BOOK NEWS: 21st century American authors grapple with the construct of whiteness

Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America

BY STEPHANIE LI

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

ISBN 978-1-5179-1574-2

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/ugly-white-people

Ugly White People explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors (Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and others) as they grapple with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm. Revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take, Stephanie Li examines the tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice.

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 questions posed in Ugly White People about the nature and future of whiteness are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America. From the election of Trump and the rise of white nationalism to Karen memes and the war against critical race theory to the pervasive pattern of behavior among largely liberal-leaning whites, Li elucidates truths about whiteness that challenge any hope of national unity and, most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others.

"Ugly White People is not about the 'racists' but about the way whiteness shapes the subjectivity of all white people. Relying on an elegant and parsimonious textual analysis of the work of contemporary authors, Stephanie Li shows how whites manage to evade while they acknowledge their whiteness, how they consume people of color through racist love, and how they accept whiteness in a way that neglects addressing racism. I highly recommend this book to readers interested in understanding contemporary whiteness." — Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University

"The best writing critically studying whiteness today intensely engages imbrications of race with other identities, especially class, gender, nationality, and disability. No one does all of that better than Stephanie Li. Addressing literary moments with a sure grasp of history and an adventuresome readings of texts, Ugly White People speaks compellingly to the persisting strength of Trump and white nationalism and to the desire for social media celebrity as something authors both explore and share." — David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

Stephanie Li is Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Pan-African American Literature, Playing in the White, and Signifying without Specifying.

BOOK NEWS: Global, multidisciplinary approaches to memory

Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches

EDITED BY BRETT ASHLEY KAPLAN

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350230118

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/9781350230118/

Bringing together a diverse array of new and established scholars and creative writers in the rapidly expanding field of memory studies, this collection creatively delves into the multiple aspects of this wide-ranging field. Contributors explore race-ing memory; environmental studies and memory; digital memory; monuments, memorials, and museums; and memory and trauma.

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.

Organized around 7 sections, this book examines memory in a global context, from Kashmir and Chile to the US and UK. Featuring contributions on topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement; the AIDS crisis; and memory and the anthropocene, this book traces and consolidates the field while analyzing and charting some of the most current and cutting-edge work, as well as new directions that could be taken.

"Brett Ashley Kaplan has put together an innovative and appealing collection that opens up a dynamic, multipronged vision of memory studies. With fiction and memoir placed side-by-side with essays by scholars, activists, and practitioners, Critical Memory Studies offers new directions for a field rapidly becoming institutionalized. Its global scope, interdisciplinary range, and attention to urgent areas of concern, such as ecology and race, make it a must read for all those concerned with the future of the past. —Michel Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

"Unique in its combination of creative and scholarly approaches to memory, this rich collection presents the cutting-edge of memory studies. Absolutely essential reading." —Susanne C, Knittel, Utrecht University, Netherlands

"This important volume shows the diversity of contemporary cultural memory studies. It opens new avenues for the field by bringing together scholarly and artistic work in a way that invites us to reflect on the fluidity between fictional and theoretical approaches to cultural memory." —Hanna Meretoja, University of Turku, Finland

Brett Ashley Kaplan directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies and is a professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her novel, Rare Stuff, was published in 2022 and she is the author of Unwanted Beauty, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory, and Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth.

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: 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: Analyzing Alice Walker's multifaceted oeuvre

Understanding Alice Walker

BY THADIOUS M. DAVIS 

U of South Carolina P, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-64336-237-3 hardback │ 978-1-64336-238-0 paper│ 

978-1-64336-239-7 ebook

https://uscpress.com/Understanding-Alice-Walker

Understanding Alice Walker serves both as an introduction to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner’s large body of work and as a critical analysis of her multifaceted canon. Thadious M. Davis begins with Walker’s biography and her formative experiences in the South and then presents ways of accessing and reading Walker’s complex, interconnected, and sociopolitically invested career in writing fiction, poetry, critical essays, and meditations. 

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.

Although best known for her novel The Color Purple and her landmark essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker began her career with Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She has remained committed not merely to writing in multiple genres but also to conveying narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition and as visualized through the lens of race and gender.

Davis traces Walker’s literary voice as it emerges from the civil rights and feminist movements to encourage an individual and collective search for justice and joy and then evolves into forceful advocacy for world peace, spiritual liberation, and environmental conservancy. Her writing, a rich amalgamation of the cutting-edge and popular, the new-age and difficult, continues to be paradigm shifting and among the most important produced in the last half of the twentieth century and among the most consistently prophetic in the first part of the twenty-first century.

“In Thadious Davis, Alice Walker has found an ideal reader, one who places the author and her work in personal, historical, and political contexts, one whose critical analysis reveals depth and meaning beyond the obvious, and one whose brilliance complements that of the writer.” — Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University 

“This brilliant book provides a dazzlingly crystalline and panoramic portrait of Alice Walker’s expansive body of work. It incorporates insights on Walker’s biography, examining stages in her epic journey as a writer whose life and work have profoundly impacted the world and been devoted to helping its healing.”  — Riché Richardson, Cornell University 

“a succinct and searching study of Alice Walker’s expansive corpus and evolving imagination. Thadious Davis provides her readers a comprehensive and illuminating overview of Walker’s writings across multiple themes and genres, but also of the contexts—local and global—that have given it form.”                 — Deborah McDowell, University of Virginia

“Davis reveals an immense scholarly patience with Alice Walker and her works, reading and discussing and analyzing them in a deep and well-organized reconstruction of the author's background against American history and events around the globe.” — Geneva Cobb Moore, author of Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought, Emerita, and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature; Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance; and Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context.

Ray Bradbury's Afrofuturist Mars

 

JML author Steve Gronert Ellerhoff discusses the background of his research on Ray Bradbury's anti-racism at work in two science fiction short stories, in a post for Indiana University Press, available HERE.

Ellerhoff's essay is now a read for FREE feature:

"White Supremacy and the Multicultural Imagination in Ray Bradbury's Afrofuturist Stories of Mars." Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 44, no. 4, Summer 2021, pp. 1-18.