White Scholars/African American Texts

by Lisa A. Long (Editor)

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 debates, the essays in this collection explore the many difficulties created by the fact that white scholars greatly outnumber black scholars in the study and teaching of African American literature. Contributors, including some of the most prominent theorists in the field as well as younger scholars, examine who is speaking, what is being spoken and what is not , and why framing African American literature in terms of an exclusive black/white racial divide is problematic and limiting. In highlighting the "whiteness" of some African Americanists, the collection does not imply that the teaching or understanding of black literature by white scholars is definitively impossible. Indeed such work is not only possible, but imperative. Instead, the essays aim to open a much needed public conversation about the real and pressing challenges that white scholars face in this type of work, as well as the implications of how these challenges are met.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published August 25, 2005

Reviews

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of essays, most of which are in general agreement, about the optics, politics, and conditions of non-Black, mostly white teachers of African American literature. At the risk of oversimplifying, the consensus was that, yes, white professors can teach and write scholarship on AfAm lit, that to assume Black people have a unique affinity to do so is essentialist, that anyone can be adequately trained to write and interpret anything regardless of their identity, and yet that one’s interpretation is historically/socially/materially conditioned and therefore not final. I wish they’d included Ann DuCille’s essay “The Occult of True Black Womanhood” since so many make reference to it. I think a fuller discussion of the class politics of the academy was greatly needed to supplement the over-emphasis on the question of identity and of identity politics more generally, as well as a fuller discussion of race and labor in the academy, particularly in literature departments.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a white scholar who teaches and works largely with African American texts, I find that this book is a phenomenal way to situate my own subject position in a much larger discourse. The essays in this anthology explore the ways through which white scholars have (un)successfully engaged with African American texts in both scholarship and coursework, and they provide criticism that challenges non-African American scholars to do justice to these texts we wish to work with. The book is useful for anyone interested in pedagogy, especially pertaining to higher education, but for white scholars interested in African American texts, I feel as if this book is mandatory reading.

[Purple Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will need to come back to Lewis.

RMJC: Rape victim/survivor, Baker in Lewis

find: duCille "the occult of true black womanhood: critical demeanor and black feminist studies"

Nellie McKay, "Naming the problem"
Leslie Lewis, "Concept of Authenticity"