Western Fictions, Black Realities—Meanings of Blackness and Modernities

Soto (English studies, National Distance Education U., Madrid, Spain) and Johnson (history, Agnes Scott College, US) bring together English, history, literature, American studies, and other scholars from the US and Europe who present 16 essays that originated as papers given at the 2007 conference of the Collegium for African American Research in Madrid, Spain. The essays examine the relationship between blackness and modernities, discussing literary and cultural perspectives, including W.E.B. Du Bois and double consciousness, the gothic genre, the work of James Weldon Johnson, racially motivated murders in Olympia Vernon's Killing in This Town and Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle, and jazz studies. Coverage also includes race, diasporas, and modern encounters, with discussion of the Atlantic and trans-Atlantic slave trade, racial changes in Spain, travel narratives by African American women, and transmigrant Dominicans in Santo Domingo and New York. Other essays discuss the Harlem Renaissance and race, sexuality, and gender in works by Richard Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman, Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston, Black Symphony and Black, Brown and Beige by Duke Ellington, and the autobiographies of Louis Armstrong; and the black body as a racialized object, including essays on Audre Lorde's struggle with breast cancer, black American boxing, and Angela Davis's Autobiography. No index is provided. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Violet Showers Johnson is Professor of History at Agnes Scott College, Atlanta, Georgia.