Shame and the Ex-Convict: The New Jim Crow, African American Literature, and Edward P. Jones's “Old Boys, Old Girls”

For the most part, when the topic of Faulkner and African American literature is discussed, the intellectual conversation is primarily concerned with the undeniable influence of Faulkner’s fiction on black novelists. However, this chapter focuses on the major impact of the African American migration novel in the early Jim Crow era on Faulkner’s work, particularly Light in August and Absolom, Absolom! While the peripatetic, rootless, and often mixed-race characters of such novels by black authors as Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand informs the creation of the protagonists/speakers of much modernist U.S. fiction and poetry; it is in Faulkner’s work, with possible exception of Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” that one sees the clearest adaptation of the characters and cultural geography of the early black migration narrative.

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Book Faces

The Unfinished Book ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.11 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 150-165

Author(s):

Jacqueline Goldsby

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

Jim Crow ◽

The United States ◽

Cultural Work ◽

Black Literature ◽

Ethics Of Reading ◽

The Face

Across the first half of the twentieth century, author portraits migrated from the frontispiece inside of books to the exterior covers of dust jackets; at the same time, while Jim Crow segregation reached its repressive heights in the United States, African-American literature enjoyed unprecedented circulation in the mainstream literary marketplace. This chapter traces this convergence to explore the cultural work performed by the “face” of a book—frontispieces, dust jackets, and author portraits. Examining these lays bare the signal development that distinguishes mid-twentieth-century African-American authorship from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precedents: namely, the turn away from writing as corroboration of black humanity to writing as expressive of black pluralities or personae. By setting alterity, not authenticity, as the threshold where readers meet and interpret black literature as works of art, the migration of author portraits also functions as a trope for the ethics of reading.

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Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

Ethnic Studies Review ◽

10.1525/esr.2009.32.1.55 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 55-76

Author(s):

Quan Manh Ha

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

Black Experience ◽

Racial Issues ◽

Black Voices ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

One Year ◽

Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

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