BOOK NEWS: How literary studies can undo carceral epistemologies

 Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice

By Jess A. Goldberg

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781517917890

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517917890/abolition-time/

Abolition Time is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory, critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literatures of slavery, Jess A. Goldberg reveals how literary studies can help undo carceral epistemologies embedded in language and poetics.

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.

Goldberg examines poetry, drama, and novels from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first—such as William Wells Brown’s The Escape, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—to consider literature and literary scholarship’s roles in shaping societal paradigms. Focusing on how Black Atlantic literature disrupts the grammar of law and order, they show how these texts propose nonlinear theories of time that imagine a queer relationality characterized by care rather than inheritance, property, or biology. 

Abolition Time offers a framework for thinking critically about what is meant by the term justice in the broadest and deepest sense, using close reading to inform the question of abolishing prisons or the police and to think seriously about the most fundamental questions at the heart of the abolitionist movement.

"Through close reading, Jess A. Goldberg shows us that ‘justice is not an event’ and that to bring into being a different set of relations, imagining and building must take place at the same time. Clearly and compellingly argued and written, Abolition Time arrives right on time. This book is utterly necessary." —Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

"In Abolition Time, Jess A. Goldberg develops an abolitionist reading practice through which readers can find the seeds of collective liberation immanent in creative intellectual work. By emphasizing reading as constructive and imaginative work rather than passive decoding, Goldberg encourages us to reimagine what being human could mean in a world where people were truly free." —Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production

Jess A. Goldberg is assistant professor of American literature at New Mexico Highlands University. They are coeditor of Queer Fire: Liberation and Abolition, a special issue of GLQ.

BOOK NEWS: How Black women poets' prominence comes at a price

Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition

BY LAURA ELIZABETH VRANA 

Ohio State UP, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1575-3

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215753.html

From 1987, when Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, to 2021, when Amanda Gorman skyrocketed to celebrity status after performing during Biden’s inauguration and the Super Bowl, Black women have seemingly attained secure, stable positions at the forefront of American poetry. But this prominence comes at a price. As figures like Dove and Elizabeth Alexander have become well known, receiving endorsements and gaining visible platforms from major prizes, academic institutions, and publishing houses, the underlying terms of evaluation that greet Black women’s poetics often remain superficial, reflecting efforts to co-opt and contain rather than meaningfully consider new voices and styles. 

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 Pitfalls of Prestige, Laura Elizabeth Vrana surveys how developments in American literary institutions since 1980 have shaped—and been shaped by—Black women poets. Grappling with the refulgent works of the most acclaimed contemporary figures alongside lesser-known poets, Vrana both elucidates how seeming gestures of inclusion can actually result in constraining Black women poets’ works and also celebrates how these writers draw on a rich lineage and forge alternative communities to craft continually innovative modes of transgressing such limits, on the page and in life.

“Few scholars have so convincingly dissected the logic and the priorities by which awards-granting institutions distribute prestige, and none has done so while also providing the incisive close readings of complex, challenging poetry that Vrana has here. Pitfalls of Prestige is an impressive achievement.” —Keith D. Leonard, author of Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights

“Vrana documents the poetic lineages that Black women construct as they navigate the politics of the contemporary poetry landscape, and pressures the false binary between ‘formalist’ and ‘experimental’ verse. Pitfalls of Prestige is a compelling read that will significantly enhance scholarly understandings of contemporary Black women’s poetry.” —Emily Ruth Rutter, author of The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry

Laura Elizabeth Vrana is associate professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Alabama. She coedited The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas and has published on contemporary Black poetics, including in the anthologies Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.

BOOK NEWS: Contemporary Black women writers embrace Africanist understandings of embodiment and disability

Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women's Writing

By Anna LaQuawn Hinton

UP of Mississippi, 2025

ISBN: 9781496855046

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/R/Refusing-to-Be-Made-Whole

In Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing, author Anna LaQuawn Hinton examines how contemporary Black women writers present becoming disabled as a traumatic and violent experience of Black womanhood. Nevertheless, Black women embrace disabled Black womanhood by turning to Africanist spiritual understandings of wholeness, which view debilitating injury and illness as not only physical but also spiritual, not just an individual problem but a symptom of discord in the community. Black women use these belief systems to reimagine healing in ways that make space for a variety of bodymindspirits. Hinton maintains that this is not only a major theme in contemporary Black women’s writing but that it also shapes the formal elements characteristic of the Black women’s literary tradition.

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.

Refusing to Be Made Whole analyzes texts published after the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, focusing particularly on the late 1970s onward when Black women’s writing flourished. Through the lens of writings by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Sapphire, and Sarah E. Wright, Hinton addresses prominent critical discourses within Black feminist literary studies. Hinton approaches the intersections of Africanist spirituality, race, gender, class, and disability, conversations about representation, community, motherhood, and sexuality through a Black feminist disability studies framework. Refusing to Be Made Whole embraces the complex and multifaceted nature of Black women’s writing, arguing that through this collision of race, gender, and spirituality, Black women writers speak healing and wellness into their readers’ lives and their own.

"Refusing to Be Made Whole takes seriously the Black feminist reckoning with disability, providing an apt guide to the tradition using the tenets of Black disability studies. This book deftly rereads the Black feminist literary tradition with an eye toward disability, and it was an absolute joy to read. Simply put, this is the book all Black feminist and disability scholars need." - Therí A. Pickens, author of Black Madness: Mad Blackness

"Anna LaQuawn Hinton’s Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing brings together—and extends—theoretical paradigms from disability studies, Black studies, feminist studies and queer studies through careful, innovative readings of canonical and lesser-known texts written by Black women, demonstrating how the contemporary literature of Black women and the theoretical work of disability studies are mutually transformative when engaged together. This rich and exciting work showcases the author’s deep engagement with (and sense of accountability to) multiple scholarly fields, and anyone writing on any of the authors discussed here—even if they are not a disability scholar—should consult this book in the future." - Julie Avril Minich, author of Radical Health: Unwellness, Care, and Latinx Expressive Culture

 

Anna LaQuawn Hinton is assistant professor of disability studies and Black literature and culture in the English Department at the University of North Texas. She has published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and CLA Journal, as well as The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body and The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature.

BOOK NEWS: Cross-caste romance in W.E.B. Du Bois's fiction

Tales from Du Bois: The Queer Intimacy of Cross-Caste Romance

By Erika Renée Williams

SUNY Press, 2022

ISBN: 9781438488189

https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/Tales-from-Du-Bois

Offers a new framework for understanding Du Bois's poetics and politics, including the concept of double consciousness, by tracing the trope of the cross-caste romance across his fiction.

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.

Tales from Du Bois brings together critical race theory, queer studies, philosophy, and genre theory to offer an illuminating new comprehensive study of W. E. B. Du Bois's fiction from 1903–1928. Erika Renée Williams begins by revisiting Du Bois's tale of being rebuffed by a white female classmate in The Souls of Black Folk, identifying it as a failure of what she calls "cross-caste romance"—a sentimental, conjugal, or erotic relation projected across lines of cultural difference. In Du Bois's text, this failure figures as the cause of double consciousness, the experience of looking at oneself through the eyes of others. 

Far from being unique to Souls, the trope of cross-caste romance, Williams argues, structures much of Du Bois's literary oeuvre. With it, Du Bois queries romance's capacity to ground nationalism, on the one hand, and to foment queer forms of Afro-Diasporic reclamation and kinship, on the other. Beautifully written and deftly argued, Tales from Du Bois analyzes familiar works like Souls and Dark Princess alongside neglected short fiction to make a case for the value of Du Bois's literary writing and its centrality to his thought more broadly.

"Well researched and clearly written, this volume provides a new perspective on Du Bois, calling attention to his less-known writing Williams carefully documents the contexts and sources of the critical discourse surrounding her approach, making this excellent book a reasonable introduction to Du Bois." — CHOICE

"The insights this book offers are sometimes startling but also so convincing that one wonders how earlier scholars had not seen them." — Koritha Mitchell, author of From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

"Williams's archive and interventions are wide-ranging and far-reaching as she nimbly carries us from queer of color critique to medieval and African folklore to affect theory to Enlightenment formulations that braid aesthetics, morality, and reason. Still, it is not enough to say that this study of double consciousness and its enframement in cross-caste romance will be important to ongoing conversations across multiple disciplines. Rather, Williams invites a re-thinking of the key concepts that moor Black Studies." — Nicole A. Waligora-Davis, author of Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire

Erika Renée Williams is associate professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut.

BOOK NEWS: Black immigrant fiction's rebellious daughters

 Against! Rebellious Daughters in Black Immigrant Fiction in the United States

BY ASHA JEFFERS

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5933-7

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215791.html

Against! is the first book-length study of Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant and second-generation writing in the United States. In it, Asha Jeffers evaluates the relationship between Blackness and immigranthood in the US as depicted through the recurring theme of rebellious Black immigrant daughters. Considering the work of Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Taiye Selasi, Jeffers untangles how rebellion is informed by race, gender, ethnicity, and migration status.

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.

Immigrant and second-generation writers mobilize often complicated familial relationships to comment on a variety of political, social, and psychic contexts. Jeffers argues that rather than categorizing Black migrants as either immediately fully integrated into an African American experience or seeing them as another category altogether that is unbound by race, Marshall, Danticat, Adichie, and Selasi identify the unstable position of Black migrants within the American racial landscape. By highlighting the diverse ways Black migrants and their children negotiate this position amid the dual demands of the respectability politics imposed on African Americans and the model-minority myth imposed on immigrants, Jeffers reveals the unsteady nature of US racial categories.

“Against! balances a necessary critique of families invested in the turning of their offspring into status and profit with a necessary empathy for those ancestors who, themselves, had been so ruthlessly made. Jeffers’s affect work theorizes pain without being fueled by it, able to evade the sentimental and anti-sentimental traps common to symptomatic readings. This is important scholarship and bold literary criticism.” —Erin Khuê Ninh, author of Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities

“Against! makes a significant intervention into gender studies and diasporic literature and redirects the conversation around Caribbean American fiction. Jeffers demonstrates how rebellious immigrant daughter characters push back against ‘respectability’ and organize their subjectivity within and against model-minority discourse.” —Angeletta K.M. Gourdine, author of The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity

“Jeffers offers a theoretically engaged yet accessible presentation of how four diasporic novels explore their African and Afro-Caribbean protagonists’ rebellions against the familial, racial, geographical, cultural, and gendered vortexes that threaten their individuality. Jeffers’s multilayered, densely crafted analysis sets itself apart from the prevailing, stereotypically racial and gendered discussions of four dynamic women writers. This provocative text engagingly advances conversations around—and scholarship of—novels about African and Afro-Caribbean women’s experiences in their ancestral homelands and the diaspora” —Joyce A. Joyce, author of Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews

Asha Jeffers is associate professor of English and gender and women’s studies at Dalhousie University. Her research focuses on literature about the children of immigrants across national and ethnic lines. She is coeditor of The Daughters of Immigrants: A Multidisciplinary Study.

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.

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.

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.