Book News: First scholarly collection examining Edwidge Danticat's full range of works

Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat

EDITED BY MAIA L. BUTLER, JOANNA DAVIS-MCELLIGATT, AND MEGAN FEIFER

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496839886

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/N/Narrating-History-Home-and-Dyaspora

Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat contains fifteen essays addressing how Edwidge Danticat’s writing, anthologizing, and storytelling trace, (re)construct, and develop alternate histories, narratives of nation building, and conceptions of home and belonging. The prolific Danticat is renowned for novels, collections of short fiction, nonfiction, and editorial writing. As her experimentation in form expands, so does her force as a public intellectual. Danticat’s literary representations, political commentary, and personal activism have proven vital to classroom and community work imagining radical futures. Among increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and containment and rampant ecological volatility, Danticat’s contributions to public discourse, art, and culture deserve sustained critical attention. These essays offer essential perspectives to scholars, public intellectuals, and students interested in African diasporic, Haitian, Caribbean, and transnational American literary studies. This collection frames Danticat’s work as an indictment of statelessness, racialized and gendered state violence, and the persistence of political and economic margins.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The first section of this volume, “The Other Side of the Water,” engages with Danticat’s construction and negotiation of nation, both in Haiti and the United States; the broader dyaspora; and her own, her family’s, and her fictional characters’ places within them. The second section, “Welcoming Ghosts,” delves into the ever-present specter of history and memory, prominent themes found throughout Danticat’s work. From origin stories to broader Haitian histories, this section addresses the underlying traumas involved when remembering the past and its relationship to the present. The third section, “I Speak Out,” explores the imperative to speak, paying particular attention to the narrative form with which such telling occurs. The fourth and final section, “Create Dangerously,” contends with Haitians’ activism, community building, and the political and ecological climate of Haiti and its dyaspora.

"Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora is an in-depth interdisciplinary collection of essays that engages the corpus of Edwidge Danticat in all its dimensions: novelist, short fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, activist, and public intellectual. The book also brings these different aspects of her work together by bringing to light the alternate histories and historiographies this extraordinary storyteller maps out in her work. " - Carine M. Mardorossian, author of Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism

"Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora accomplishes a sustained interrogation of Danticat's canon—including her most recent works—in ways that lay the critical foundation not only for a reappraisal of the author's writing, but also for her place within the larger discursive nexus of African diaspora writing or immigrant literature. Such a work is long overdue, and it makes a case for itself as the most exhaustive treatment of Danticat's expanding literary output." - Maxine Lavon Montgomery, editor of Conversations with Edwidge Danticat

Maia L. Butler is assistant professor of African American literature at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she is also affiliate faculty in women’s and gender studies and Africana studies. She is a literary geographer researching and teaching in African American/diasporic, Anglophone postcolonial, and American (broadly conceived) studies, with an emphasis on Black women’s literature and feminist theories.

Joanna Davis-McElligatt is assistant professor of Black literary and cultural studies in the Department of English at the University of North Texas, where she is affiliate faculty in women’s and gender studies. She is coeditor of Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy.

Megan Feifer is assistant professor of English at Medaille College in New York. Her research and teaching addresses Afro-Caribbean diasporas in the US, multiethnic literatures, postcolonial literature and theory, and feminist theories.

Book News: Modernist writers wrestle with Freud's legacy

Secret Sharers: The Intimate Rivalries of Modernism and Psychoanalysis

BY JENNIFER SPITZER

Fordham UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781531502102

https://www.fordhampress.com/9781531502102/secret-sharers/

Secret Sharers traces a genealogy of secret sharing between literary modernism and psychoanalysis, focusing on the productive entanglements and intense competitive rivalries that helped shape Anglo-American modernism as a field. As Jennifer Spitzer reveals, such rivalries played out in explicit criticism, inventive misreadings, and revisions of Freudian forms—from D. H. Lawrence’s re-descriptions of the unconscious to Vladimir Nabokov’s parodies of the psychoanalytic case study. While some modernists engaged directly with Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis with unmistakable rivalry and critique, others wrestled in more complex ways with Freud’s legacy. The key protagonists of this study—D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and Vladimir Nabokov—are noteworthy for the way they engaged with, popularized, and revised the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, while also struggling with it as an encroaching discourse. Modernists read psychoanalysis, misread psychoanalysis, and sometimes refused to read it altogether, while expressing anxiety about being read by psychoanalysis—subjecting themselves and their art to psychoanalytic interpretations.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

As analysts, such as Freud, Ernest Jones, and Alfred Kuttner, turned to literature and art to illustrate psychoanalytic theories, modernists sought to counter such reductive narratives by envisioning competing formulations of the relationship between literature and psychic life. Modernists often expressed ambivalence about the probing, symptomatic style of psychoanalytic interpretation and responded with a re-doubling of arguments for aesthetic autonomy, formal self-consciousness, and amateurism. Secret Sharers reveals how modernists transformed the hermeneutic and diagnostic priorities of psychoanalysis into novel aesthetic strategies and distinctive modes of epistemological and critical engagement. In reassessing the historical and intellectual legacies of modernism, this book suggests that modernist responses to psychoanalytic criticism anticipate more recent critical debates about the value of “symptomatic” reading and the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

If modernism was anything, it was a literature of consciousness. For that reason, Freud and psychoanalysis have long been seen as crucial context to the literary innovations of the early twentieth century. Secret Sharers, however, troubles received notions about the role of Freud within literary modernism, offering a new narrative in which modernism was shaped by an engagement that was both anxious and constitutive. Jennifer Spitzer’s book is a timely invitation to reexamine modernism’s fundamental concerns and their bearing on the work we do as literary critics.---Timothy Wientzen, author of Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex

Spitzer moves beyond standard accounts of literary modernism’s debt to Freud to show how practicing psychoanalysts and modernist writers worked in close proximity on the same terrain—narrating the minds of others, interpreting the meaning of texts, theorizing queer experience. Attuned to subtler forms of influence and reaction—and featuring an ensemble cast of secondary characters who practiced or wrote about Freudian psychoanalysis—Secret Sharers offers a revelatory account of the rise of modernist conceptions of literary autonomy.---Laura Heffernan, author of The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study

Jennifer Spitzer is associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, Studies in the Novel, Modern Language Quarterly, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly, and other venues.

Black women writers' reinvention of jazz discourse

The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature 

BY PATRICIA G. LESPINASSE

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496836021

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Drum-Is-a-Wild-Woman

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse—jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album’s cover displays an image of a woman sitting atop a drum, depicting the way in which the drum literally obscures the female body, turning the subject into an object. This objectification of women leads to a critical reading of the role of women in jazz music: If the drum can take the place of a woman, then a woman can also take the place of a drum.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature challenges that image but also defines a counter-tradition within women’s writing that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a modern jazz discourse. Despite their alienation from bebop, women have found jazz music empowering and have demonstrated this power in various ways. The Drum Is a Wild Woman explores the complex relationship between women and jazz music in recent African diasporic literature. The book examines how women writers from the African diaspora have challenged and revised major tropes and concerns of jazz literature since the bebop era in the mid-1940s. Black women writers create dissonant sounds that broaden our understanding of jazz literature. By underscoring the extent to which gender is already embedded in jazz discourse, author Patricia G. Lespinasse responds to and corrects narratives that tell the story of jazz through a male-centered lens. She concentrates on how the Wild Woman, the female vocalist in classic blues, used blues and jazz to push the boundaries of Black womanhood outside of the confines of respectability. In texts that refer to jazz in form or content, the Wild Woman constitutes a figure of resistance who uses language, image, and improvisation to refashion herself from object to subject.

This book breaks new ground by comparing the politics of resistance alongside moments of improvisation by examining recurring literary motifs—cry-and-response, the Wild Woman, and the jazz moment—in jazz novels, short stories, and poetry, comparing works by Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and Maya Angelou with pieces by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ellington. Within an interdisciplinary and transnational context, Lespinasse foregrounds the vexed negotiations around gender and jazz discourse.

"The works discussed all present the urge toward subjectivity and female agency. . . . Valuable for those studying jazz history, feminist studies, and contemporary women’s fiction."  - B. Wallenstein, CHOICE

Patricia G. Lespinasse is director of undergraduate studies, associate professor of Africana studies and African American and African diaspora literature, and a faculty affiliate in the Department of English, General Literature and Rhetoric and in the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies (LACAS) program at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is associate editor of The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies. And, she teaches courses in blues and jazz literature, Caribbean literature, Africana studies, race, gender, and American film.

Book News: Networks of Black periodicals during Jim Crow

Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures

BY EURIE DAHN

U of Massachusetts P, 2021

ISBN: 9781625345264

https://www.umasspress.com/9781625345264/jim-crow-networks/

Scholars have paid relatively little attention to the highbrow, middlebrow, and popular periodicals that African Americans read and discussed regularly during the Jim Crow era—publications such as the Chicago Defender, the Crisis, Ebony, and the Half-Century Magazine. Jim Crow Networks considers how these magazines and newspapers, and their authors, readers, advertisers, and editors worked as part of larger networks of activists and thinkers to advance racial uplift and resist racism during the first half of the twentieth century.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

As Eurie Dahn demonstrates, authors like James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and Jean Toomer wrote in the context of interracial and black periodical networks, which shaped the literature they produced and their concerns about racial violence. This original study also explores the overlooked intersections between the black press and modernist and Harlem Renaissance texts, and highlights key sites where readers and writers worked toward bottom-up sociopolitical changes during a period of legalized segregation.

"Dahn provides close and textured readings of the networks to make a significant contribution to periodical and discursive studies ... attending to the ways Black people forged bottom-up resistance through the Black press." —Reception

“Jim Crow Networks makes a particularly important contribution to how we might recover underexamined Black literary networks by reviving the importance of what Dahn labels ‘middlebrow networks.’... [S]uch work makes visible the broader culture and networks that brought Black print culture into being and opens them up for Black bibliographic practice.” —Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America

EURIE DAHN is associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose.

Book News: Uniting art, writing, and protest in the 1960s Black Arts Movement

Start a Riot!

Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement 

Drama, Fiction, and Poetry

BY CASARAE LAVADA ABDUL-GHANI

30% off during February

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496840455

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Start-a-Riot

While the legacy of Black urban rebellions during the turbulent 1960s continues to permeate throughout US histories and discourses, scholars seldom explore within scholarship examining Black Cultural Production, artist-writers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) that addressed civil unrest, specifically riots, in their artistic writings.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Start a Riot! Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement Drama, Fiction, and Poetry analyzes riot iconography and its usefulness as a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM artist-writers like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ben Caldwell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Henry Dumas challenge misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental explorations in their writings. Representations of riots became more pronounced in the 1960s as pivotal leaders shaping Black consciousness, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. , were assassinated. BAM artist-writers sought to override the public's interpretation in their literary exposés that a riot’s disjointed and disorderly methods led to more chaos than reparative justice.

Start a Riot! uncovers how BAM artist-writers expose anti-Black racism and, by extension, the United States' inability to compromise with Black America on matters related to citizenship rights, housing (in)security, economic inequality, and education—tenets emphasized during the Black Power Movement. Abdul-Ghani argues that BAM artist-writers did not merely write literature that reflected a spirit of protest; in many cases, they understood their texts, themselves, as acts of protest.

"Start a Riot! will forge new directions in the study of art, political activism, and contemporary African American culture. Analyzing neglected or overlooked texts, Abdul-Ghani unveils the recurrent attention to the idea of the riot and sheds light on the complexity of thought during the Black Arts era, proving we might not know the Black Arts Movement and its key texts as well as we thought. "

-- GerShun Avilez, author of Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani is a scholar of African American literary cultural studies and owner of Africana Instructional Design.