Donald M. Shaffer

The African American Great Migration novel emerged as a popular mode of fiction in the 1920s. Not surprisingly, the decade that saw both the Harlem Renaissance as well as the thunderous onset of the Jazz Age also provided the backdrop for Black migrant stories of personal triumph and transformation set in the symbolically potent urban landscape of America’s iconic cityscapes. While these novels represented the powerful symbol of the Northern city as a proverbial Promised Land, they also reflected the urban pastoral conflict that defined the Black migrant experience. These novels marshaled a variant of the urban pastoral mode that historian Michael Denning has termed the “ghetto pastoral.” In Though There Be Giants: The Ghetto Pastoral Mode in Black Migration Novels, Donald M. Shaffer advances Denning’s concept of the ghetto pastoral to examine the ideological tension between rural and urban modes of experience in these novels. Through close readings of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Walter White’s Flight, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Shaffer demonstrates how these texts destabilize concepts of race and identity even as they attempt to locate “Blackness” in the spaces and places of the Northern city. Shaffer traces the historical and critical link between racial uplift novels of the late nineteenth century and Black modernist novels of the mid-twentieth century. This work thus examines a key figure of African American modernity: the liminal Black migrant standing at the proverbial crossroads of Southern folk culture and the transformative cultural spaces of the Northern city. This figure defines not only a generation of Black artistic expression but also stands as the culmination of the African American literary tradition.

The Ghetto Pastoral Mode in Black Migration Novels

Though There Be Giants

David R. Roediger

Stephen Middleton

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2017 This volume collects interdisciplinary essays that examine the crucial intersection between whiteness as a privileged racial category and the various material practices (social, cultural, political, and economic) that undergird white ideological influence in America. In truth, the need to examine whiteness as a problem has rarely been grasped outside academic circles. The ubiquity of whiteness--its pervasive quality as an ideal that is at once omnipresent and invisible--makes it the very epitome of the mainstream in America. And yet the undeniable relationship between whiteness and inequality in this country necessitates a thorough interrogation of its formation, its representation, and its reproduction. Essays here seek to do just that work. Editors and contributors interrogate whiteness as a social construct, revealing the underpinnings of narratives that foster white skin as an ideal of beauty, intelligence, and power. Contributors examine whiteness from several disciplinary perspectives, including history, communication, law, sociology, and literature. Its breadth and depth makes The Construction of Whiteness a refined introduction to the critical study of race for a new generation of scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students. Moreover, the interdisciplinary approach of the collection will appeal to scholars in African and African American studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, legal studies, and more. This collection delivers an important contribution to the field of whiteness studies in its multifaceted impact on American history and culture.

Donald M. Shaffer

About

Books

Join the club