Introduction: Home in African American Literature: Difficult to Define, Challenging to Claim
Chapter 1: Movement, Migration, and Homelessness
Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966)
Chapter 2: Where I Live is Not Home
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970);
Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (2001)
Chapter 3: Lonely Place, Unwelcoming Space
A. J. Verdelle’s The Good Negress (1995)
Chapter 4: A Mother’s Desire, A Son’s Hell
Daniel Black’s Perfect Peace (2010)
Chapter 5: A Mother’s Domination, A Family’s Submission
Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy (1940)
Chapter 6: Wrapped in Imagination and Desire
Countee Cullen, “Heritage”; Ann Petry, “Mother Africa”; Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959); Alice Walker, “Everyday Use” (1973); Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977); Phyllis Alesia Perry, Stigmata (1998); Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (2016); James Weldon Johnson; Sterling A. Brown
Conclusion: While We’re in This Place . . .
Trudier Harris is University Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of English at the University of Alabama.
Harris has made a long, distinguished career of taking on topics
within African American literature that seem simple enough until
she unpacks the messy complexities and reveals them to be much more
difficult and engaging. This latest work examines the notion of
home in African American literature, and Harris quickly
demonstrates that home is often not where the heart is but a
dysfunctional space, riven with violence and pain. It is also
filled with memory and belief systems that sustain one and it is
portable in ways that go beyond the traditional definitions of
“homespaces” one often relies on. Here home also becomes a space of
imagination and migration. Harris reveals the fraught, complicated
rendering that creates these spaces in works by such writers as
Margaret Walker, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, A. J. Verdelle,
Dorothy West, Countee Cullen, and Yaa Gyasi, crossing time periods
and genres to catalog distinct variations while revealing the
racial and religious structures that shape people's views. Harris
provides an important corrective to views of home, and her work
will particularly interest scholars of American literature and
Black studies. Essential. Upper-division Undergraduates, Graduate
Students, Researchers/Faculty.
*Choice Reviews*
Trudier Harris's Depictions of Home in African American Literature
is destined to have an impact on the shaping of literary and
cultural discourses and on the teaching of African American
literature in the future. Harris makes a nuanced, persuasive case
for re-examining the tension between idealized notions of home and
the actual use of the concept in the production of literary genres.
Analyzing works by well-known and lesser-known writers, Harris
illuminates how history, race, power, and economics influence the
understanding of home as space and place. Thus, the book makes an
important contribution to scholarship and pedagogy.
*Jerry W. Ward Jr., author of The Katrina Papers: A Journal of
Trauma and Recovery*
Has the field of African American literary studies ever produced a
more thoughtful, prolific reader-scholar than Trudier Harris?
Article after article, book after book, decade after decade, she
has consistently pursued a fantastic quest to illuminate the
underpinnings of black artistic writing. In Depictions of Home in
African American Literature, the newest phase of her journey, she
charts explorations of homespaces in works by James Baldwin,
Countee Cullen, Toni Morrison, Suzan-Lori Parks, A. J. Verdelle,
Margaret Walker, and several others. Harris demonstrates that home,
a complex and in many cases unsettling place in the literature,
offers wonderous creative opportunities for black writers.
*Howard Rambsy II, author of Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black
Writers*
Depictions of Home in African American Literature is a moving
literary experience about home in black life and culture. Trudier
Harris, in what amounts to a corporate testimony, rhetorically
shouts out that since enslaved Africans arrived in America, home
has not been a hospitable environment or haven of shelter, of
happiness or love; rather it has been the site of a topography of
pain. It has been a constant reminder of black people's degraded
condition: containment, confinement, control. This situation
impedes the individual from attaining maturity at all levels.
Instead of the mythologized American dream, home is a reminder of
the American nightmare.
*Dolan Hubbard, author of The Sermon and the African American
Literary Imagination*
In the latest of her always illuminating and stimulating studies of
important topics in African American literature, Trudier Harris
shows us what “home” means for a wide range of writers. As
impressive as is the breadth of coverage of this book – writers
canonical to those almost unknown – are the elegant and insightful
readings of what home has meant as a domestic space, an imagined
and longed for place of origin, and a desired and anticipated haven
of refuge and solace. Harris reveals how complicated those
representations have been, how deep is the yearning for a safe
haven in a heartless world and how profound the tensions that can
and often do frustrate it.
*Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, author of Neo-Slave Narratives and
Philosophies of Gratitude*
In Depictions of Home in African American Literature, Trudier
Harris draws upon her expansive knowledge of African American
fiction, poetry and drama to trace recurring yet problematic
representations of both real and imagined homespaces. Her
painstaking and probing analyses of "home" in selected works that
span from James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to Dorothy
West's The Living Is Easy deconstruct the familiar archetypal quest
for home, ponder the role of slavery, and argue the inability of
African American writers to suppress the mimetic urge "to follow on
a path of troubling depictions." A fresh critical lens for
examining both classic and lesser-known works!
*Sandra G. Shannon, author of The Dramatic Vision of August
Wilson*
Trudier Harris has made a distinguished career of taking on large
topics in African American literature. In writing about folklore,
lynching, and women and domesticity, among others, she consistently
finds nuance, complexity, and ambiguity that enrich material that
we often took for granted before reading her analysis. Her latest
work is no different. Home as place, space, and idea/ideal has been
considered frequently in the criticism. Harris, by examining a wide
range of texts, forces us to rethink this central trope: so much of
the literature presents home as toxic, unstable, and even violent.
Set against this pessimism, as she so effectively points out, is an
endless yearning for nurture, love, and family. Every work by her
enriches us; this latest one simply adds to our debt.
*Keith Byerman, author of Remembering the Past in Contemporary
African American Fiction and The Art and Life of Clarence Major*
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