A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama

Posted 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
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Alien Land

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels, Passing, United States on 2010-08-03 02:51Z by Steven

Alien Land

Northeastern University Press
2006 (Originally published in 1949 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.)
336 pages
1 illus. 5 1/2 x 8″
ISBN-13: 978-1-55553-657-2
ISBN-10: 1-55553-657-3

Willard Savoy (1916-1976)

Introduction by:
Robert Burns Stepto, Professor of African American Studies, English and American Studies
Yale University

Alien Land is the passionate and haunting story of a light-skinned black man who can pass as white in mid-twentieth-century America. As a spiritually tormented child and young adult caught between two worlds in a segregated society, Kern Roberts puzzles over racism and agonizes over “why he’s a nigger.” As a teenager studying at the exclusive Evans Academy in Vermont, Kern “passes” until a classmate maliciously exposes him. Anguished and resentful, he throws himself into working for the Freedom League in Washington, D.C., the civil rights organization of which his father, a prominent black attorney, is national president. In 1934 Kern starts college in an “alien land,” the Jim Crow South. Exposed to horrifying racially motivated crimes, prejudice, and contempt, Kern necessarily plays the submissive “nigger” until, terrorized, he renounces his race and his father, returning to Vermont to live as a white man with his white grandmother. Ultimately he comes to terms with his biracial identity, finds peace in his marriage to a white woman, and reconciles with his father.

Robert Burns Stepto’s keen introduction firmly situates Alien Land in the line of African American novels that treat the issue of identity through the motif of passing. Originally published in cloth in 1949 to national acclaim, the full text of this remarkable novel is finally available in paperback.

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