Carlyle V. Thompson – författare

The (Underground) Railroad in African American Literature offers a brief history of the African American experience of the railroad and the uses of railroad history by a wide assortment of twentieth-century African American poets, dramatists, and fiction writers. Moreover, this literary history examines the ways in which trains, train history, and legendary train figures such as Harriet Tubman and John Henry have served as literary symbols. This repeated use of the train symbol and associated train people in twentieth-century African American literature creates a sense of literary continuity and a well-established aesthetic tradition all too frequently overlooked in many traditional approaches to the study of African American writing. The metaphoric possibilities associated with the railroad and the persistence of the train as a literary symbol in African American writing demonstrates the symbol’s ongoing literary value for twentieth-century African American writers – writers who invite their readers to look back at the various points in history where America got off track, and who also dare to invite their readers to imagine an alternate route for the future.

In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation and its aftermath, Carlyle Van Thompson illumines the racialized sexual desire that reduces Black people to commodities for consumption. Eating the Black Body examines the often-sadistic forms of sexual violence during the period of slavery and its aftermath. By looking at one poem and three novels – Richard Wright’s Between the World and Me, John Oliver Killens’ Youngblood, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred – that examine slavery and the Jim Crow period, Thompson investigates a wide variety of Black bodies as sites of miscegenation and sexual desire. Thompson also examines a horrific case of White male police brutality in New York City in which a Black man was sodomized. Bold and persuasively argued, Eating the Black Body will engage readers in a broad range of literary, historical, and cultural studies.

In this provocative and original exploration of Black males and the legal establishment, Carlyle Van Thompson illuminates the critical issues defining Black male subjectivity. Since the days of Black people’s enslavement and the days of Jim Crow segregation, Black males have been at odds with the legal and extra-legal restrictions that would maintain white supremacy and white male privilege. Grounded in the voices of Frederick Douglass and David Walker, who challenged hegemonic systems designed to socio-economically disenfranchise Black people, Black Outlaws examines legal aspects with regard to Black males during the period of segregation. By critically looking at Richard Wright’s The Outsider, Chester Bomar Himes’ The Third Generation, Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, and Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying – all of which examine Black males during the Jim Crow period – Thompson investigates the challenges that Black males confront and surmount in their journeys to establish their individual and collective agency. Black Outlaws helps decipher critical legal and racial issues in the works of four of the most important Black male writers, and is suitable for readers in literary studies, cultural studies, and history.

The new edition of The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination offers a fresh perspective on this trail blazing scholarship, and the singular importance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as a challenge to the racial hegemony of biological white supremacy. Fitzgerald convincinglyand boldly shows how racial passing by light-skinned Black individuals becomes the most fascinating literary trope associated with democracy and the enduring desire for the American Dream.

Zora Neale Hurston produced some of the most provocative literature of the twentieth century. This book examines the numerous scenes of violence against women in her fictional works and the development of her feminist ideals. This groundbreaking book is the first full-length discussion of Hurston’s repetitive rendering of violently controlled women. It gives significant insight into why Hurston’s themes often questioned the power dynamics of heterosexual relationships. It also explores the effect of death and loss on Hurston’s life and reveals intertwined relationships between writing and healing.

The Tragic Black Buck examines the phenomenon, often paradoxical, of black males passing for white in American literature. Focusing on the first third of the twentieth century, this book argues that black individuals successfully assuming a white identity represent a paradox, in that passing for white exemplifies a challenge to the hegemonic philosophy of biological white supremacy, while denying blackness. Issues of race, gender, skin color, class, and law are examined in the literature of passing, involving the historical, theoretical, and literary tropes of miscegenation, mimicry, and masquerade. The narratives examined in The Tragic Black Buck are Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and William Faulkner’s Light in August.

Black Women’s Activism is the first book-length study of African American women’s historical romances. This book examines romances written from 1989 to the present, and discusses their black heroines’ resistance at particular moments in history – from the colonization movement to the Texas oil boom. Socio-historical perspectives, a womanist agenda, and an African-centered outlook inform the readings of female characters in the narratives of Francine Craft, Gay G. Gunn, Shirley Hailstock, Beverly Jenkins, and Anita Richmond Bunkley. Broadening the scope of the historical romance genre, and expanding the canon of African American literature, this book provides a more comprehensive image of the black female character and addresses gender issues previously unexplored in black fiction. This text should be used by librarians, historians, literary critics, writers, college- and graduate-level students, teachers, and romance readers.

The Black community has historically suffered stasis on the political level. W.E.B. Du Bois originally identified the source of the stasis as a contradiction of political goals within individuals and Black culture. During the last century, the development of African American political organizations has institutionalized this «contradiction of double aims». That institutionalization is largely due to the energy and resources of two distinct and often contradicting political traditions – Black nationalism and the Black American Jeremiad. It is within a third tradition, Black cultural pluralism, that a possible discourse exists that can address the stasis within the Black community. This book attempts to reconstruct the development of this third tradition and posits it as the most viable source of Black political development.