo heteronormativity, which enforces the requirement to announce a heterosexual identity. This announcement is made both by how a man performs his masculinity, and in his actual sex life. Since the bedroom is private (we don’t know who people actually have sex with), one is supposed to feel unrestrained in disclosing his sexual practice by stating that he is heterosexual. If a man doesn’t make this pronouncement, he is deemed non-normative (otherwise, it’s assumed that he would proudly proclaim his straightness). What’s more, Orelus gives the men the choice to remain silent regarding their sexuality, yet when some take the option, it is read as a fear of coming out. This may be an instance when Orelus himself perpetuates the exact crisis he hopes to end. This isn’t a criticism of this good book. Orelus begins by placing himself as a subject of analysis. He states that he has his own ongoing personal struggle with patriarchy, a fact often brought to his attention by his wife. It’s this experience he shares with other black men that prompted him to write the book. Please, listen in to our discussion of it.

Is comedian and cultural critic Bill Cosby right—that black youth suffer from a cultural pathology that leads them to commit more crimes than their white counterparts? Is the remedy to the high rate of offending by African American men the “shape up or get shipped out” perspective? Is there more to African American offending than poor parenting or lousy schools? James D. Unnever is the co-author (with Shaun L. Gabbidon) of the new book A Theory of African American Offending: Race, Racism, and Crime (Routledge, 2011). This book builds on the assertion of sociologist and cultural critic W. E. B. Du Bois that theories of African American life, culture, and especially crime must deal with the unique circumstances and worldview of black people living in America. Unnever and Gabbidon take this assertion seriously as they develop a theory that the reading public in general and criminologists and lawyers specificilly, indeed all associated with the criminal justice system, should read. I’ve recommended this book to colleagues at the collegiate level in African American Studies, as well as to junior high and high school teachers working in predominantly African American schools. This book is a must read!

Miriam Thaggert’s study Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), is an exceptional contribution to the discussion of both modernism and the the period of intense African American artistic production known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black Modernism is particularly invaluable because it explores the techniques, devices, and politics of blackness as both a cultural and literary concept, even as it examines modernism in the same way. It is a well-written and meticulously researched study. The University of Massachusetts Press’s website explains that “Thaggert identifies and analyzes an early form of black American modernism characterized by a heightened level of experimentation with visual and verbal techniques for narrating and representing blackness. The work of the writers and artists under discussion reflects the creative tension between the intangibility of some forms of black expression, such as spirituals, and the materiality of the body evoked by other representations of blackness, such as “Negro” dialect.” I am especially enthralled with Thaggert’s deft analyses of James Weldon Johnson’s famous introductions to his volumes on African American poetry and African American spirituals. She handles the cross influences between black and white writers of the early period of the Harlem Renaissance with insight and respect. This undeniable academic study can easily be handled by educated critics, working outside of university environments. It also offers a heuristic investigation for those within the academy. Thaggert is a careful and intelligent writer, and she brings her fresh perspective alive in our hour-long discussion. Please listen in.

If a mother raises her biologically male child as a daughter instead of a son, what would be the effects on the family, the community, the church? Indeed what would be the psychosocial, psychoemotional effects on the daughter once she discovers she’s a “he”? And what would all this reveal about the mother? What’s more, would the male-daughter’s brothers, father, friends come to agree with gender philosopher Judith Butler and accept the prevailing academic wisdom that gender and sex are social constructions, discourses that inform how we perform our lives? Or would they agree with some conservative Christian groups that a boy is a son. That’s how God made him, and that’s that! End of story. And what if the male-daughter is African American? What would race reveal about the social dynamics of gender in America? Novelist Daniel Black deftly explores the above questions and so much more in his lyrical new novel Perfect Peace (St. Martin’s Press, 2010). Not to give too much away, but Perfect is the name of the male-daughter; Peace is her family name. For seven years, she’s a girl. At age eight, she is told she’s a boy. What ensues disturbs the Peace family and the black Southern community where they live. Yet Perfect learns lessons that Daniel Black believes America as a whole must learn to face. There is never a dull moment in this intense interview. The discussion with Daniel Black is just as engaging as his fascinating novel.

In his new book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Columbia University Press, 2008), Houston A. Baker makes the argument that many contemporary black public intellectuals, otherwise known as African American “academostars,” are self-serving individuals who distort the message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and belie the overall aims of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. He calls out five main figures: Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and even Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson. Betrayal has been described both as a “brave and funny vernacular broadside” and “an important and absorbing meditation” on contemporary discussions of American politics. This book is immensely important not only for the way it clarifies the often misconstrued and misapplied rhetoric of Dr. King, but also the way in which it takes pains to historicize the plight of African Americans. I am personally persuaded by this book, and I highly recommend it. While Betrayal was published in the same year as the election of America’s first president of African descent, it offers us a framework for understanding our “now”: the upcoming 2012 election season, much of the Tea Party rhetoric, and even the political challenges that Barack Obama faces in relation to contemporary racial conflict. Baker is a distinguished university professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and he is a well-known literary and cultural critic, focusing on African American arts and politics. He is also a creative writer, with a recently published volume of poetry entitled Passing Over. I hope to have him on the show again to discuss that book. Till then, I’m certain you’ll be thoroughly engaged in this lively interchange.

Frank Dobson, Jr.’s Rendered Invisible: Stories of Blacks and Whites, Love and Death (Plain View Press, 2010) is a single-authored collection of fiction. It includes the opening, gripping novella “Rendered Invisible,” which gives the book its title. That’s followed by five notable short stories: “Black Messiahs Die,” about a black college basketball player who is murdered by police officers; “Homeless M.F,” about a homeless, ex-convict who is picked up by a rich woman for sex; “Junior Ain’t,” which features a fatherless boy who is antagonized by his wealthier, two-parent cousins; “Another Continent,” a study of unrequited love between professors; and “It Falls between,” a meditation on white racial anxiety and its affect on a working class black man. The stories are nice complements to the opening “Rendered,” the fictionalized account of the factual serial killing of black men in 1980 in Buffalo, New York. Dobson discussed his book, black life, the role of literature in society, and why he loves his job as an educator and writer. Listen in. You’ll enjoy it.

Deborah Whaley’s new book Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (SUNY Press, 2010) may be the first full-length study of a Black Greek-Letter Organization (BGLO) written by a non-BGLO member. But that’s not the only reason to read her book. Whaley takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study, which includes a personal rumination on her family’s relation to BGLO’s, interviews with sorority sisters, ethnographic participant observations, and literary and film analyses. Her foray into popular black culture is enriched by deep critical engagement with such texts as Spike Lee’s canonical film “School Daze” and the recent cinematic representation of Black Greek life “Stomp the Yard.” Whaley takes her subject matter seriously, but not so much so that her book lacks wit and charm. Indeed, her prose is just as pleasant, inviting, and engaging as she is in the interview. Check it out.