A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of ObamaPosted in Barack Obama, Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2012-09-25 22:01Z by Steven |
A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama
Harvard University Press
May 2010
192 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
no illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674050969
Robert B. Stepto, Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies
Yale University
In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
Stepto draws our attention to the concerns that recur in the books he takes up: how protagonists raise themselves, often without one or both parents; how black boys invent black manhood, often with no models before them; how protagonists seek and find a home elsewhere; and how they create personalities that can deal with the pain of abandonment. These are age-old themes in African American literature that, Stepto shows, gain a special poignancy and importance because our president has lived through these situations and circumstances and has written about them in a way that refreshes our understanding of the whole of African American literature.
Stepto amplifies these themes in four additional essays, which investigate Douglass’s correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe; Willard Savoy’s novel Alien Land and its interracial protagonist; the writer’s understanding of the reader in African American literature; and Stepto’s account of his own schoolhouse lessons, with their echoes of Douglass’ and Obama’s experiences.
Table of Contents
- Part One: The W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures
- Introduction
- 1. Frederick Douglass, Barack Obama, and the Search for Patrimony
- 2. W.E.B. Du Bois, Barack Obama, and the Search for Race: School House Blues
- 3. Toni Morrison, Barack Obama, and Difference
- Part Two
- Introduction
- 4. A Greyhound Kind of Mood
- 5. Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass
- 6. Willard Savoy’s Alien Land: Biracial Identity in a Novel of the 1940s
- Afterword: Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives
- Notes
- Index