American Studies Commons^™

Their Confederate Kinfolk: African Americans' Interracial Family Histories, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The interracial mixing of American families dates back to colonial times, but the history of slavery and racism in the American South made public discussion of the subject taboo—so shameful for whites that they long repressed facts that challenged their fantasies of racial purity, so painful or politically incorrect for African Americans that they suppressed the details of their mixed ancestry. In the 1970s the popularity of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), and the television miniseries that followed, sparked an interest in genealogy among many African Americans, who had long given up hope of tracing African roots severed by the middle …

Writing Southern Race Relations: Stories Ellen Douglas Was Brave Enough To Tell, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

When Ellen Douglas started writing, she drew inspiration from the way William Faulkner and other southern writers whom she admired, like Eudora Welty, depicted southern places. Douglas planted all of her fiction firmly in the region of Mississippi that she knew best; her Homochitto is modeled of Natchez, where she was born, and her Philippi on Greenville, where she lived with her husband and their children. But Douglas reacted against the gothic and mythic elements in Faulkner's work and used as her first literary models the great nineteenth-century realists: Dostoevsky, Flaubert, James, and Tolstoy. She admired Eudora Welty, but found …

Invisible Dread, From Twisted: The Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

This excerpt traces the issues and process surrounding the dreadlocking of an Afri­can-American professor's hair. The personal history leading up to the decision to grow locks is briefly addressed, as is the experience of getting twisted for the first time and some reactions to the new hairstyle. Twisted discusses issues of cultural authenticity and academic nonconformity. It examines dreadlocks as a pathway to explore black identity, but in opposing ways: the act of locking ones hair does dis­play unconventional blackness - but it also participates in a preexisting black style. To what extent, the excerpt asks, can the adoption of …

Interracial Love, Virginians' Lies, And Donald Mccaig's Jacob's Ladder, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The Old South's taboo against love between blacks and whites has cast a long shadow. No cross-racial relationship has been so pathologized by American society. Even in 1967, when the Supreme Court finally declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia, sixteen states still prohibited interracial marriage, down from thirty states as recently as 1948. Not until 1998 and 2000 did ballot initiatives in South Carolina and Alabama finally eliminate the last of the antimiscegenation laws, although no one had tried to enforce them for years. Recent U.S. census figures show interracial unions increasing--up from 3 …

[Introduction To] Race Mixing: Southern Fiction Since The Sixties, Suzanne W. Jones

Bookshelf

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

Race Relations, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Since the early nineteenth century, when white southern writers began to defend slavery, relationships between blacks and whites became a central concern in southern literature. Many nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century works by white writers exacerbated racial prejudice by reproducing southern white society's racist ideology. But other southern writers, both white and black, have attempted to redress this problem by using literature to dismantle stereotypes and to imagine new relationships. The results of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement speeded up the process, suggesting new plots, new endings, and new points of view to southern writers of both races.

"Hair Drama" On The Cover Of "Vibe" Magazine, Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

This study consists of a cultural reading of the cover photograph of the June-July 1999 issue of Vibe magazine. It explores the relationship between Mase, an African-American male rap star, and the three anonymous African-American female models that surround him. The study interprets the cover through the long, straightened hair of the models, locating the models' hair in a historically-informed context of black hair theory and practice. The study argues that the models' presence on the cover, particularly their "bone straight and long" hair, "enhances" Mase in much the same way breast-augmented "trophy women" "enhance" their mates. Ultimately, the study …

[Introduction To] Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators And American Identities, Laura Browder

Bookshelf

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes …

[Introduction To] Crossing The Color Line: Readings In Black And White, Suzanne W. Jones

Bookshelf

The complex truth about the color line -- its destructive effects, painful legacy, clandestine crossings, possible erasure -- is revealed more often in private than in public and has sometimes been visited more easily by novelists than historians. In this tradition, Crossing the Color Line, a powerful collection of nineteen contemporary stories, speaks the unspoken, explores the hidden, and voices both fear and hope about relationships between blacks and whites. The volume opens with stories by Alice Adams, Toni Cade Bambara, Ellen Douglas, Reynolds Price, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, and John A. Williams that focus on misunderstandings created by racial stereotypes …

Refighting Old Wars: Race Relations And Masculine Conventions In Fiction By Larry Brown And Madison Smartt Bell, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Since the Civil War white male writers of the American South have created fond fictions about childhood friendships that crossed the color line. For example, much of the poignancy of Faulkner's The Unvanquished (1938) comes from Bayard Sartoris's description of the close relationship he had with a black servant boy Ringo in the Mississippi small town that will separate them as they grow older and that from the beginning marked them as different, based on race. After their boyhood games and real Civil War adventures together, Bayard and Ringo grow up to be, not close friends, but master and faithful …

On The Jazz Musician's Love/Hate Relationship With The Audience, Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

An assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, Bertram D. Ashe discusses how the intersection of an African American cool style with a black vernacular tradition and multi-racial audiences complicates audience-performer relations. In the vernacular tradition, performers play not "to" but "with" an audience, drawing on the call-response patterns that characterize the black aesthetic. Ashe notes that the vernacular tradition is not racial but cultural, and class can be as important a marker as race in determining audience expectations. Differing cultural backgrounds create, in Ashe's words, "competing realities," distinct sets of expectations that can shape a …