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James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) exemplified the ideal of the
American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter,
diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African
American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously
in 1912, Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is
considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century
African American literature, and its themes and forms have been
taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole.
Johnson's novel provocatively engages with political and cultural
strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains
in print over a century after its initial publication. New
Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book's
reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and
received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its
author, and its continuing influence on American literature and
global culture.
Anne Spencer between Worlds provides an indispensable reassessment
of a critically neglected figure. Looking beyond the poetry she
published during the Harlem Renaissance, Noelle Morrissette
provides a new critical lens for interpreting Spencer's expansive
life and imagination through her archives, giving particular focus
to her manuscripts authored from 1940 to 1975. Through its
attentiveness to Spencer's published and unpublished work, her work
as a librarian and an activist, and the political dimensions of her
writing, Anne Spencer between Worlds transforms our understanding
of Spencer. It offers a sustained examination of poetry and
ecology, and the relationships among race, gender, and archives,
through its analysis of the manuscripts that Spencer produced and
revised throughout her life. Morrissette argues that the
expansiveness, depth, and range of Spencer's writing has not been
appreciated because she did not publish this incomplete, ongoing
work. She also demonstrates that careful reading of the manuscripts
challenges many of the assumptions that have governed Spencer's
reception. In Anne Spencer between Worlds, Spencer emerges as a
deeply engaged political poet who used the creative possibilities
of the unpublished manuscript to explore pressing political and
cultural concerns and to develop experimental cultural forms. In
her unpublished manuscripts, Spencer pushed beyond the lyric mode
to develop experimental forms that were alert to the expressive
possibilities of the epic, prose, correspondence, and mixed genres.
Indeed, Spencer's manuscripts serve as witnesses of historical and
poetic junctions for the poet and for the attentive reader of her
archives.
Anne Spencer between Worlds provides an indispensable reassessment
of a critically neglected figure. Looking beyond the poetry she
published during the Harlem Renaissance, Noelle Morrissette
provides a new critical lens for interpreting Spencer's expansive
life and imagination through her archives, giving particular focus
to her manuscripts authored from 1940 to 1975. Through its
attentiveness to Spencer's published and unpublished work, her work
as a librarian and an activist, and the political dimensions of her
writing, Anne Spencer between Worlds transforms our understanding
of Spencer. It offers a sustained examination of poetry and
ecology, and the relationships among race, gender, and archives,
through its analysis of the manuscripts that Spencer produced and
revised throughout her life. Morrissette argues that the
expansiveness, depth, and range of Spencer's writing has not been
appreciated because she did not publish this incomplete, ongoing
work. She also demonstrates that careful reading of the manuscripts
challenges many of the assumptions that have governed Spencer's
reception. In Anne Spencer between Worlds, Spencer emerges as a
deeply engaged political poet who used the creative possibilities
of the unpublished manuscript to explore pressing political and
cultural concerns and to develop experimental cultural forms. In
her unpublished manuscripts, Spencer pushed beyond the lyric mode
to develop experimental forms that were alert to the expressive
possibilities of the epic, prose, correspondence, and mixed genres.
Indeed, Spencer's manuscripts serve as witnesses of historical and
poetic junctions for the poet and for the attentive reader of her
archives.
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) exemplified the ideal of the
American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter,
diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African
American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously
in 1912, Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is
considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century
African American literature, and its themes and forms have been
taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole.
Johnson's novel provocatively engages with political and cultural
strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains
in print over a century after its initial publication. New
Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book's
reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and
received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its
author, and its continuing influence on American literature and
global culture. Contributors: Bruce Barnhart, Lori Brooks, Ben
Glaser, Jeff Karem, Daphne Lamothe, Noelle Morrissette, Michael
Nowlin, Lawrence J. Oliver, Diana Paulin, Amritjit Singh, Robert B.
Stepto.
James Weldon Johnson's Modern Soundscapes provides an evocative and
meticulously researched study of one of the best known and yet
least understood authors of the New Negro Renaissance era. Johnson,
familiar to many as an early civil rights leader active in the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and an
intentionally controversial writer on the subject of the
significance of race in America, was one of the most prolific,
wide-ranging, and yet elusive authors of twentieth-century African
American literature. Johnson realised early in his writing career
that he could draw attention to the struggles of African Americans
by using unconventional literary methods such as the incorporation
of sound into his texts. In this groundbreaking work, literary
critic Noelle Morrissette examines how his literary representation
of the extremes of sonic experience-functioning as either cultural
violence or creative force-draws attention to the mutual
contingencies and the interdependence of American and African
American cultures. Moreover, Morrissette argues, Johnson
represented these "American sounds" as a source of multiplicity and
diversity, often developing a framework for the interracial
transfer of sound. The lyricist and civil rights leader used sound
as a formal aesthetic practice in and between his works, presenting
it as an unbounded cultural practice that is as much an interracial
as it is a racially distinct cultural history. Drawing on archival
materials such as early manuscript notes and drafts of Johnson's
unpublished and published work, Morrissette explores the author's
complex aesthetic of sound, based on black expressive culture and
cosmopolitan interracial experiences. This aesthetic evolved over
the course of his writing life, beginning with his early Broadway
musical comedy smash hits and the composition of Autobiography of
an Ex-Colored Man(1912), and developing through his "real"
autobiography, Along This Way (1933). The result is an innovative
new interpretation of the works of one of the early twentieth
century's most important and controversial writers and civil rights
leaders.
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