English Language and Literature Commons^™

Pocahontas Looks Back And Then Looks Elsewhere: The Entangled Gaze In Contemporary Indigenous Art, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, various genres of visual art in North America feature Indigenous subjects looking from the canvas or the screen at the viewers to interpellate them as implicated in the gaze framing the artwork. In this article, I provide an historical genealogy of this returned gaze, starting with Simon van de Passe’s 1616 engraving, Matoaka als Lady Rebecca. I show how subsequent depictions of Pocahontas depart from the reciprocal gaze of de Passe’s portrait and how contemporary art returns to this theme of the returned gaze, using Shelley Niro’s video work The Shirt (2003) …

[Introduction To] Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with Ashe's own mid-life journey to lock his hair.

After leading a far-too-conventional life for forty years, Ashe began a long, arduous, uncertain process of locking his own hair in an attempt to step out of American convention. Black hair, after all, matters. Few Americans are subject to snap judgements like those in the African-American community, …

Emily And Annie: Doris Lessing's And Jamaica Kincaid's Portraits Of The Mothers They Remember And The Mothers That Might Have Been, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In 2008 at the age of eighty-nine, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing returned to the mother who has haunted her life and her literature in order to rewrite a fictional account of the life that might have been and a biographical account of the life that she actually lived in Alfred & Emily. Her efforts to finally exorcise the powerful and hated figure that has hounded her for most of her eighty-nine years call to mind similar efforts throughout the canon of fifty-nine-year-old celebrated Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid to free herself. Both writers take advantage of and seek to find …

'Grung Tell Me Wud': An Introduction To Karl, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Olive Senior informs us in 'The Poem as Gardening, the Story as Su-Su: Finding a Literary Voice' that Jamaican elders believe the ground is the place where ancestral wisdom is located and they will explain and validate their warning or advice by saying, 'Grung tell me wud' (36). Jamaican linguist/literary critic/poet/and novelist Velma Pollard has put her ear to the ground of Jamaica and shared many important words of ancestral wisdom with us. This was a natural development for the talented girlchild born into an artistic family in Woodside, Jamaica, a rural community rich in folk traditions: her father was …

"I Put The Tale Back Where I Found It": Feeling The Past Through "The Warmth Of The Human Voice", Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In this article, I examine my revelations and growth related to folk culture and literature connected to the African American community. I borrow from and play on the Sudanese formulaic ending for the folktale; it seemed to me appropriate - even obligatory- that "I put the tale back where I found it." This maxim is symbolic, reflecting what I find one of the most characteristic elements of Black folklore - that is, the focus on the group, the community, in terms of the source of the historical situation of the tale; the moral lesson; the content, style, and delivery; and …

Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives And The Second Generation By Lisa D. Mcgill (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Using second generation Americans Harry Belafonte, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Piri Thomas, and the meringue hip hop group Proyecto Uno, Lisa D. McGill considers in Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation the issues of identity formation of those whose heritage ultimately includes Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, most often New York City. Though her subjects come from different national, racial, and language backgrounds; though they have made their names in different media; and though they have different views of race, identity, and culture, she convincingly makes the argument that "African America becomes powerful site …

Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, And Survival By Meredith M. Gadsby (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

The folk will tell you that salt can either save you or destroy you. Toni Cade Bambara's Velma of The Salteaters realized that her survival depended on learning "the difference between eating salt as an antidote to snakebite and turning into salt, succumbing to the serpent." The lesson of similar folk wisdom is the subject of Meredith M. Gasby's Sucking Salt, where she propses as a new framework for the examination of Caribbean women's writing the survival techiniques implied in "sucking salt," techiniques suggested in her aunt's reflections on people she knew. Tantie expounded: "Little salt won't kill …

Who Was Cock Robin? A New Reading Of Erna Brodber's Jane And Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Much has been written about the quest of Brodber's protagonist Nellie for identity, for wholeness, for balance, for sanity, for finding her way back home into the community. Nellie's efforts to find herself and to integrate into the community will be easier, Brodber declared in a speech in 1988, "when Jane and Louisa come home, i.e., when the women find themselves" (Notes). Brodber also observed in that same speech, "'coming' rather than 'being' is the appropriate action word with which to address the issue of integration into the community," a fact suggested by the game that gives the title to …

In Search Of Nella Larsen: A Biography Of The Color Line By George Hutchinson (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

With In Search of Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson makes the third major attempt to provide a biography of the elusive Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891-1964), the mulatto daughter of immigrants from Denmark and the Danish West Indies whose life and fiction were shaped largely by her mixed emotions about her racial heritage and her feelings of abandonment by her white mother, stepfather, and sister. In his introduction, Hutchinson makes much of the errors of prior Larsen biographers Charles R. Larson (Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen [1993]) and Thadious M. Davis (Nella Larsen, Novelist of …

Ismith Khan (1925-2002), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Trinidadian novelist who explored the conflicts experienced by East Indians in the Caribbean as well as the racial diversity that characterizes the region. A brilliant storyteller, he created memorable characters through whom the sights and cadences of Trinidad will forever live.

A Conversation With Velma Pollard, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Noted poet, novelist, linguist, and educator, Velma Pollard was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia, during the fall semester of 2001 when I conducted the following interview. John Martin, my graduate assistant at the time, assisted me in videotaping and transcribing our conversation, which took place in her cottage at the University on December 3, 2001.

[Introduction To] From Within The Frame: Storytelling In African-American Studies, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late …

[Introduction To] From My People: 400 Years Of African American Folklore, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

A magnificent celebration of―and an essential introduction to―African American life and culture. Folklore displays the heart and soul of a people. African American folklore not only hands down traditions and wisdom through the generations but also tells the history of a people banned from writing and reading during slavery. In this anthology, Daryl Cumber Dance collects a wealth of tales that have survived and been adapted over the years, many featuring characters (like Brer' Rabbit) from African culture. She leaves no genre of folklore out, including everything from proverbs and recipes to folk songs and rumor. There is a section …

"Under The Umbrella Of Black Civilization": A Conversation With Reginald Mcknight, Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

Talking to Reginald McKnight is like scanning an imaginary worldwide radio dial. At any given moment he can transform his pleasant speaking voice into a raspy, aged, Middle Eastern-by-way-of-New York accent - or a deep Southern drawl. In an instant he can switch from a precise West African dialect to hip, urban street lingo, and then effortlessly segue back to his normal voice. McKnight says he "hit the ground running" as a mimic, and his talent was broadened as he lived all over the United States as the son of an Air Force sergeant. His time spent on the road …

The Colored Girl In The Ring: A Guyanese Woman Remembers By Brenda Chester Doharris (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Brenda Chester DoHarris's The Colored Girl in the Ring: A Guyanese Woman Remembers joins the company of some of the most memorable works of Caribbean literature, those classic accounts of coming-of-age, such as George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando, Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey, Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Zea Edgell's Beka Lamb, Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, and Beryl Gilroy's Sunlight on Sweet Water. Like most of the bildungsromans - and …

My Brother By Jamaica Kincaid (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In Jamaica Kincaid's six previous autobiographical novels and essays (At the Bottom of the River, 1984; Annie John, 1985; A Small Place, 1988; Annie, Gwen, Lily, Pam and Julie, 1989; Lucy, 1990; and The Autobiography of My Mother, 1996), her readers have the feeling that she has told all about her troubled life in Antigua and her painful emotional conflicts with her family (especially her mother). We discover with her new memoir, My Brother, however, that some things have been just too painful to tell - until now. Clearly the most obvious …

[Introduction To] Honey, Hush! An Anthology Of African American Women's Humor, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

The vibrant humor of African American women is celebrated in this bold and unique collection that the Miami Herald describes as "breathtakingly broad and deep."

In this "dazzling anthology" (Publishers Weekly), Daryl Cumber Dance has collected the often hard-hitting, sometimes risqué, always dramatic humor that arises from the depth of black women's souls and the breadth of their lives. The eloquent wit and laughter of African American women are presented here in all their written and spoken manifestations: autobiographies, novels, essays, poems, speeches, comic routines, proverbial sayings, cartoons, mimeographed sheets, and folk tales. The chapters proceed thematically, covering …

[Introduction To] The Lineage Of Abraham: The Biography Of A Free Black Family In Charles City, Va, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

The history of the descendents of Abraham Brown (1769? - 1840) in Charles City County, Virginia.

African-American Proverbs In Context By Sw. Anand Prahlad (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Growing up in Hanover, Virginia, "surrounded by people who cast the world in vibrant and poetic colors," Sw. Anand Prahlad "fell in love with proverbs at an early age" (ix). This lifelong love affair has resulted in a rich collection of African American proverbs that expanded as Prahlad went through college and graduate school, and did postgraduate research. All the while, he was sharpening his critical skills and developing the theoretical framework to establish a model for use in examining the varied components of proverbial speech in the African American community, proceeding on the assumption that in order to understand …

Notice The Mistletoe, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Selection of African-American folklore on the winter holidays.

"Why Don't He Like My Hair?": Constructing African-American Standards Of Beauty In Toni Morrison's "Song Of Solomon" And Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

African-Americans, with their traditionally African features, have always had an uneasy coexistence with the European (white) ideal of beauty. According to Angela M. Neal and Midge L. Wilson, "Compared to Black males, Black females have been more profoundly affected by the prejudicial fallout surrounding issues of skin color, facial features, and hair. Such impact can be attributed in large part to the importance of physical attractiveness for all women" (328). For black women, the most easily controlled feature is hair. While contemporary black women sometimes opt for cosmetic surgery or colored contact lenses, hair alteration (i.e., hair-straightening "permanents," hair weaves, …

The Zea Mexican Dairy: 7 Sept 1926 - 7 Sept 1986. By Kamau Brathwaite (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

I may be hard put to classify the latest work of noted poet, historian, literary critic, linguist, and Africanist Kamau (Eddie) Brathwaite, but I have no problem describing it - compelling, riveting, unforgettable! Begun when Brathwaite received the devastating news that his wife Doris (his Zea Mexican) was dying of cancer, it is a paean to her, a record of his efforts to deal with her dying, death, and absence, an account of their relationship, and an autobiographical confessional. The Zea Mexican Diary includes diary entries, letters, memorates, an epigraph, expressions of sympathy, confessions, autobiographical narrative, poems - but whatever …

Various Black Virginians As Told To Daryl Cumber Dance, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans, published in 1978, derived from fieldwork done far a doctoral dissertation at Virginia Commonwealth University by Daryl Cumber Dance (the only woman named Daryl I have heard of aside from Daryl Hannah). She gathered stories and verses from black Virginians in colleges, senior citizens' centers, and a penitentiary. Though she doesn't bring to the party an editorial touch as enlivening as Zora Neale Hurston's, she has an ear and-unlike far, far too many assiduous collectors of folktales - knows how to capture vocal rhythms on a page.

Matriarchs, Doves, And Nymphos: Prevalent Images Of Black, Indian, And White Women In Caribbean Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Universally, male writers have tended to create images of women which reveal the familiar male tendency to view women merely as functionaries whose role basically is determined by male needs, male motivations, male fears, and male fantasies. When woman is submissive, docile and pure, she is to be protected and revered; then, she is the virgin/goddess. When she is assertive and strong, she is to be avoided and despised; then, she is the bitch/shrew. When she is passionate and active, she is to be resisted and feared; she is the whore/temptress. While this genera] categorizing of women characters carries over …

"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Throughout their experiences in this country, certain segments of the Black population have viewed themselves as enslaved, whether they were chattel owned by slaveowners prior to emancipation, whether they were impressed into peonage and forced to work on white plantations and in chain gangs after slavery, whether they were victims of sharecropping systems that virtually reenslaved them during the twentieth century, whether they were the repressed and disfranchised and persecuted in Southern Jim Crow towns throughout the first half of the twentieth century, whether they are those trapped by unemployment and poverty today, or whether they are among the Blacks …

An Interview Of Paule Marshall, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

This Interview was conducted at the home of Paule Marshall in Richmond, Virginia, on June 14, 1991. Much of our discussion focused on Ms. Marshall's recently completed novel, Daughters, published this fall by Atheneum, which she characterizes here as "perhaps my most personal novel." There are, of course, frequent references to her earlier works, which include Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961). The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), and Reena and Other Stories (1983).

Teasing Tales And Tit(Bit)S, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Collection of African-American folklore from Shuckin' and Jivin' by Daryl Dance.

[Introduction To] New World Adams: Conversations With Contemporary West Indian Writers, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

In these interviews, held in the early 1980s, with twenty-two of the major writers of the English-speaking Caribbean, Daryl Dance brings together what is much more than just a valuable source book for readers of West Indian writing. The interviews are highly readable - by turns probing, combative and reflective and always absorbing. Daryl Dance brings to the interviews a rare breadth of knowledge and empathy with the work of the writers interviewed and the openly avowed insights of an African-American woman.

The writers interviewed include Michael Anthony, Louise Bennett, Jan Carew, Martin Carter and Denis Williams, Austin Clarke, Wilson …

Go Eena Kumbla: A Comparison Of Erna Brodber's Jane And Louisa Will Soon Come Home And Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

When I returned to Jamaica in July 1982, I took as gifts for friends some recent novels by black American writers, including Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters. Upon my arrival, Erna Brodber gave me a copy of her new book, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. As I read it, I was struck by another instance of how similar experiences (in this case, being black and female in the Americas of the civil rights, black awareness, Rastafarian, and feminist movements) had inspired such strikingly similar expressions in books published the same year (1980) by an American …

[Introduction To] Folklore From Contemporary Jamaicans, Daryl Cumber Dance

Bookshelf

There is not now available, nor has there ever been, a general and comprehensive introductory collection of the rich folklore of Jamaica. Yet, despite this widespread enthrallment with the better-known aspects of Jamaican folk life and culture, the fact remains that no extensive general collection of the vast range of Jamaican folklore has been assembled.

Dr. Dance spent six months in Jamaica from June through November 1978 researching and compiling stories and folklore for this book.