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Nellie Y. McKay (1930–2006) was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. The author of several books, McKay is best known for coediting the canon-making with Henry Louis Gates Jr., which helped secure a place for the scholarly study of Black writing that had been ignored by white academia. However, there is more to McKay's life and legacy than her literary scholarship. After her passing, new details about McKay's life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her. Why did McKay choose to hide so many details of her past? Shanna Greene Benjamin examines McKay's path through the professoriate to learn about the strategies, sacrifices, and successes of contemporary Black women in the American academy. Benjamin shows that McKay's secrecy was a necessary tactic that a Black, working-class woman had to employ to succeed in the white-dominated space of the American English department. Using extensive archives and personal correspondence, Benjamin brings together McKay’s private life and public work to expand how we think about Black literary history and the place of Black women in American culture.
This gathering of critical essays is at once impressive and hospitable -- characteristic of Morrison's own work as well. Basically, the contributors of these pieces react to Morrison as a black novelist, as a female novelist, or as a practitioner of the novel form, period -- black and female or otherwise. All of them are interested in how Morrison has stretched the boundaries of these three categories. Points are made, counterpoints offered, her works are examined and cross-examined. The general opinion is that in reading Morrison, critics and general audience alike experience the sheer pleasure of hearing all the resonances of a voice beautiful and powerful. ISBN 0-8161-8884-X: $37.50.
Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936
The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman: Tarry was devoid of pronounced African-American racial markings, and her interactions with white Americans were not characterized by fear or distrust, but when her own brown daughter was subjected to racial discrimination she wrote The Third Door in 1955 to tell America about the plight of her people.
With the continued expansion of the literary canon, multicultural works of modern literary fiction and autobiography have assumed an increasing importance for students and scholars of American literature. This exciting new series assembles key documents and criticism concerning these works that have so recently become central components of the American literature curriculum. Each casebook will reprint documents relating to the work's historical context and reception, present the best in critical essays, and when possible, feature an interview of the author. The series will provide, for the first time, an accessible forum in which readers can come to a fuller understanding of these contemporary masterpieces and the unique aspects of American ethnic, racial, or cultural experience that they so ably portray. This casebook to Morrison's classic novel presents seven essays that represent the best in contemporary criticism of the book. In addition, the book includes a poem and an abolitionist's tra published after a slave named Margaret Garner killed her child to save her from slavery—the very incident Morrison fictionalizes in Beloved.
Teachers started assigning the novels of Toni Morrison long before she won the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature and before there was a significant body of secondary literature on the author. Now her works are the subject of countless studies and listed in the syllabi of an ever-increasing number of courses in schools and universities. The editors of this volume help the teacher to sort out the best materials and to meet the many challenges that Morrison's writings pose.
Though today she is little known, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was one of the most remarkable women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Active in both the civil rights movement and the campaign for women's suffrage, Terrell was a leading spokesperson for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education and the American Association of University Women. She was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In this autobiography, originally published in 1940, Terrell describes the imp...
"Sister Circle: Black Women and Work" is the end product of almost a decade's commitment made to each other by a small group of interdisciplinary Black and (one) white "Sister Scholars" at the University of Maryland in 1993.
"Funny, painful, and disturbing by turns, this absolutely necessary volume powerfully engages readers in passionate debates about the place of the non-African American teacher of African American literature."-Maureen Reddy, coeditor of Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics What makes someone an authority? What makes one person's knowledge more credible than another's? In the ongoing debates over racial authenticity, some attest that we can know each other's experiences simply because we are all "human," while others assume a more skeptical stance, insisting that racial differences create unbridgeable gaps in knowledge. Bringing new perspectives to these perennial questions, th...