Understanding Colson Whitehead - REVIEW

      In 2020 Colson Whitehead became the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Although Whitehead's widely divergent books resist overarching categorization, Derek C. Maus argues that they are linked by their skepticism toward the ostensible wisdom inherited from past generations. Whitehead, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad, bids readers to accompany him on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to reexamine-and frequently defy-accepted notions of truth.

     Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead's books from his 1999 debut The Intuitionist through 2019's The Nickel Boys, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. By first imitating and then violating their conventions, Whitehead attempts to transcend the limits and conventions of the genres in which he seems to write. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter, again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, or malevolent aspects of American culture.

     Although it is only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race is often central to his work. It serves as a prime example of how Whitehead asks his readers to revisit their assumptions about meanings and values. By upending the literary formulas of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story, the zombie apocalypse, the slave narrative, and historical fiction, Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings of many of the long-lasting stories through which Americans have defined themselves. In addition to evoking such explicitly literary storytelling traditions, Whitehead also directs attention toward interrelated historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.

"With Understanding Colson Whitehead, Derek Maus offers an invaluable, readable, and comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the current era's most important authors. Few writers have shifted genres, styles, and tones so masterfully, and Maus helps readers understand how Whitehead's work all fits together."
- Cameron Leader-Picone
   Kansas State University

"Understanding Colson Whitehead is an indispensable study about an incredibly inventive contemporary novelist. Derek C. Maus produces superb and meticulous analyses of The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, The Underground Railroad, and Whitehead's other books. This engaging examination advances our views of an author whose idiosyncratic novels captured the attention of countless readers and earned astonishing levels of critical acclaim."
- Howard Rambsy II, Author of Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers

Derke C. Maus teaches contemporary literature at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He is the author of Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire and Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire. He is also the editor or coeditor of Conversations with Colson Whitehead; Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights; Finding a Way Home: A Critical Assessment of Walter Mosley's Fiction; and Angry Rain: A Memoir by Maurice Kenny.

Understanding Colson Whitehead: Revised and Expanded Edition
by Derek C. Maus
University of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 978-1-64336-174-1

Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy - REVIEW

Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
by David Zucchino

     From Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino comes a searing account of the Wilmington riot and coup of 1898, an extraordinary event unknown to most Americans

     By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. There were successful black-owned businesses and an African American newspaper, The Record. But across the state―and the South―white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny.

     In 1898, in response to a speech calling for white men to rise to the defense of Southern womanhood against the supposed threat of black predators, Alexander Manly, the outspoken young Record editor, wrote that some relationships between black men and white women were consensual. His editorial ignited outrage across the South, with calls to lynch Manly.

     But North Carolina’s white supremacist Democrats had a different strategy. They were plotting to take back the state legislature in November “by the ballot or bullet or both,” and then use the Manly editorial to trigger a “race riot” to overthrow Wilmington’s multi-racial government. Led by prominent citizens including Josephus Daniels, publisher of the state’s largest newspaper, and former Confederate Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, white supremacists rolled out a carefully orchestrated campaign that included raucous rallies, race-baiting editorials and newspaper cartoons, and sensational, fabricated news stories.

     With intimidation and violence, the Democrats suppressed the black vote and stuffed ballot boxes (or threw them out), to win control of the state legislature on November eighth. Two days later, more than 2,000 heavily armed Red Shirts swarmed through Wilmington, torching the Record office, terrorizing women and children, and shooting at least sixty black men dead in the streets. The rioters forced city officials to resign at gunpoint and replaced them with mob leaders. Prominent blacks―and sympathetic whites―were banished. Hundreds of terrified black families took refuge in surrounding swamps and forests.

     This brutal insurrection is a rare instance of a violent overthrow of an elected government in the U.S. It halted gains made by blacks and restored racism as official government policy, cementing white rule for another half century. It was not a “race riot,” as the events of November 1898 came to be known, but rather a racially motivated rebellion launched by white supremacists.

     In Wilmington’s Lie, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino uses contemporary newspaper accounts, diaries, letters and official communications to create a gripping and compelling narrative that weaves together individual stories of hate and fear and brutality. This is a dramatic and definitive account of a remarkable but forgotten chapter of American history.

Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
by David Zucchino
Grove Press, 448 pages
ISBN: 978-0802148650

Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927 - REVIEW

Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927
by Jeffrey B. Perry

     The St. Croix–born, Harlem-based Hubert Harrison (1883–1927) was a brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and activist who combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a potent political radicalism. Harrison’s ideas profoundly influenced “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his work is a key link in the two great strands of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation struggle: the labor- and civil-rights movement associated with Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist movement associated with Garvey and Malcolm X.

     In this second volume of his acclaimed biography, Jeffrey B. Perry traces the final decade of Harrison’s life, from 1918 to 1927. Perry details Harrison’s literary and political activities, foregrounding his efforts against white supremacy and for racial consciousness and unity in struggles for equality and radical social change. The book explores Harrison’s role in the militant New Negro Movement and the International Colored Unity League, as well as his prolific work as a writer, educator, and editor of the New Negro and the Negro World. Perry examines Harrison’s interactions with major figures such as Garvey, Randolph, J. A. Rogers, Arthur Schomburg, and other prominent individuals and organizations as he agitated, educated, and organized for democracy and equality from a race-conscious, radical internationalist perspective. This magisterial biography demonstrates how Harrison’s life and work continue to offer profound insights on race, class, religion, immigration, war, democracy, and social change in America.

Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927
by Jeffrey B. Perry
Columbia University Press, 1000 pages
ISBN: 978-0231182638

Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do - REVIEW

by Claude M. Steele

The acclaimed social psychologist offers an insider’s look at his research and groundbreaking findings on stereotypes and identity.

Claude M. Steele, who has been called “one of the few great social psychologists,” offers a vivid first-person account of the research that supports his groundbreaking conclusions on stereotypes and identity. He sheds new light on American social phenomena from racial and gender gaps in test scores to the belief in the superior athletic prowess of black men, and lays out a plan for mitigating these “stereotype threats” and reshaping American identities.

Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do
by Claude M. Steele
W.W. Norton & Company, 256 pages
ISBN: 978-0393339727

This Far and No Further: Photographs Inspired by the Voting Rights Movement - REVIEW

     Standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 2017, photographer William Abranowicz was struck by the weight of historical memory at this hallowed site of one of the civil rights movement's defining episodes: 1965's “Bloody Sunday,” when Alabama police officers attacked peaceful marchers. To Abranowicz’s eye, Selma seemed relatively unchanged from its appearance in the photographs Walker Evans made there in the 1930s. That, coupled with an awareness of renewed voter suppression efforts at state and federal levels, inspired Abranowicz to explore the living legacy of the civil and voting rights movement through photographing locations, landscapes, and individuals associated with the struggle, from Rosa Parks and Harry Belafonte to the barn where Emmett Till was murdered.

     The result is This Far and No Further, a collection of photographs from Abranowicz's journey through the American South. Through symbolism, metaphor, and history, he unearths extraordinary stories of brutality, heroism, sacrifice, and redemption hidden within ordinary American landscapes, underscoring the crucial necessity of defending―and exercising―our right to vote at this tenuous moment for American democracy.

This Far and No Further: Photographs Inspired by the Voting Rights Movement
by William Abranowicz (Author), Zander Abranowicz Nikole Hannah-Jones (Foreword)

University of Texas Press | ISBN-13 : 978-1477321744