African American

Wesleyan Welcomes Books by J. A. Rogers

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“Perhaps his most unique achievement [was] the fact that with little more than a high school education, [Rogers] was able to perfect an orthodox history methodology.”
                                                 –Bilalian News, August 1976

The Wesleyan University Press is pleased to announce that we are now distributing a collection of books by J.A. Rogers, originally published by Helga M. Rogers. Joel Augustus Rogers (1880–1966) was a Jamaican-American author, journalist, and a self-taught historian who made great contributions to the history of Africa and the African diaspora, with a focus on the history of African Americans in the United States. His research spanned the fields of history, sociology, and anthropology–challenging prevailing ideas about race and demonstrating a connection between civilizations. Rogers was instrumental in popularizing African history and tracing African achievements. He revolutionized the telling of African history by addressing the lack of science behind many assumptions about “race,” as well as the dearth of black historians researching and telling their own histories.

Wesleyan University Press  is now distributing eight of his titles: 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, Nature Knows No Color Line, Africa’s Gift to America, Sex and Race Volume 1, Sex and Race Volume 2, and Sex and Race Volume 3, The Five Negro Presidents, and From “Superman” to Man.

For Mothers Day: Two Connecticut Women

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Happy Mothers Day! Wesleyan University Press is celebrating two new books about fascinating Connecticut women.

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In her book Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker, Susan Campbell tells the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s younger half-sister. Isabella Beecher Hooker was a curiously modern nineteenth-century figure. She was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement, and a mover and shaker in Hartford’s storied Nook Farm neighborhood and salon. Tempest-Tossed is a breezily written, fast paced biography that reveals Isabella’s more unusual traits. She was an ardent Spiritualist who could be off-putting, perplexing, and tenacious, yet wonderfully charming. Many of her contemporaries found her unapproachable and difficult to maintain a relationship with. Her “wild streak” was especially unfavorable in the eyes of Hartford society at the time, which valued restraint and duty. Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Campbell, also the author of Dating Jesus: Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl, brings her own unique blend of empathy and unbridled humor to the unique story of this unorthodox woman. Tempest-Tossed reveals Isabella’s evolution from Calvinist daughter, wife, and mother, to one of the most influential players in the movement for women’s suffrage. This long overdue story has found its perfect storyteller in Campbell, who captures the liveliness and spirit of this daring individual.

You can read a new short piece by Susan Campbell, “Can Mothers Get it Right? Experts Disagree,” (in which another Beecher sister, Catherine, is discussed) in this Sunday’s edition of the Hartford Courant.

Hot off the press is Connecticut state senator Donald E. Williams’s Prudence Crandall: The Fight for Equality in the 1830s, Dred Scott, and Brown v. Board of Education. Crandall was a Connecticut school teacher dedicated to the education of African-American girls–a goal unheard of in the racist landscape of the United States of the 1830s. She ignited a firestorm of controversy when she opened Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color, in Canterbury. Residents of the town refused to supply Crandall with the goods necessary to run her school, even going so far as to poison the school’s well water. She was ridiculed and arrested, but only closed her school upon the realization that the safety of her girls was at risk. Striking a balance between careful research and lively storytelling, Williams tells of Crandall’s push for justice and how her struggles helped to set legal precedent. He explains the relationship between three trials brought against Crandall, for her violation of Connecticut’s “Black Law,” and other notable legal cases: the Amistad case, the Dred Scott decision, and Brown v. Board of Education. Williams also discusses how Crandall v. State impacts our modern interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Happy mother’s day, and happy reading!

Samuel R. Delany receives the 2013 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Award

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delany-1-of-1The Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA) has announced that Samuel R. Delany is the recipient of the 2013 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. The award recognizes Delany’s lifetime achievements as an SF author. Delany will receive the award at the Nebula award ceremonies in May. Delany is the author of many beloved books published by Wesleyan University Press.

Here is short introduction to Delany’s life and work, compiled by Wesleyan University Press director and editor-in-chief Suzanna Tamminen:

Samuel R. Delany is one of science fiction’s most influential authors, critics, and teachers. He appears to be always writing and to always have been writing. This is both a commentary on his many published books and also on the way he seems to live inside language, in both the spirit and the word. His work is dear to many writers, indeed his work has profoundly influenced several generations of writers, and the spirit manifested in his words, how he uses words to create and open up structures of thought, has earned him many ardent readers.

Delany’s works range from autobiography and essays to literary and cultural criticism, to fiction and science fiction, this last his most widely recognized genre. He served as professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and most recently has been a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.

The outline of the writer’s life is itself novel-worthy. Delanyʼs grandfather, Henry Beard Delany, was born a slave in Georgia in 1857, and became the first black suffrage Episcopal bishop of the Archdiocese of North and South Carolina as well as vice-chancellor of a black Episcopal college, St. Augustineʼs, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

He grew up in Harlem where his father, Samuel Sr., owned and operated the Levy & Delany Funeral Home. His mother, Margaret Delany, was a clerk in the New York Public Library system. The family lived in the two floors over Samuel Sr.’s Seventh Avenue business. His aunts were the Delany Sisters who were always Having Their Say.

Delany finished and sold his first published novel, The Jewels of Aptor, when he was still nineteen. Before his twenty-second birthday, he’d completed and sold four more novels, including a trilogy: The Fall of the Towers.

In 1974, Dhalgren, Delany’s most controversial work, made its appearance. At eight hundred seventy-nine pages in its initial Bantam Books edition, it drew much praise, much scorn—and open anger. Over the next dozen years, however, it sold more than a million copies and, today, has settled comfortably into the slot reserved for “classics of the genre.” As Delanyʼs most popular book, it has been turned into both a play on the East Coast and an opera on the West Coast.

Dhalgren was followed by the highly acclaimed novel Trouble on Triton. From 1979 to 1987, Delany wrote a connected set of eleven fantasy tales: two novels, three novellas, and six short stories. They include The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (1987)—the first novel about AIDS released by a major American publisher—and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. In 1984 Delany’s last purely SF novel for twenty-five years would appear, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand—a book in which he predicted the Internet a decade before the fact.

Since then, Delany has written highly praised works, both fictitious and autobiographical. His 1988 publication, The Motion of Light in Water, is a staple of gender studies and African American studies classes and received a Hugo Award for nonfiction. In 1995, he published three long stories, about black life in the Jazz Age, the fifties in New York, and the sixties in Europe, collected in Atlantis: Three Tales and, partly, in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. This was followed by collections of interviews and nonfiction essays, including Silent Interviews (1994), Longer Views (1996), and Shorter Views (1999), all published by Wesleyan University Press.

Among his highly acclaimed academic releases are Times Square Red, Times Square Blue—and About Writing. Other novels, long and short, from this time include The Mad Man, Hogg (“the most shocking novel of the 20th century,” wrote Larry McCaffery), and Phallos. His novel about a black gay poet living in the East Village over the turn of the most recent century, Dark Reflections, won the 2008 Stonewall Book Award. His most recent novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), is over eight hundred pages—an amalgam of gay erotic writing, rural realism, and science fiction.

Altogether, Delany has won four Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards, as well as the Bill Whitehead Award for a lifetime contribution to gay and lesbian writing. In 2002, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. He received the Pilgrim Award for SF scholarship in 1985 and the J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. That same year he was among the judges for the National Book Award in Fiction. In 2007 he was the subject of Fred Barney Taylorʼs documentary The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, in which Delany is interviewed by Jonathan Lethem.  includes an experimental color film, The Orchid, which Delany himself wrote, directed, and edited in 1972.

Traditional and experimental music meet in northeast Brazil

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We are pleased to announce a new book by Daniel B. Sharp, Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse: Popular Music and the Staging of Brazil.

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Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse is a close-to-the-ground account of musicians and dancers from Arcoverde, Pernambuco—a small city in the northeastern Brazilian backlands. The book is a study of samba de coco families, considered bearers of traditional music and dance, and the band Cordel do Fogo Encantado, modern performers whose sound incorporates traditional music. Sharp’s study becomes a revealing portrait of performers engaged in new forms of cultural preservation during a post-dictatorship period of democratization and neoliberal reform. Sharp explores how festivals, museums, television, and tourism steep musicians’ performances in national-cultural nostalgia, which both provides musicians and dancers with opportunities for cultural entrepreneurship and hinders their efforts to be recognized as part of the Brazilian here-and-now. The book charts how Afro-Brazilian samba de coco, born in the slave quarters of Brazil, became an unlikely symbol in an interior where European and indigenous cultures predominate. Sharp also discusses the modernization of folkloric elements, chronicling how the popular band Cordel do Fogo Encantado draws upon the sounds of samba de coco, ecstatic Afro-Brazilian religious music, and heavy metal—making folklore dangerous by embodying an apocalyptic register often associated with northeastern Brazil.

For more details, click here.

To listen to the sounds of Cordel do Fogo Encantado, click here.

Also available as an ebook—check with your favorite ebook retailer.

Come home Charley Patton” reviewed in DCA Newsletter

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Visit the UPNE Book PageRalph Lemon’s Come home Charley Patton was reviewed by Judith Ingber, for the Dance Critics Association newsletter. Ingber recommends “this most rewarding and unorthodox book.”

We thank Dance Critics Association [www.dancecritics.org] for allowing us to post this review.

From the review essay:

“If you like dance diaries in print you’ll especially love Ralph Lemon’s latest book Come home Charley Patton (2013). Years ago I was thrilled to delve into Martha Graham’s diary The Notebooks of Martha Graham when it was published (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973) and likewise, later, with Merce Cunningham’s Changes: Notes on Choreography (NY: Something Else Press, 1968). I assume a dancer’s diary will be snatches of this and that, providing illuminations both visual and articulate about the choreographer’s process and works. That’s true only in part for Ralph’s new book. Note I’ll call him Ralph in the following comments–how could I call him Lemon when he grew up in Minneapolis like I did (though admittedly some years later)? I remember him dancing in the Nancy Hauser Dance Company and then seeing his works for the New Dance Ensemble including “Boundary Water” (1984), “Waiting for Carnival” (1986) and a wonderful solo for dancer Luc Ball?

Ralph’s book is much more than diary entries about his dances—here we get historical context for his stories, images he has photographed and his own sketches (some in black and white and others in color). It’s published by Wesleyan University Press, the famous dance press, and someone there loves him because they’ve also published his previous books (Persephone, his 1996 dance ode to spring which is a small book collaboration with photographer Philip Trager; Geography: art/race/exile, published in 2000; and Tree in 2004). Until one reads this latest book, his role as choreographer/dancer seemed most important. But here one sees his many facets—story teller, researcher, painter, and photographer.

For me, Martin Luther King Day each year calls up a spring day in 1968, walking up New York City’s Broadway near Columbia University, with radio news blaring onto the street from countless shops and cars that King had been shot. This year the inauguration of Barak Hussein Obama as America’s 57th president fell on Martin Luther King Day. I spent the day reading Ralph’s book with time out for watching the televised inauguration ceremonies. In a way, it struck me that his book is an ode to Martin Luther King, for Ralph interweaves the Civil Rights Movement with his own and his family stories.”

Read the full review (.pdf)

Celebrating Aimé Césaire at 100!

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Photo of Césaire courtesy of Al. James Arnold

Celebrating Aimé Césaire at 100!

Two new translations of overlooked work give us a fresh reading of this important poet.

This is the centennial year of Martinican poet, playwright, essayist, and politician Aimé Césaire (June 26, 1913–April 17, 2008). Wesleyan University Press is pleased to announce The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, in English for the first time.

Aimé Césaire cofounded the influential Negritude movement, aiming to restore the cultural identity of black Africans living under colonial rule. Césaire first introduced the concept of Negritude in his work, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. The concept of Negritude was poorly understood in the United States, where it is usually reduced to the tag line “Black is Beautiful.” Césaire’s concept of negritude is displayed in his verse, in the dynamic structure of the lyric and dramatic that he sometimes referred to as Pelean (named for Martinique’s volcano). Using the word Pelean, he was referring to the violent, explosive imagery that characterized his earlier work, from the late 1930s through the 1950s. This explosiveness is evident in fresh translations of two classic texts in their original editions: Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition and The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

The period from 1941 to 1948 marked Césaire’s closest association with the Paris surrealists, evident in the collections Miraculous Weapons (1946) and Solar Throat Slashed (1948). His voice was mystifying to American readers, who were used to the style of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Césaire’s treatment of the subject of lynching, for example, elicited no critical response. His poem on the brutal killing of young Emmett Till, “Message sur l’état de l’Union” (State of the Union Address), was published in the Paris journal Présence Africaine (1956) before being collected in Ferrements (Ferraments, 1960). It met the same fate, seemingly falling on deaf ears.

The full flower of Césaire’s heroic vision of negritude is to be found in his lyrical oratorio Et les chiens se taisaient (And the Dogs Were Silent), first published in English in 1990. Similarly, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land captures the fireworks and passion of Césaire’s earlier work.

During the 1960s, Césaire turned to theatre, discarding the idea of Negritude for black militancy. Both La Tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe), a drama of decolonization in 19th century Haiti, and Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo), the story of the 1960 Congo rebellion, question fate of “black power,” depicting the movement as forever doomed to fail. The condemnation of the United States and the United Nations for complicity in the death of Patrice Lumumba in Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1965) did not elicit much sympathy from either black or white America. Nor did Césaire’s preference for Malcolm X over Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Une Tempête (A Tempest, 1969), written in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. King, improved the playwright’s standing in the eyes of the African-American establishment. The elegiac tone of Césaire’s final collection of verse, Moi, laminaire (I, laminar, 1982), marked a critical engagement with the hero of Negritude.

Césaire was a recipient of the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the second winner in its history. He served as Mayor of Fort-de-France, representing the Communist Party. He later quit the party to establish the Martinique Independent Revolution Party. He was deeply involved in the struggle for French West Indian rights and served as the deputy to the French National Assembly. He retired from politics in 1993. In his art, he explored the paradox of black identity under French colonial rule. Césaire died on April 17, 2008, in Martinique.

Praise for The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
“This book re-presents one of the most significant of all pieces of postcolonial writing in its original version. The scholarship is impeccable; the result of two careers dedicated to Césaire.”
 —Martin Munro, author of Shaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre

“A remarkable and essential contribution to the scholarship on Aimé Césaire, unquestionably the most important and influential black poet to have written in French. This is the first time that non-specialists will have access to the original published version of this monument of francophone letters, making it one of the most important publications in francophone studies of recent date. Arnold’s introduction argues compellingly for the singularity and importance of this edition in distinction to the familiar 1956 version.”
 —Nick Nesbitt, author of Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature

About the book
Aimé Césaire’s masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire’s quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire’s work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, here in French and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.
Read an excerpt here.  

Praise for Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition
For poets, Solar Throat Slashed may well ignite new poetry and will surely complicate and enlarge our sense of Césaire’s greatness.”
—Adrienne Rich, author of Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

“Not only do Eshleman and Arnold give us excellent translations of Césaire’s at times syntactically knotty, etymologically abstruse, and semantically bedeviling verse; they also contextualize the poems—with an introduction by Arnold and endnotes by Eshleman—with crucial historical information and lucid discussions of the complexities of the poems’ language.”
 —Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism

About the book
Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed), Aimé Césaire’s most explosive collection of poetry, is now available in English for the first time. Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with an African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. The original 1948 French edition of Soleil cou coupé has a dense magico-religious frame of reference. In the late 1950s, Césaire was increasingly politically focused and seeking a wider audience, when he, in effect, gelded the 1948 text—eliminating 31 of the 72 poems, and editing another 29. Until now, only the revised 1961 edition, called Cadastre, has been translated. The revised text lacks the radical originality of Soleil cou coupé. This Wesleyan edition presents all the original poems en face with the new English translations. Includes an introduction by A. James Arnold and notes by Clayton Eshleman.

About the Translators
A. James Arnold is an emeritus professor of French at the University of Virginia. He is the lead editor of Césaire’s complete literary works in French (in progress) and author of Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire.
Clayton Eshleman is a professor emeritus at Eastern Michigan University and the foremost American translator of Aimé Césaire. He has published over forty books during his long career, including his own poetry, nonfiction, and translations of such authors as César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, and others. His honors include a National Book Award in Translation and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.

 

“Making Freedom” finds wide exposure

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Wesleyan UP’s book Making Freedom: The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith is finding its way into more libraries across Connecticut. 850 copies of the book will be donated to libraries statewide, thanks to co-author Chandler Saint and congresswoman Rosa DeLauro. The distribution project was announced  by five members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, at a press conference held at the state Capitol earlier this week.

Read more about the book here. View a video of an announcement of the project to distribute the book here. Read an article from The Day newspaper here.

 

Wesleyan UP Influence Map

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Please enjoy our interactive Influence Map, highlighting our press’s international scope. Click here to learn more about the map.

Remembering Janet Collins

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Click here to view Time Out New York‘s slide show of the 92nd Street Y’s celebration of Janet Collins. To learn more about this phenomenal woman, check out her biography, Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins here.