Tragic Black Buck

Carlyle Van Thompson is Professor of African American Literature and American Literature at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. He received his Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. Thompson is the former Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Education at Medgar Evers College and former Series Editor at Peter Lang Publishers Inc. As the author of three scholarly books, sixteen edited books, and numerous scholarly articles on Richard Wright, Nella Larsen, Ernest J. Gaines, Abner Louima, Toni Morrison, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thompson’s current scholarship focuses on the challenges of young Black males in academia. Thompson lives in New York City.

“The Tragic Black Buck</> is a worthy successor to the sort of imaginative literary reconstruction initiated in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. Her suggestive program of reading blackness as the implicit backdrop of white American literary and cultural identities is richly fleshed out in Carlyle Van Thompson’s impressive volume. Joining Charles Waddell Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner in a single volume is a stroke of vivid literary reading. Too rarely have we had literary investigations that examine towering white and black figures as co-creators of an artistic convention and cultural practice. Thompson’s interweaving of biographical and cultural features of these writers’ lives and their novels furthers his sagacious argument about racial passing as a complex, evolving, and hence multi-textured practice and identity. The virtue of such a move is that it underscores how a racial practice like passing is never simply a one-sided affair. Professor Thompson shows us in lucid fashion how white and black identities are never the sole possession of black and white people. Blackness and whiteness are created out of the complex and intricate interplay between cultural, racial, and social forces that are larger than a fastidiously bi-polar paradigm suggests.”—Michael Eric Dyson, Avaion Foundation Professor of Humanities and African-American Studies, the University of Pennsylvaniania

• Acknowledgments – Preface to the First Edition – Preface to the Second Edition – Introduction: Black Bucks Being as White as They Wanna Be: The Historical and Theoretical Roots of Black People Passing for White – “The Circular Ruins” of Passing: Race, Class, and Gender in Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars – The Improvisational and Faustian Performance in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man – The Tragic Black Buck: Jay Gatsby’s Passing in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – Joe Christmas, a Black Buck with Attitude: The Virulent Nexus of Race and Color in William Faulkner’s Light in August – Conclusion – Bibliography