[This past week
we held the 50th
Anniversary NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC. It was a great time as
ever, and this week I’ll highlight a few of the many standout moments and
conversations for me. Lemme know
if you’d like to hear or chat more about the NeMLA Board,
the American
Area, next year’s convention in Boston,
or anything else!]
Out of my
initial proposal “African American Literature and the Ironies of Freedom” came
two great panels—here’s a quick recap of the four wonderful papers on the
first, which ended up focusing on Toni Morrison’s novels.
1)
Laura
Dawkins: Laura got the panel off and running with a multi-layered
comparative analysis of Morrison’s
Beloved (1987) alongside Yaa
Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016), a novel
that echoes and extends Morrison’s classic in numerous ways. Besides making a
great case for how literary legacies can help us read and understand individual
texts, Laura’s talk also engaged with both novels through an impressive
balancing act: focusing on the traumas and horrors (of but not limited to
slavery) that both feature; but arguing at the same time for how narrative
provides a fraught but crucial vehicle for countering such traumas in both
books. Like all seven papers across these two panels, Laura’s talk offered a
bracing and an inspiring start to our conversations!
2)
Theresa Desmond:
In the panel’s second talk, Theresa offered an excerpt from her recently
defended dissertation on 20th century reframings and revisings of
images of single womanhood. In particular, her talk drew from a chapter on Morrison’s
Sula (1973), and linked that
novel’s title character and its other central women to the stereotypical images
of the mammy,
the jezebel, and the sapphire. I had never heard of the third stereotype,
and that context both reframes Morrison’s novel and offers new windows into
considering those other two types and the limited range of images presented to
mid-20th century African American women. But Theresa’s readings of
how the two characters of Sula and Nell engage with these various images and
their own trajectories also adds compelling to our understanding of both this particular
novel and to other mid-century texts and contexts such as Betty Friedan’s “The
Problem That Has No Name.”
3)
Shari Evans: Shari’s talk
shifted our thematic focus a bit, using three Morrison novels (The
Bluest Eye [1970], Paradise
[1997], and A
Mercy [2008]) to consider the limits and possibilities of moments and
processes of becoming for individuals, communities, and the nation. I’m ashamed
to admit that I haven’t had the chance to read A Mercy yet, and Shari not only reminded me that I need to do so
ASAP, but made a compelling case for what that book helps us understand about
the nation’s fraught origin points. I was particularly struck by her
multi-layered reading of the novel’s images of communities and their
multi-generational identities and stories, as exemplified by an oven that is
transplanted from one town (where it serves its original utilitarian purpose)
to another (where it stands in the center of town as a memorial to that past
and how the community has moved beyond it). Yet that memorial is then defaced
by younger residents, highlighting how stories and images of the past likewise
continue to evolve with each generation and perspective.
4)
Rachel Schratz:
Rachel finished up this great quartet of papers with an extended reading of
another Morrison novel I haven’t had a chance to read in full, God
Help the Child (2015). Her extended analysis of colorism in this most
recent Morrison novel added important contexts to a social and cultural conversation
that has become prominent in recent months (thanks in no small measure to the January
Black-ish episode on that theme). Yet as with
each of these four great papers, Rachel’s analyses went well beyond both one
theme and even her focal texts, considering such vital topics as the duality of
othering and sympathy and how both relate to the ironic but shared quest for freedom
on which the panel’s title and through-lines likewise focused. As with all the
best panels, these four papers staked their own claims but related to and build
upon each other quite strikingly, creating a broader conversation that could
have continued well beyond our allotted time.
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. NeMLA
reflections to share?
PPS. Theresa adds, "The Saffire archetype is attributed to Saffire, the wise cracking wife from the old series, Amos & Andy, circa mid twentieth century.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, her role is that of an angry black woman who sets out to demean her husband."