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  [Introduction to] Race Mixing: Southern Fiction Since the Sixties

  Suzanne W. Jones

  In the southern United States, there remains a deep need among both black and white writers to examine the topic of race relations, whether they grew up during segregation or belong to the younger generation that graduated from integrated schools. In Race Mixing, Suzanne Jones offers insightful and provocative readings of contemporary novels, the work of a wide range of writers—black and white, established and emerging. Their stories explore the possibilities of cross-racial friendships, examine the repressed history of interracial love, reimagine the Civil Rights era through children's eyes, herald the reemergence of the racially mixed character, investigate acts of racial violence, and interrogate both rural and urban racial dynamics.

  Employing a dynamic model of the relationship between text and context, Jones shows how more than thirty relevant writers—including Madison Smartt Bell, Larry Brown, Bebe Moore Campbell, Thulani Davis, Ellen Douglas, Ernest Gaines, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Reynolds Price, Alice Walker, and Tom Wolfe—illuminate the complexities of the color line and the problems in defining racial identity today. While an earlier generation of black and white southern writers challenged the mythic unity of southern communities in order to lay bare racial divisions, Jones finds in the novels of contemporary writers a challenge to the mythic sameness within racial communities—and a broader definition of community and identity.

  Closely reading these stories about race in America, Race Mixing ultimately points to new ways of thinking about race relations. "We need these fictions," Jones writes, "to help us imagine our way out of the social structures and mind-sets that mythologize the past, fragment individuals, prejudge people, and divide communities."

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  [Introduction to] Vision’s Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination

  Peter Lurie

  William Faulkner occupied a unique position as a modern writer. Although famous for his modernist novels and their notorious difficulty, he also wrote extensively for the "culture industry," and the works he produced for it—including short stories, adaptations, and screenplays—bore many of the hallmarks of consumer art. His experiences as a Hollywood screenwriter influenced him in a number of ways, many of them negative, while the films turned out by the "dream factories" in which he labored sporadically inspired both his interest and his contempt. Faulkner also disparaged the popular magazines—though he frequently sold short stories to them.

  To what extent was Faulkner's deeply ambivalent relationship to—and involvement with—American popular culture reflected in his modernist or "art" fiction? Peter Lurie finds convincing evidence that Faulkner was keenly aware of commercial culture and adapted its formulae, strategies, and in particular, its visual techniques into the language of his novels of the 1930s. Lurie contends that Faulkner's modernism can be best understood in light of his reaction to the popular culture of his day. Using Theodor Adorno's theory about modern cultural production as a framework, Lurie's close readings of Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem uncover the cultural history that surrounded and influenced the development of Faulkner's art.

  Lurie is particularly interested in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and especially the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in Augustof stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism.

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  [Introduction to] Platitudes: & the New Black Aesthetic

  Trey Ellis and Bertram D. Ashe

  A playful, irreverent look at the African-American literary community.

  Trey Ellis's uproariously funny debut novel Platitudes, first published in 1988, takes on conflicts within the African American literary community. Dewayne Wellington, a failing black experimental novelist, and Isshee Ayam, a radical feminist author, collaborate on Dewayne's latest sexist comedy. Alternately telling the story about the coming of age of Earle and Dorothy - two black middle-class teenagers, sex-starved in New York City - the battling writers sneak ever, and dangerously, closer to reconciling their literary disputes.

  This edition of Platitudes also includes "The New Black Aesthetic," a groundbreaking essay by Ellis that appeared in the journal Callaloo.

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  [Introduction to] By the Hand of Mormon: the American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion

  Terryl Givens

  With over 100 million copies in print, the Book of Mormon has spawned a vast religious movement, but it remains little discussed outside Mormon circles. Now Terry L. Givens offers a full-length treatment of this influential work, illuminating the varied meanings and tempestuous impact of this uniquely American scripture.
  
  Givens examines the text's role as a divine testament of the Last Days and as a sacred sign of Joseph Smith's status as a modern-day prophet. He assesses its claim to be a history of the pre-Columbian peopling of the Western Hemisphere, and later explores how the Book has been defined as a cultural product--the imaginative ravings of a rustic religion-maker. Givens further investigates its status as a new American Bible or Fifth Gospel, one that displaces, supports, or, in some views, perverts the canonical Word of God. Finally, Givens highlights the Book's role as the engine behind what may become the next world religion.

  The most wide-ranging study on the subject outside Mormon presses, By the Hand of Mormon will fascinate anyone curious about a religious people who, despite their numbers, remain strangers in our midst.

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  [Introduction to] Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature

  Suzanne W. Jones

  Something about the South has inspired the imaginations of an extraordinary number of America’s best storytellers—and greatest writers. That quality may be a rich, unequivocal sense of place, a living connection with the past, or the contradictions and passions that endow this region with awesome beauty and equally awesome tragedy. The stories in this superb collection of modern Southern writing are about childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood—in other words, about growing up in the South. Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” set in a South that remains segregated even after segregation is declared illegal, is the story of a white college student who chastises his mother for her prejudice against blacks. But black, white, aristocrat, or sharecropper, each of these 23 authors is unmistakably Southern—and their writing is indisputably wonderful.

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  [Introduction to] From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Studies

  Bertram D. Ashe

  The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late 20th century.

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  [Introduction to] From My People: 400 Years of African American Folklore

  Daryl Cumber Dance

  A magnificent celebration of―and an essential introduction to―African American life and culture. Folklore displays the heart and soul of a people. African American folklore not only hands down traditions and wisdom through the generations but also tells the history of a people banned from writing and reading during slavery. In this anthology, Daryl Cumber Dance collects a wealth of tales that have survived and been adapted over the years, many featuring characters (like Brer' Rabbit) from African culture. She leaves no genre of folklore out, including everything from proverbs and recipes to folk songs and rumor. There is a section on the unique style that African Americans have consciously fashioned, including works by and about Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jelly Roll Morton. Within the chapter on folk art, which includes a sixteen-page color insert, quilts, dolls, sculpture, and painting get their due. From the famous to the anonymous, From My People is Dance's gift back to her culture.

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  [Introduction to] South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture

  Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith

  Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth.

  In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains one of the key goals of the book: to open up to scrutiny the literary and cultural practice that has come to be known as “regionalism.” Part I, “Surveying the Territory,” theorizes definitions of place and region, and includes an analysis of southern literary regionalism from the 1930s to the present and an exploration of southern popular culture. In “Mapping the Region,” essayists examine different representations of rural landscapes and small towns, cities and suburbs, as well as liminal zones in which new immigrants make their homes. Reflecting the contributors’ transatlantic perspective, “Making Global Connections” challenges notions of southern distinctiveness by reading the region through the comparative frameworks of Southern Italy, East Germany, Latin America, and the United Kingdom and via a range of texts and contexts — from early reconciliation romances to Faulkner’s fictions about race to the more recent parody of southern mythmaking, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone.

  Together, these essays explore the roles that economic, racial, and ideological tensions have played in the formation of southern identity through varying representations of locality, moving regionalism toward a “new place” in southern studies.

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  [Introduction to] Crossing the Color Line: Readings in Black and White

  Suzanne W. Jones

  The complex truth about the color line -- its destructive effects, painful legacy, clandestine crossings, possible erasure -- is revealed more often in private than in public and has sometimes been visited more easily by novelists than historians. In this tradition, Crossing the Color Line, a powerful collection of nineteen contemporary stories, speaks the unspoken, explores the hidden, and voices both fear and hope about relationships between blacks and whites. The volume opens with stories by Alice Adams, Toni Cade Bambara, Ellen Douglas, Reynolds Price, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, and John A. Williams that focus on misunderstandings created by racial stereotypes and by mislabeling cultural differences. In a second group of stories, Anthony Grooms, Randall Kenan, James Alan McPherson, Toni Morrison, Frances Sherwood, Alice Walker, and Joan Williams examine situations that promote understanding, even when relationships between blacks and whites are complicated by charged issues of politics, religion, class, gender, and sexual orientation. The final section features recent stories that turn on personal similarities as often as racial differences, but even here the legacy of racism lingers. It tests the emerging friendship of Alyce Miller's women, the professional relationship of David Means's men, the alliances between Clifford Thompson's college students, the romance of Reginald McKnight's interracial couple, and the business venture between Elizabeth Spencer's white woman and black man. Much of the power and poignancy of these recent stories, however, comes from their portrayal of how equal and amiable relationships can cross the color line.

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  [Introduction to] Honey, Hush! An Anthology of African American Women's Humor

  Daryl Cumber Dance

  The vibrant humor of African American women is celebrated in this bold and unique collection that the Miami Herald describes as "breathtakingly broad and deep."

  In this "dazzling anthology" (Publishers Weekly), Daryl Cumber Dance has collected the often hard-hitting, sometimes risqué, always dramatic humor that arises from the depth of black women's souls and the breadth of their lives. The eloquent wit and laughter of African American women are presented here in all their written and spoken manifestations: autobiographies, novels, essays, poems, speeches, comic routines, proverbial sayings, cartoons, mimeographed sheets, and folk tales. The chapters proceed thematically, covering the church, love, civil rights, motherly advice, and much more.

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  [Introduction to] The Lineage of Abraham: The Biography of a Free Black Family in Charles City, VA

  Daryl Cumber Dance

  The history of the descendents of Abraham Brown (1769? - 1840) in Charles City County, Virginia.

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  [Introduction to] The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy

  Terryl Givens

  Nineteenth-century American writers frequently cast the Mormon as a stock villain in such fictional genres as mysteries, westerns, and popular romances. The Mormons were depicted as a violent and perverse people--the "viper on the hearth"--who sought to violate the domestic sphere of the mainstream. While other critics have mined the socio-political sources of anti-Mormonism, Givens is the first to reveal how popular fiction, in its attempt to deal with the sources and nature of this conflict, constructed an image of the Mormon as a religious and social "Other."

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  [Introduction to] New World Adams: Conversations with Contemporary West Indian Writers

  Daryl Cumber Dance

  In these interviews, held in the early 1980s, with twenty-two of the major writers of the English-speaking Caribbean, Daryl Dance brings together what is much more than just a valuable source book for readers of West Indian writing. The interviews are highly readable - by turns probing, combative and reflective and always absorbing. Daryl Dance brings to the interviews a rare breadth of knowledge and empathy with the work of the writers interviewed and the openly avowed insights of an African-American woman.
  
  The writers interviewed include Michael Anthony, Louise Bennett, Jan Carew, Martin Carter and Denis Williams, Austin Clarke, Wilson Harris, John Hearne, C.L.R. James, Ismith Khan,George Lamming, Earl Lovelace, Tony McNeill, Pam Mordecai and Velma Pollard, Mervyn Morris, Orlando Patterson, Vic Reid, Dennis Scott, Sam Selvon, Michael Thelwell, Derek Walcott and Sylvia Wynter.

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  [Introduction to] Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture

  Suzanne W. Jones

  The essays in this collection explore the many ways in which women writers have seen and dreamed the woman artist as a character in their works. In describing this character, her struggles and her visions, we as feminist critics run the risk of prescribing her, and yet failing to name her means failing to know her. We confront this difficulty not by defining the woman artist figure but by identifying many. Recognizing as Teresa De Lauretis has suggested that the social construction of gender is "a common denominator" among women, we examine the different representations of the woman artist figure as gender is mediated by race, class, nationality, ethnicity, motherhood, sexual orientation, and historical era as well as literary movements and theories of language. Although a concern with so many positions may seem to suggest a paradoxical passive creator determined by external elements along, Linda Alcoff argues that "the concept of positionality includes two points: first...that the concept of woman is a relational term identifiable only within a (constantly moving context; but, second, that the position that women find themselves in can be actively utilized (rather than transcended) as a location for the constructions of meaning." The title of the collection, Writing the Woman Artist, suggests both the social construction of women artists an their own imaginative construction of the artist figure; it registers the tension between the fictional and the empirical figure, the problematic relationship between language and reality.

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  [Introduction to] Folklore from Contemporary Jamaicans

  Daryl Cumber Dance

  There is not now available, nor has there ever been, a general and comprehensive introductory collection of the rich folklore of Jamaica. Yet, despite this widespread enthrallment with the better-known aspects of Jamaican folk life and culture, the fact remains that no extensive general collection of the vast range of Jamaican folklore has been assembled.

  Dr. Dance spent six months in Jamaica from June through November 1978 researching and compiling stories and folklore for this book.

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  [Introduction to] Long Gone: The Mecklenburg Six and the Theme of Escape in Black Folklore

  Daryl Cumber Dance

  Magnitude of the Death Row escape on May 31, 1984 of six condemned men (Linwood Briley, James Briley, Earl Clanton, Jr., Willie Leroy Jones, Derick Lynn Peterson, and Lem Tuggle) incarcerated in the Mecklenburg Correction Center in Boydton, Virginia is chronicled.

  The terror it inspired in Virginia and up and down the East Coast, and even into Canada, evoked memories of the numerous exploits of fugitives and out-laws on the run in Black folktales, Black toasts, Black music, and Black literature.

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  [Introduction to] Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook

  Daryl Cumber Dance

  The beginnings of Caribbean literature lie hidden In the folklore of the plantation era and in the prim, condescending travelogues, the exotic novels, and the apparently naive slave narratives - often authored by Whites - that began to appear as early as the eighteenth century. Francis Williams, the classically educated Black poet of 18th century Jamaica, used conventional Augustan poetics to protest racism and assert the common humanity of mankind. The vision draws from Caribbean life. By the 19th century some black poets began to write of their own concerns and experiences, some writing in the local vernacular.

  The essays in this book are intended to introduce the reader to the wide range of important Caribbean writers, from the pioneers to the contemporaries.

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  [Introduction to] Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans

  Daryl Cumber Dance

  An exciting new collection of Black American folklore, running the gamut from anecdotes concerning life among the slaves to obviously contemporary jokes. In their frank expression of racial attitudes and unexpurgated wit, these tales represent a radical departure from earlier collections.