E3W Literature | University of Texas

Dedicated to the memory of Dr. John Warfield, former Director of the Center for African and African American Studies and Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin.

Edited by Jeremy Dean

Despite the fact that Barack Obama began his political career as a grass-roots organizer on Chicago’s predominantly black South Side, his primary campaign has largely downplayed his race—supporters chanting “Race Doesn’t Matter!” as they did in South Carolina. This section serves as further reminder that even as Obama stands poised to make the most significant bid for the US presidency by an African American to date race does indeed still matter—a point he himself made in his “A More Perfect Union” speech at the Contiution Center in Philadelphia. We begin by reviewing e3w Interest Group co-founder Wahneema Lubiano’s edited collection The House That Race Built, an important contribution to African American studies emerging from its own post-racial moment, which similarly echoed Cornell West’s “Race Matters” 1992 claim. An interview with Dr. Lubiano follows that both remembers that earlier time and reconsiders the work’s lasting influence on the present day. This special section then continues to look back on the past twenty years in African American literary study, offering landmark reviews of two seminal works of criticism: Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Signifying Monkey, reviewed by Ashley Squires, and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, reviewed by Patricia Burns. But we also look forward to the future of African American literature and scholarship with Andrea Hilkovitz’s review of Gene Andrew Jarrett’s recent Deans and Truants. This section also includes reviews of classic and contemporary works of African American fiction and poetry with 2007 Guggenheim Fellow A. Van Jordon’s book of poems, Quantum Lyrics, reviewed by Liz Jones, and the understudied Harlem Renaissance novelist Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, reviewed by Kate Benjamin. Jennifer Eckel’s review of historian James Sidbury’s Becoming African in America and Jeremy Dean’s interview with Edmund T. Gordon, Director of the Center for African & African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, transition this section largely focused on the continental US to consider a wider range of geographies within a Black Atlantic framework. As African American anti-racist activists have done since the nineteenth century, we turn to Haiti to think through the meaning of blackness, with Rachel Burgess’s review of Edwidge Dandicat’s most recent novel, Brother, I Am Dying, and a review essay by Christopher Micklethwait of two classic works by C.L.R. James and Alejo Carpentier, The Black Jacobins and The Kingdom of This World.