Nicole King

‘Getting in Conversation’: Teaching African American Literature and Training Critical Thinkers

Asking what we teach when we teach African American literature can feel like a reactionary and dangerous question, but the occasion of asking allows a different type of teaching and learning encounter to evolve. This essay explores how we might foster in students a reflexive questioning of knowable identities and a passionate curiosity about the shifting syntax and vocabulary of blackness. The difficulty is and remains that this unstable syntax and vocabulary exists in the literature in paradoxical symmetry with grand narrative structures. In other words, there is something about both the texts and aspects of teaching practice that creates a seemingly safe space for some students to relax back onto the soft furnishings of singular and monolithic notions of blackness as either authentic or inauthentic. King seeks to counterbalance such effects by making the implicit explicit while attending to discourses and theorisations of authenticity. She thus aims to move the paradox and dialectics of African American literature to the front of the classroom, for full and continuous engagement.

Creolisation and On Beauty: Form, Character and the Goddess Erzulie

There are many facets of feminist creolisation within Zadie Smiths novel On Beauty (2005). This article locates and analyses the novels feminist subtext by assessing the characterisations of black women and Smiths use of Vodou symbolism in the form of the goddess Erzulie. The argument is made that Smiths black women, imbued with aspects of Erzulies diverse personae, defy their marginal positions in the narrative and become its driving force. After outlining the principles of creolisation and the attributes of the goddess Erzulie, this work identifies where and how Smith has incorporated both creolisation and feminist creolisation into the structure of her text. Glissants notion of creolisation as, in part, being ‘open to change’ provides a rubric for understanding and analysing the relationships and the key differences between and amongst black women in On Beauty, in addition to their alignment with Erzulie. These overlapping threads are taken up in an analysis of Carlene Kipps, one of the texts most marginalised characters. In discerning the attributes of Erzulie (a syncretic, creolist figure) in Kipps, and to a lesser extent in Kiki Belsey, these women are revealed as multi-dimensional rather than simplistic, powerful rather than passive. An analysis of Smiths alignment of her black women characters with Erzulie causes the surfacing of a subtle erotics of friendship between Kipps and Belsey. As complex New World subjects, Smiths black women are not just shaped by creolisation, they also operate as its agents. In conclusion, the article maintains that Smiths feminist and creolist aesthetic not only structures the novel through form and characterisation, but also crucially shapes its standpoint and perspective.

Response to Deborah Willis's "The Black Civil War Soldier: Conflict and Citizenship"

With references to my current research on African American World War II archives and from the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks I use special forum to assert that Willis’s successful negotiation of the public and private realms of representation of black Civil War soldiers offers an excellent model for research on black soldiers in U.S. military conflicts and their quest for recognition and equal treatment as soldiers, citizens and people.

Teaching Crime Fiction and the African American Literary Canon

Teaching African American literature, whether it is designated as ‘literary’ or ‘popular,’ is political and carries with it a political resonance. According to some calculations, detective stories are the most widely read literary genre in the United States, but the fact that African American writers have been writing in this genre since the early twentieth century is less well known (Dietzel 2006: 159). Rudolph Fisher’s novel The Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery of Dark Harlem (1932) is understood as an important precursor to the mid and late twentieth-century crime fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley. Earlier still, Pauline E. Hopkins used the Colored American magazine to serialize her novel Hagar’s Daughter (March 1901–March 1902) which features the first black female detective in fiction (Dietzel 2006: 158).