"Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante
Alighieri and the "Divine Comedy is a literary-historical study of
the many surprising ways in which Dante Alighieri and the "Divine
Comedy" have assumed a position of importance in African American
culture. Dennis Looney examines how African American authors have
read, interpreted, and responded to Dante and his work from the
late 1820s to the present.
In many ways, the African American reception of Dante follows a
recognizable narrative of reception: the Romantic rehabilitation of
the author; the late-nineteenth-century glorification of Dante as a
radical writer of reform; the twentieth-century modernist
rewriting; and the adaptation of the "Divine Comedy" into the prose
of the contemporary novel. But surely it is unique to African
American rewritings of Dante to suggest that the "Divine Comedy" is
itself a kind of slave narrative. Only African American
"translations" of Dante use the medieval author to comment on
segregation, migration, and integration. While many authors over
the centuries have learned to articulate a new kind of poetry from
Dante's example, for African American authors attuned to the
complexities of Dante's hybrid vernacular, his poetic language
becomes a model for creative expression that juxtaposes and blends
classical notes and the vernacular counterpoint in striking ways.
Looney demonstrates this appropriation of Dante as a locus for
black agency in the creative work of such authors as William Wells
Brown, the poet H. Cordelia Ray, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison,
Amiri Baraka, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, and the filmmaker
Spencer Williams.
"Dennis Looney's "Freedom Readers "is an original, timely, and
very welcome contribution to the study of Dante's reception in the
United States. Looney shows vividly and lucidly how the American
reception of Dante is tied more closely to the entangled history of
the country's black and white citizens than we have ever imagined;
he also explores how influential readers in the Afro-American
cultural tradition, over almost two centuries, have called upon
Dante to help them negotiate the transition from the culture of
their past to that of their present. --Nicholas Havely, University
of York
"Dennis Looney takes us on a fascinating journey of discovery of
the African American reception of Dante and the "Divine Comedy,"
covering with great surety the period from the early 1800s to the
present: from William Wells Brown, Cordelia Ray, and W. E. B. Du
Bois to Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, and Dudley Randall.
Rigorously researched and also engagingly readable, "Freedom
Readers "offers a new angle of seeing African American literature
that enriches our appreciation of its complexity and beauty.
Demonstrating persuasively the continuing relevance of Dante, this
important study of African American anti-imperial readings of his
life and works opens up valuable new lines of comparative literary
investigation." --M. Giulia Fabi, University of Ferrara
""Freedom Readers" fills a gap in scholarship and criticism, and
fills it outstandingly. Looney reconstructs the historical,
ideological, political, and cultural background with extreme
accuracy, and his reading of Du Bois, LeRoi Jones, and Toni
Morrison is a great feat both of interpretation and of writing. The
book promises to become a milestone: original, new, fresh, often
exciting." --Piero Boitani, University of Rome "Sapienza"
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