BOOK NEWS: Examining representations of blackness in Black literary and filmic texts

Intersecting Aesthetics: Literary Adaptations and Cinematic Representations of Blackness

Edited by Charlene Regester, Cynthia Baron, Ellen C. Scott, Terri Simone Francis, and Robin G. Vander

U of Mississippi P, 2023

ISBN: 9781496848857

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/I/Intersecting-Aesthetics

Intersecting Aesthetics: Literary Adaptations and Cinematic Representations of Blackness illuminates cultural and material trends that shaped Black film adaptations during the twentieth century. Contributors to this collection reveal how Black literary and filmic texts are sites of negotiation between dominant and resistant perspectives. Their work ultimately explores the effects racial perspectives have on film adaptations and how race-inflected cultural norms have influenced studio and independent film depictions. Several chapters analyze how self-censorship and industry censorship affect Black writing and the adaptations of Black stories in early to mid-twentieth-century America. Using archival material, contributors demonstrate the ways commercial obstacles have led Black writers and white-dominated studios to mask Black experiences. Other chapters document instances in which Black writers and directors navigate cultural norms and material realities to realize their visions in literary works, independent films, and studio productions. Through uncovering patterns in Black film adaptations, Intersecting Aesthetics reveals themes, aesthetic strategies, and cultural dynamics that rightfully belong to accounts of film adaptation.

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 volume considers travelogue and autobiography sources along with the fiction of Black authors H. G. de Lisser, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Frank Yerby, and Walter Mosley. Contributors examine independent films The Love Wanga (1936) and The Devil’s Daughter (1939); Melvin Van Peebles's first feature, The Story of a Three Day Pass (1967); and the Senegalese film Karmen Geï (2001). They also explore studio-era films In This Our Life (1942), The Foxes of Harrow (1947), Lydia Bailey (1952), The Golden Hawk (1952), and The Saracen Blade (1954) and post-studio films The Learning Tree (1969), Shaft (1971), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995).

"Intersecting Aesthetics is a pivotal work from leading scholars in African American film studies. The influence of this collection will reach long into the future." - Gerald R. Butters Jr., coeditor of Beyond Blaxploitation

"A riveting take on overlooked chapters in Hollywood history" - Publishers Weekly

Charlene Regester is associate professor in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies and affiliate faculty with the Global Cinema Minor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900–1960 (2010) and coeditor with Mae Henderson of The Josephine Baker Critical Reader (2017). Her essays have appeared in In the Shadow of “The Birth of a Nation”: Racism, Reception and Resistance (2023), Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited (2021), and Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity (2020).

Cynthia Baron is professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University. She is author of Modern Acting: The Lost Chapter of American Film and Theatre (2016) and Denzel Washington (2015). She is coauthor of Acting Indie: Industry, Aesthetics, and Performance (2020), Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation (2014), and Reframing Screen Performance (2008). She is coeditor of More Than a Method: Trends and Traditions in Film Performance (2004), editor of the Journal of Film and Video, and BGSU Research Scholar of Excellence 2017–2020.

Ellen C. Scott is associate professor and head of the Cinema and Media Studies Program in the School of Theater, Film, and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2016, she was awarded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholars Grant for her project “Cinema’s Peculiar Institution,” which investigated the representation of slavery on screen. She is author of Cinema Civil Rights: Race, Repression, and Regulation in Classical Hollywood Cinema (2015). Her publications appear in Film History, African American Review, American History, Black Camera, and other journals.

Terri Simone Francis is associate professor of cinematic arts at the University of Miami. She is author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism (2021), which illustrates Baker’s conscious shaping of her celebrity and African Americans’ interest in cinema and efforts to gain equality. Her research appears in Feminist Media Histories, Film History, Film Quarterly, Black Camera, and other journals. In her former role as director of the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University, she curated series on Classic Black Films of the 1970s, Black Cinematic Imaginations of Outer Space, and other topics.

Robin G. Vander is associate professor in the Department of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. She is coeditor of Percival Everett: Writing Other/Wise (2014) and Perspectives on Percival Everett (2013). She is coeditor of two issues of the Xavier Review: “Celebrating Jesmyn Ward: Critical Readings and Scholarly Responses” (2018) and “Reading the Intersections of Sex and Spirit in the Creative Arts” (2007). Her article “The African American Population in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina” appears in The Review of Black Political Economy (2011).

BOOK NEWS: A Critical Reassessment of Aimé Césaire's poetry

Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits

BY JASON ALLEN-PAISANT

Oxford UP, April 2024

ISBN: 9780192867223

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/engagements-with-aim-csaire-9780192867223?cc=us&lang=en&#

Aimé Césaire is due a major critical reinterpretation and that is exactly what this book carries out. Through an in-depth grasp of the trajectory and core significance of Césaire's work, Jason Allen-Paisant highlights a set of links it makes between "spirit," "poetry," and "knowing." These explications, setting Césaire's work in relation to a rigorously accounted for set of influences, reframe how we understand his writings, enhancing their philosophical, rather than merely political, aspects.

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.

Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits is about more than Negritude (which has come to mean something less than a deep poetic sensibility with its own aspirational aesthetics and metaphysics, and rather something more like a fantasy-ridden iteration of pan-Africanism). It shows an Aimé Césaire deeply relevant to today: to the crises of ecological collapse, capitalist dystopias, and ideologies predicated upon fear and the threat of foreigners; and to contemporary chatter around interspecies collaboration and the need to rethink the entrepreneurial subject of Western political thought.

Recasting Césaire's work is not just a matter of transforming a significant figure. It is also about rethinking legacies. This book is an engagement in the truest sense--the work of a contemporary Black poet who expounds the ways in which Césaire's work articulates for him a new politics of the self.

"Jason Allen-Paisant introduces us to a pedagogy of spirit in which the rigid divisions of Western thought, and the rigid Western interpretations of Aimé Césaire, are transformed into a homage to the daily inspirited materialities of African/diasporic social poiesis. The most original and inspiring reading of Césaire in decades." -- Professor Stefano Harney, Academy of Media Arts Cologne - co-author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

"Stunning, sensuous, and urgent, Jason Allen-Paisant's poetic meditation on the ecopoetics of Aimé Cesaire is also a wholly original philosophical inquiry into the shifting ways of being human under conditions of coloniality and climate catastrophe. He gives us a vibrant new language, deeply rooted in the ancestral lands and Black vitality of his native Jamaica, to engage the vibrational intelligence of the earth, and open ourselves to a regenerative ethics of life." -- Professor Kris Manjapra, Northeastern University - author of Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation

"Beautifully written and propelled by a fascinating new approach and its direct intervention to Aimé Césaire's scholarship, Thinking with Spirits will cement Jason Allen-Paisant's reputation as a rigorous critical thinker." -- Professor Frieda Ekotto, University of Michigan - author of Race and Sex Across the French Atlantic: The Color of Black in Literary, Philosophical and Theater Discourse

Jason Allen-Paisant is a senior lecturer in critical theory and creative writing in the Department of English, American Studies, and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. An alumnus of the University of the West Indies (Mona), the University of Oxford, and the École normale supérieure (Ulm), he is the author of Théâtre dialectique postcolonial (2017) and of two books of poetry: Thinking with Trees (winner of the Poetry category of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Poetry Prize) and Self-Portrait as Othello (winner of the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection).

BOOK NEWS: Engaging legal culture as a key to understanding Black writing

See Justice Done: The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition

BY CHRISTOPHER MICHAEL BROWN

UP of Mississippi, 2024

ISBN: 9781496848208

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/See-Justice-Done

In See Justice Done: The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition, author Christopher Michael Brown argues that African American literature has profound and deliberate legal roots. Tracing this throughline from the eighteenth century to the present, Brown demonstrates that engaging with legal culture in its many forms—including its conventions, paradoxes, and contradictions—is paramount to understanding Black writing.

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.

Brown begins by examining petitions submitted by free and enslaved Blacks to colonial and early republic legislatures. A virtually unexplored archive, these petitions aimed to demonstrate the autonomy and competence of their authors. Brown also examines early slave autobiographies such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Mary Prince’s History, which were both written in the form of legal petitions. These works invoke scenes of Black competence and of Black madness, repeatedly and simultaneously.

Early Black writings reflect how a Black Atlantic world, organized by slavery, refused to acknowledge Black competence. By including scenes of Black madness, these narratives critique the violence of the law and predict the failure of future legal counterparts, such as Plessy v. Ferguson, to remedy injustice. Later chapters examine the works of more contemporary writers, such as Sutton E. Griggs, George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, and Edward P. Jones, and explore varied topics from American exceptionalism to the legal trope of "colorblindness." In chronicling these interactions with jurisprudential logics, See Justice Done reveals the tensions between US law and Black experiences of both its possibilities and its perils.

"See Justice Done compels readers to think again about Black life before the law while revealing an aesthetics of harm and injury that gives form to the ‘incommensurable.’ A difficult, unsettling journey, it takes African American writing, from early slave petitions to the contemporary novel, as riposte to a legal system that fails to imagine the Black subject. Giving blood to terms overused and emptied out, this timely book is at once chilling and analytically acute." —Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, With Dogs at the Edge of Life, and In the Belly of Her Ghost: A Memoir

"See Justice Done cogently excavates the convergence of African American fiction and the histories in US law. Its declaration of this critical intimacy is accomplished in ways that are substantive, nuanced, and frankly brilliant. Brown’s book will be indispensable, not only for understanding the relationship between law and literature, but because of its compelling exploration of how the law’s ‘disjuncture’ and ‘ambiguity’ flow with unnerving ease through his distinctive and deeply engaged reading of African American fiction. Brown’s necessary text proves its point—that the relationship of law to ‘racialized subjects’ challenges the very notions of legal freedom and fugitivity, the composition of American cultural studies, and—in ‘In Formation’ the final chapter’s deadly serious take on Black culture’s performativity, whether as entertainment or as a matter of life and death, the law, with all its incapacities, may indeed be the adjudicator that determines whether and how Black lives—be they fact or fiction—matter." —Karla FC Holloway, author of Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial and Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Compositing Literature

Christopher Michael Brown is assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University, where he teaches courses on African American literature and legal culture. His research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Ford Foundation.

BOOK NEWS: A Black feminist spiritual history

We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism

BY MARINA MAGLOIRE

U of North Carolina P, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-4696-7489-6

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469674896/we-pursue-our-magic/

Drawing on the collected archives of distinguished twentieth-century Black woman writers such as Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, Marina Magloire traces a new history of Black feminist thought in relation to Afro-diasporic religion. Beginning in the 1930s with the pathbreaking ethnographic work of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and ending with the present-day popularity of Afro-diasporic spiritual practices among Black women, she offers an alternative genealogy of Black feminism, characterized by its desire to reconnect with ancestrally centered religions like Vodou.

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.

Magloire reveals the tension, discomfort, and doubt at the heart of each woman’s efforts to connect with ancestral spiritual practices. These revered writers are often regarded as unchanging monuments to Black womanhood, but Magloire argues that their feminism is rooted less in self-empowerment than in a fluid pursuit of community despite the inevitable conflicts wrought by racial capitalism. The subjects of this book all model a nuanced Black feminist praxis grounded in the difficult work of community building between Black women across barriers of class, culture, and time.

"Magloire's examination is wholly unique to the field and makes a significant treatment that is even more necessary now as the study of Black women's spiritual practices has again come into vogue. A wonderfully complex and well-researched book."—Kinitra Brooks, Michigan State University

"An engaging and thoroughly researched book that brings together well- and lesser-known figures to explore religion, spirituality, and feminism among African American women writers, artists, and scholars. For scholars interested in gender, religion, diaspora relations, and comparative diaspora studies, We Pursue Our Magic is essential."—Tiffany Patterson, Vanderbilt University

Marina Magloire is assistant professor of English at Emory University.

BOOK NEWS: Tracing the literary imaginary of Central American Blackness

Black in Print: Plotting the Coordinates of Blackness in Central America

By Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar

SUNY Press, 2023

ISBN: 9781438492827

https://sunypress.edu/Books/B/Black-in-Print

Black in Print examines the role of narrative, from traditional writing to new media, in conversations about race and belonging in the isthmus. It argues that the production, circulation, and consumption of stories has led to a trans-isthmian imaginary that splits the region along racial and geographic lines into a white-mestizo Pacific coast, an Indigenous core, and a Black Caribbean. Across five chapters, Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar identifies a series of key moments in the history of the development of this imaginary: Independence, Intervention, Cold-War, Post-Revolutionary, and Digital Age. Gómez Menjívar's analysis ranges from literary beacons such as Rubén Darío and Miguel Ángel Asturias to less studied intellectuals such as Wingston González and Carl Rigby. The result is a fresh approach to race, the region, and its literature. Black in Print understands Central American Blackness as a set of shifting coordinates plotted on the axes of language, geography, and time as it moves through print media.

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.

"Black in Print challenges commonplaces about mestizo Central America, bringing to light 'new' Guatemalan-Belizean Garifuna works and tracing a genealogy of Blackness that will enrich literary studies of the region." — Yvette Aparicio, author of Post-Conflict Central American Literature: Searching for Home and Longing to Belong

"Gómez Menjívar's book is a welcome addition to studies of Central America, both for its breadth and for its focus on narratives of Blackness. Far from concentrating on a single period or corpus of texts, Black in Print proposes a matrix to understand and analyze how Blackness has played out in discourses about the nation and national identity across different locales and contexts." — Jorge Marturano, author of Narrativas de encierro en la República cubana

Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar is associate professor of media arts at the University of North Texas. She is coeditor (with Héctor Nicolás Ramos Flores) of Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability; editor of Amefrica in Letters: Literary Interventions from Mexico to the Southern Cone; coeditor (with Gloria Elizabeth Chacón) of Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America; and coauthor (with William Noel Salmon) of Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize.

BOOK NEWS: Afro-diasporic fiction confronts the resurgence of biological racism

Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction: Race, Kinship, and the Passion for Ontology

BY NICOLE SIMEK

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781501377655

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/alchemies-of-blood-and-afrodiasporic-fiction-9781501377655/

Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction focuses on the resurgence of biological racism in 21st-century public discourse, the ontological and material turns in the academy that have occurred over the same time period, and how Afro-diasporic fiction has responded to both with alternative visions of bloodlines, kinship, and community.

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.

In thinking through conceptions of race, ethnicity, and materiality at work within both humanities research and popular culture, Nicole Simek asks how the figure of alchemy – that semi-scientific, semi-mystical search for gold and the elixir of long life – can help scholars address the epistemological and affective investments in blood, bloodlines, and genetics marking both academic and mainstream discourses. To answer this question, Simek examines neo-plantation and Afrofuturist narratives, Afropessimist interventions, museums and public memory projects, and direct-to-consumer genetic testing services in the French Caribbean and the United States. This comparative approach to cultural production helps pinpoint and better understand the intersections and divergences between scholarship trends and troubling features of a broader Zeitgeist.

"This is a refreshing and original reflection on racial theory and contemporary cultural production that speaks aptly to the tensions and anxieties of our times while demonstrating how literature and film can offer salutatory alternatives to ongoing racial injustice." --Jane Hiddleston, professor of literatures in French, Oxford University

"Nicole Simek's Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction offers a trenchant critique of cultural and political bloodlines in contemporary Black thought, In a bold series of case studies, from genealogical analysis to a wonderful juxtaposition of work by Whitehead and Condé, Simek provides fresh thinking on a passion for the real in Black writing. An impressive contribution." --Peter Hitchcock, professor of English, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

 

Nicole Simek is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, USA. Her latest books include Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life (2016) and Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation (2008). She is also co-editor of Francophone Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020) and translator of Maryse Condé's The Belle Créole (2020).

BOOK NEWS: Interviews with leading scholar in African American literature

Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr.

EDITED BY JOHN ZHENG

UP of Mississippi, 2023

ISBN: 9781496845443

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Jerry-W.-Ward-Jr

Jerry W. Ward Jr. (b. 1943) has published nonfiction, literary criticism, encyclopedias, anthologies, and poetry. Ward is also a highly respected scholar with a specialty in African American literature and has been recognized internationally as one of the leading experts on Richard Wright. Ward was Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College, served as a member of both the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Mississippi Advisory Committee for the US Commission on Civil Rights, and cofounded the Richard Wright Circle and the Richard Wright Newsletter. He has won numerous awards, and in 2001 he was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent.

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.

Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr. aims to add an indispensable source to American literature and African American studies. It offers an account of Ward's intelligent and thoughtful responses to questions about literature, literary criticism, teaching, writing, civil rights, Black aesthetics, race, and culture. Throughout the fourteen interviews collected in this volume that range from 1995 to 2021, Ward demonstrates his responsibilities as a contemporary scholar, professor, writer, and social critic. His charming personality glimmers through these interviews, which, in a sense, are inner views that allow us to see into his mind, understand his heart, and appreciate his wit.

John Zheng is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University and author of A Way of Looking, which won the Gerald Cable Book Award. He is also editor of African American Haiku: Cultural Visions; The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku; Conversations with Dana Gioia; and Conversations with Sterling Plumpp and coeditor of Conversations with Gish Jen, all published by University Press of Mississippi.