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
Sherwood Anderson Read by the Greats
The Library of America celebrates the publication of Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories by posting audio recordings of nine famous writers reading ten of Anderson’s famous works. Hop on over to hear readings by Charles Baxter, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Marcus, Rick Moody, and Patricia Hempl.
Using Neuroscience To Study Art
Dutch researchers are using moistened electrode caps to measure the brain waves, heart rate, galvanic skin response and facial expressions on an author and fifty of his readers. They hope to find patterns “that may help illuminate links between the way art is created and enjoyed, and possibly the nature of creativity itself.”
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This Could End Badly
Want to tweet as @Horse_ebooks or @TimTebow? Well, now you can. Just remember that with great power comes great Klout scores responsibility.
Tuesday New Release Day: Eggers; Gaiman; Murphy, Upadhyay; Hastings
Dave Eggers has a new novel out this week, while Neil Gaiman has an illustrated version of a previously published story on shelves. Also out: I Love You More by Jennifer Murphy; The City Son by Samrat Upadhyay; and The Last Magazine by the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings.
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Criminal Justice in America: A Failure
William Stuntz's book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice investigates "how, over the past 50 years, our criminal justice system had been transformed into an unfair, amoral bureaucracy--one that had given up on the very idea of justice." Its genesis is worth reading about. So, too, is this related article in the most recent edition of n+1, "Raise the Crime Rate."
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2012 Costa Book Award Winners Announced
The 2012 Costa Book Awards (PDF), which recognize books by writers in the UK and Ireland, were awarded yesterday in the Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children's Book categories. Interestingly, each category was won by a female author. Three cheers for Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies, Francesa Segal's The Innocents, Mary M. Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, Kathleen Jamie's Overhaul, Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon.
Raised on B-Movies
I've loved old sci-fi B-movies forever, and a staggering number of my childhood memories involve Ray Harryhausen. For this reason, I'm really geeking out over The New Yorker’s entire science fiction issue, but in particular this piece by Colson Whitehead deserves your time.
Marxman
Recommended: Max Strasser on the late Eric Hobsbawm.
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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.