Cold Kink: Race and Sex in the African American Underworld

Iceberg Slim is the godfather of African American street lit, a genre of gritty pulp fiction informed by the black noir tradition made famous by Chester Himes in the 1950s. Slim’s work has been heralded by a massive Black readership for decades. However, it remains obscure to literary critics, likely due to its brutal misogyny. While this chapter does understand Pimp as misogynistic, it pushes on its scenes of violent sex. It interprets them as representing eroticized power exchange, a noir trademark and phenomena of interest to negative affect studies. The chapter focuses on the female characters, arguing they have considerable power to not only render Slim subordinate, but abject. And by embracing their own abjection as a site of pleasure and agency, the female characters are often able to dominate Slim because he underestimates the extent of their kinkiness—and that of his own.

Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and the Persistence of Urban Forms

This essay investigates the treatment of what I call infrastructural racism in fiction by Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes. Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and Himes's Harlem Cycle novels (1957–69) chronicle vanishing urban objects and changing infrastructure to show that even as Harlem modernizes, the racist structures that undergird society do not. Ellison and Himes use ephemeral objects like signs, newspapers, and blueprints to encapsulate Harlem's transience and to suggest to readers that the neighborhood itself is a dynamic archive, continually changing yet resistant to overarching narratives of cultural loss or social progress. Himes and Ellison write about permanence and loss in mid-century Harlem in terms that disrupt the social realism associated with the novel of detection and the psychological realism associated with the novel of consciousness. Such a reading prompts a reconsideration of the critical categories–genre fiction and literary fiction–that have, until now, kept these two writers apart.

Embodying the Background

In the summer of 1943, race riots stirred waves of violence across several US cities, the largest taking place in Detroit, Harlem, and Los Angeles. During wartime, patriotic anger was aimed not only outward at the Axis powers, but also inward at US citizens. This article focuses on Los Angeles’s Zoot Suit Riots, exploring how in a surprising number of accounts of the alleged riot, movie theaters serve as backgrounds alongside white, Mexican American, African American, and Asian American women, who appear as minor, nameless characters. Finding instances in work from Beatrice Griffith and Carey McWilliams, in fiction from Fernando Alegría and Chester Himes, and in the canonical Chicano films Zoot Suit (1981) and American Me (1992), the article traces the supporting roles women and movie theaters serve in these diverse narratives, and how both come to visually and discursively represent dangerous wartime boundaries.

Welty’s Moonlighting Detective

This essay argues that Eudora Welty’s 1966 civil rights story, “The Demonstrators,” casts a spotlight on the “crime” of systemic racism in the U.S. South through the popular crime genre of American noir fiction and film. Although a mid-twentieth-century category mainly recognized for its depictions of dark cities and shadowy “mean streets,” noir’s stylized world collides with the Closed Society in Welty’s late story and throws into stark relief the subtler effects of white supremacy. Turning noir’s key traits on their head (e.g., black-and-white chiaroscuro lighting, the femme fatale, and the tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction), Welty throughout “The Demonstrators” brilliantly illuminates the subtle tactics of, and clues left behind by, criminalized acts of whiteness. In so doing, Welty’s masterful crime story pays homage to classic noir artists such as Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, and Alfred Hitchcock.

New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race

Responding to work begun in the 2013 collection Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race that mined and deciphered the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South, the thirteen diverse voices of New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. These essays freshly consider such topics as Welty’s treatment of African-American signifying in her short stories, and her attention to public street performances interacting with Jim Crow rules in her unpublished photographs. They consider her strategic adaptations of Gothic plots, black pastoral, civil war stories, haunted houses, and film noir. They frame Welty’s work with such subjects as Bob Dylan’s songwriting, the idea and history of the orphan in American, and standup comedy. They compare her handling of whiteness and race to that of other contemporary authors such as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, and Alice Walker. Additionally, several discussions bring her master-work The Golden Apples and her novel Losing Battles, under-represented in the earlier conversation, into new focus. The collection as a whole will help us to understand more clearly Welty’s artistic commentary on her time and place as well as the way her vision developed in a timespan moving America towards increased social awareness. Moreover, as a group, these essays provide insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, successfully altering literary form with her frequent pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres. Together they show her as a remarkable writer idiosyncratically engaging and confidently altering literary history.

Two Screenplays

Burnett is a complete filmmaker who has not only directed but also photographed, edited, and written many films. This chapter puts emphasis on his talent as a screenwriter, using two very different projects as examples. Bless Their Little Hearts was written for director Billy Woodbury and is similar in many ways to Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. It tells the story of an unemployed black man in Watts who suffers a crisis of masculinity while he tries to find a job and keep his family together. Man in a Basket is an adaptation of Crazy Kill by noir novelist Chester Himes. Set in 1950s Harlem, Burnett describes it as Himes’s only love story. Burnett has long wanted to direct this film and is still trying to find backers.

“Make Ya Holler You’ve Had Enough”

This chapter looks at Chester Himes' and Hal Bennett's fictional representations of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism) and sex work in order to theorize other articulations of masculinity in the domestic sphere. Funk proposes a blend of parody, irony, communal intimacy, and temporal violence to critique masculine privilege and eroticize male submission that would embrace unpatriarchal traditions of family. The chapter demonstrates how black public spheres too reliant on nostalgia and respectability can be reinvented using cultural legacies of transaesthetics. Eliminating gender hierarchies and sexual colonialism in black communities hinges on black men and women accepting systems of knowledge that would teach them that forgoing masculine privilege and rethinking the feminine is not only morally and ethically right, but also that there is pleasure in it if everyone involved is willing to submit to funk's emphasis on The One.