Not familiar with Zora Neale Hurston or just need to brush up in preparation for her birthday? Liz Dwyer has got you covered. “Through the #MeToo movement we’ve read the stories of how calling out sexual harassment and the patriarchy has ruined women’s careers. Similarly, Hurston was shunned and derided by many of her male compatriots in the Harlem Renaissance for creating one of the first strong, black, and sexually aware female protagonists of 20th century American fiction.” Hooked yet? After you finish, read this essay by our own Jeffrey Colvin on visiting Zora’s birthplace and his sister.
Zora Turns 127 Tomorrow
Dark Matter
Next week, Martin Amis will publish Zone of Interest, a dark new novel that takes place, like his earlier Time’s Arrow, in Nazi-occupied lands during the Holocaust. In this week’s New Yorker, Joyce Carol Oates reviews the book, suggesting that Amis is most compelling when he writes as a “satiric vivisectionist.” You could also read our own Mark O’Connell on Lionel Asbo: State of England.
Not for Everyone
Ultra-niche magazines operate a bit differently than their larger and more mainstream cousins. Magazines like Donkey Talk, which caters exclusively to donkey hobbyists, aim for tiny audiences of a few hundred to a few thousand readers. They also cultivate their own jargon — one magazine, The Mountain Astrologer, tosses the word “quincunx” around as casually as “email.”
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Great Expectations
John Keene, Ken Chen, and seven other writers share their most anticipated books coming out this spring. Also check out The Millions great book preview.
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40 Towns, An Experiment in Literary Journalism
Jeff Sharlet had a challenge for his creative nonfiction students at Dartmouth College. Sensing that journalism had become too “dull,” too mired in a “culture of professionalism” divided “between reporting and ‘storytelling,’” Sharlet asked his students who didn’t “know [any] better” to create a magazine of their own. The result, 40 Towns, embraces “the right conditions” of literary creation – immersion, journalism, regionalism and “a term of revision” – to present a “collection of documents, artifacts of real life” about the Upper Valley.
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Library Tour
The al-Qarawiyyin library, the oldest library in the world, has just reopened after years of renovations. Take a look inside. Andrew Pippos writes about private libraries and what they reveal about their readers.
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“Hurston was shunned and derided by many of her male compatriots in the Harlem Renaissance for creating one of the first strong, black, and sexually aware female protagonists of 20th century American fiction.”
Zora was “derided” by many of her compatriots (and by Black readers in general) for caricaturing “Negro” life for the entertainment of White readers. What too many readers now don’t understand, because their reading is, necessarily, too narrow, and their experience culturally lopsided (owing to segregation and the various biases inherent in media) is that such racialist “reportage” is an American tradition… and the victims of the racialist reportage were not just “Negroes” in general but, specifically, the (portrayed as) “lazy, ignorant, brutal, immoral, rape-inclined” Black males. Too many readers are oblivious to the ongoing issue and cyclical controversy, but this piece in the NYT (June 15, 1986) addressed it in some detail:
“In fact, this phenomenon has intensified to the extent that the harsh portrayal of black males in the enormously popular film version of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ”The Color Purple” has elicited outraged criticism from blacks that is reminiscent of the heated reaction to D. W. Griffith’s film ”The Birth of a Nation” and the film version of ”Gone With the Wind.” According to a news story in The New York Times, the movie has inspired community forums, pickets and heated arguments among blacks in many parts of the country. The screen adaptation has, of course, brought Miss Walker’s tale to a much larger audience, which the increased agitation in black communities reflects. But the underlying controversy over the portrayal of black men in fictional works by black women has been brewing in black literary circles for some time.”
This tradition continues to this day, of course. In Roxane Gay’s “An Untamed State”, brutal, ignorant Black males (who are referred to as “animals” by the heroine) serially rape a pretty, accomplished, light-skinned kidnap victim whose husband, in contrast to her Black abusers, is a sensitive, handsome, supportive White male… a sharpening of the imaginary racialist contrasts that wouldn’t have been possible in Zora’s day: progress? Ms Gay has, since the book’s publication, revealed the fact that she was gang-raped at 12… but many of the articles reporting this terrible fact are not entirely explicit about the detail that Ms Gay’s rapists were White.
Monetizing minority stereotypes is nothing new and it’s debatable whether it’s better or worse when a Creative lampoons her or his own “type” for the approbation of the mainstream. I only ask that some *awareness* of the reality (and implications) of this (racialist) practise enters the “critical discourse”… before the “critical discourse” devolves completely into trend-compliant cheerleading and units-pushing hype.