After the Pain

The Editor: Fiona Mills is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Curry College. She received her Ph.D. in African American literature and Latino/a literature and theory from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has written several essays in the areas of African American literature, Latino/a literature, Women’s studies, and film criticism. She is currently revising a monograph on Afro-Latino/a literature.

«At last, a serious, sophisticated, audacious collection of scholarly essays worthy of the reach and imagination of Gayle Jones’s craft. ‘After the Pain’ approaches Jones’s career with the fresh eyes of critics willfully unencumbered by the obscurant niceties of traditional African American literary criticism. Mills and Mitchell have done the fields of African-American and American literature an incalculable service. Gayle Jones is a literary giant and to continue to pretend not to notice her genius, because we have not yet wholly grasped it, diminishes us more than her. Compellingly, ‘After the Pain’ challenges the black literary orthodoxy by calling into question Jones’s exclusion from it. Its unified labor to reclaim Gayle Jones shows a caring for Jones, for black women writers, and for the truth of race, sex, and silenced subjects seldom achieved in critical collections. ‘After the Pain’ is a necessary work. Most necessary.» (Maurice O. Wallace, Associate Professor of English and Associate Professor of African & African American Studies, Duke University)«Gayl Jones is one of the most provocative African American writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and she has long deserved the keen and perceptive examination of her work offered here. This landmark collection of illuminating essays covers the full range of Jones’s work, from her controversial ‘Corregidora’ and ‘Eva’s Man’ to her more recent and remarkable ‘Mosquito’. This anthology will prove indispensable to students, scholars, and teachers alike – to those who read Jones as well as those who study her sharp, unflinching portrayals of women and men struggling with the complex and contradictory inheritance of North American slavery. Every page flashes with the knife of close insight.» (Jennifer Cognard-Black, Asstistant Professor of English, St. Mary’s College of Maryland)«With the publication of ‘After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones’, Fiona Mills and Keith B. Mitchell take up the long overdue task of retrieving Jones from the margins of African-American literary studies. Their work of reclamation is indeed comparable to Alice Walker’s artistic «excavation» in the 1970s of Zora Neale Hurston’s oeuvre. The conclusions drawn in these sophisticated, theoretically dexterous essays are as startling and imaginative as the subject herself; undoubtedly, this book will re-map the boundaries of the African American literary landscape and help situate Jones into her deserved place as a major voice within the canon. This pioneering work will fill a critical lacuna in Jones scholarship; introduce and re-introduce an artist whose rich and voluminous writings merit a wider readership; and stimulate further critical interrogation of an iconoclastic, nuanced author whose fiction defies facile literary categorization.» (Keith Clark, Associate Professor of English and African American Studies, George Mason University)

• Contents: Trudier Harris: Foreword – Fiona Mills/Keith B. Mitchell: After the Pain: An Introduction – Heather E. Epes: Identity and Conceptual Limitation in Gayl Jones’s The Healing: From Turtle to Human Being – Shubha Venugopal: Textual Transfigurations and Female Metamorphosis: Reading Gayl Jones’s The Healing – L.H. Stallings: From Mules to Turtle and Unicorn Women: The Gender-Folk Revolution and the Legacy of the Obeah in Gayl Jones’s The Healing – Fiona Mills: Telling the Untold Tale: Afro-Latino/a Identifications in the Work of Gayl Jones – Jill Terry: «reads kinda like jazz in they rhythm»: Gayl Jones’s Recent Jazz Conversations – Sarika Chandra: Interruptions: Tradition, Borders, and Narrative in Gayl Jones’s Mosquito – Keith B. Mitchell: «Trouble in Mind»: (Re)visioning Myth, Sexuality and Race in Gal Jones’s Corregidora – Megan Sweeney: Prison Narratives, Narrative Prisons: Incarcerated Women Reading Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man – Thomas Fahy: Unsilencing Lesbianism in the Early Fiction of Gayl Jones – Howard Rambsy II: Things Deserving Echoes: Gayl Jones’s Liberating Poetry – Lovalerie King: Resistance, Reappropriation, and Reconciliation: The Blues and Flying Africans in Gayl Jones’s Song for Anninho – Keith Byerman: Afterword. Voicing Gayl Jones.