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The History of Literature
662 Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction - Black Women Writing Under Segregation (with Eve Dunbar) | My Last Book with Deni Kasa
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Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
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Jack Wilson
We begin today with a quote from the author of a new book, Monstrous Work and Radical Black Women Writing Under Segregation. Quote the original title for this book was simply Monstrous Work because at the time I began the project, I needed to think into the boldness, endangerment, loss and possibility of what it might mean to be a black woman who refuses to center and do the work of whiteness. What happens to the black woman who refuses the potential upward mobility, financial, professional, social offered by liberal inclusion? It felt monstrous to imagine, and so I began looking for monstrousness in the works I read. That's author Eve Dunbar. We'll talk to her about this monstrousness and what she found in the works that she read by black women authors from the mid 20th century. Today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast, everyone. I am Jack Wilson. Are you reading the Dubliners? That's my annual holiday tradition, as you may recall. One story a day until reaching the dead on Xmas Eve. Also, I recommend the movie that John Huston directed, Anjelica Huston is in it. It's a very quick movie and it might be my favorite Christmas movie. Besides It's a Wonderful Life. Check out the Dead. It's a dying director's ode to filmmaking, Ireland, communal spirit and life itself. Speaking of Christmas movies, I watched the bells of St. Mary's the other day for the first time. Leo Makary directed that one. Bing Crosby's in it, and I can recommend it just on the basis of one thing. Ingrid Bergman, who is as enjoyable as ever. I'll watch anything that she's in. But the real takeaway I had from that movie is this one, a little bit tangential. Stick with me. I recently rewatched the Godfather parts one and two with my boys. Now this comes in Godfather one where Michael is still trying to be outside the family. And the night of the assassination attempt on his father, Marlon Brando Vito Corleone, where Fredo gets all excited and drops the gun. You remember this part. This is. Well, here's a detail I never fully appreciated before. Michael and Kay come out of the movies where they've just seen the Bells of St. Mary's now, if you watch the Bells of St. Mary's and think about Michael Corleone and how this fits into his life at this point, he's a soldier. A soldier in the conventional, The World War II meaning of the word. Not a soldier in the Mafia, but an actual soldier. An Italian American, yes, to be sure. And he's from a compromised family, but he is someone who's trying to stay out of that world. He can tell his girlfriend, that's my family, that's not me. And really believe it in his heart. And I'm sure when he watched this movie, The Bells of St. Mary's at Radio City Music hall, it's all about some nuns trying to save their school and persuade a hard hearted businessman to donate a a building to them. By the way, that hard hearted businessman is played by the same guy who played Clarence the angel in It's a Wonderful Life. Henry Travers. Or is it Harry Travers? He's playing a bit of a, playing a bit against type here. The hard hearted businessman. Anyway, I'm sure Michael thought, and that Michael Corleone thought as he watched that movie. I can do good in the world. I can be generous and charitable. I can be as pure of heart as Ingrid Bergman and Bing Crosby, who plays Father O'Malley who comes to help the school and to help Ingrid Bergman too, as she's diagnosed with tuberculosis and doesn't know it, he must be thinking, I can be good. It's in me to be good. Then all that changes. That night, within minutes of coming out of that movie theater, when the news reaches him and he goes down the path toward becoming one of the great anti heroes in American cinema. The guy who can preside over the most ruthless of killings because it fits into the distorted moral code of the Mafia. It's almost comical that Coppola put that movie in there on that night on that Radio City Music hall banner. Michael the Marquis, I guess I should say. Michael, in fact is late responding to his father's near death experience because he and Kay have been inside that movie theater at Radio City Music hall, outside the event that will pull Michael into the family's dark side. And inside he's watching Bing Crosby croon his way to a tearjerker ending where the forces of faith, hope and charity conquer even the coldest of hearts. Okay, a few notes of thank you for this holiday season. Thank you to all who have donated to me via the historyofliterature.com donatepage. I truly appreciate it. And to all of our monthly donors@patreon.com literature you have warmed my heart. And a thank you to all who have signed up to help me with my exciting new book project. I swear these things are going to come out in 2025 if I have to move some publisher mountains to make it happen. My apologies that I haven't yet responded to all of the potential helpers. I'm working on it. My emailing has fallen behind. How many times have I said that? Oh, the curse of being a podcaster. But hopefully the holidays will give me a chance to catch up with some correspondence. And finally today before our main event, let's do a listener email. Here's a message from listener Lila hello. I'm a full time graduate student in English Literature and it has been challenging since I came to the US about three months ago from Korea. Every time I get discouraged by not being able to understand the spirit of writings that seem so foreign at times or to write something the HOL podcast has been my dear company. Now that I appreciate even more. After 5 ish years of listening to the podcast on and off, I wanted to thank especially the frequent guest Mike Palindrome. Mr. Palindrome, I admire the eyes you have in literature. Thank you. And to the host, Mr. Wilson, thank you for loving literature, sharing and keeping on. I also wanted to let you know that I started my own project of reading A Dance to the Music of Time after listening to the Literary Guilty Pleasures episode. I ordered the first volume a few nights ago and I'm very excited waiting for the book. It's not my first time buying a book after listening to you guys conversing on literature. By the way, and I thank you for it. I hope you have a great holiday. It's a beautiful December in California. Well Lila, thank you for that very kind message. Good luck to you in California this December and beyond two of course. And good luck to you with your forays into English literature. Do not be afraid of not understanding the spirit of writings. That only means there are more pleasures there waiting for you eventually and more opportunities to grow. I've read enough bad books to know that easy comprehension does not always equate to a satisfying experience. It's the richness that counts, the literature that's uneasy or that makes us uneasy that can make us stretch the most. And it's the stretching that makes it all worthwhile. I admire your devotion to literature in a foreign language, and I hope you continue to find it rewarding. As you continue on your path, Mike and I will be standing by cheering you along. Okay. Speaking of challenging readings and interpretations that stretch you out, Eve Dunbar has taken a kind of radical approach to rethinking black women writers in the 20th century. We will hear about that after this. Gabriel.
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Eve Dunbar
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Eve Dunbar
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Eve Dunbar
Good to have you back. Come on, we've got a show to do.
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Jack Wilson
Paris and Nicole, the Encore, a three.
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Host
Okay. Joining me now is Eve Dunbar, the Jean Webster professor of English at Vassar College. She's the author of Black Regions of the African American Writers, between the Nation and the World and co editor of African American literature in transition, 1930-1940. She's here today to discuss her new book, Monstrous Work and Radical Please Black Women Writing Under Segregation. Eve Dunbar, welcome to the History of Literature.
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Eve Dunbar
Oh, thank you so much for inviting me and talking with me.
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Host
So you start the book with the story of your grandparents and their journeys. Who were they and what kind of.
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Jack Wilson
Lives did they live?
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Eve Dunbar
Oh, that's a tough question in the sense of what kind of lives that they live. I think they lived good lives. Right. That's sort of where I began my own work, which is to say my grandfather is from New Hampshire and my grandmother was from South Carolina and she grew up down there with her family. And we that portion of my family has been in South Carolina since enslavement. So I grew up with kind of stories of that time and you know, her remembering her own grandmother. But during the war, the Second World War, my grandfather was stationed with the segregated army in South Carolina, and that's where he met my grandmother and they kind of got married. And after the war was over or after he finished serving, they moved to New Hampshire. And, and I come from a working class Blue collar family. So both of my grandparents never went to college on both sides of my family. And they worked as factory workers. My grandfather worked in a tannery in New Hampshire and my grandmother worked at various kind of small mechanical. She worked as a screen printer at a textile factory for a bit. And so that's how they raised their family. They had four children. And you know, this is a period in time in the mid century where you could, you know, it's not middle class, but you could raise a family and send some of those kids to college as a blue collar worker. I think we're familiar with Pullman Porter story, those folks, those men and women who worked on the Pullman cars and ushered themselves and their children into the middle class. So that's a story, I think that is common particularly among mid century African American families. And I think my family, though kind of differently located geographically in the kind of northern northeast, falls into that. But what I think is quite interesting and what I want to get at in the book, and starting with that autobiographical example, is that that kind of what looks like a good life is tenuous always for African Americans in this country because it is not ever fortified completely by the state. And so thinking about that. Right. How do people fall into the middle class, out of the middle class? What is the tenuous nature of stability for many African American families throughout the mid to late 20th century and into the 21st century?
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Host
It's a very 20th century story. And also, I guess, how they dealt with it, how they coped or how they reacted to these promises of the American dream and then the disappointments that sometimes followed.
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Eve Dunbar
Yeah, I mean, I think all you can do is keep working and hope that the roots that you put down kind of flourish. I think that's kind of part of the American way and also the African American way. There are so many external forces working against you in this country that there is a kind of resilience. Right. And that's what I would say kind of is at the core of monstrous work, radical satisfaction. This idea of what does black resilience look like in the face of kind of an anti black nation.
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Host
Right. So we've touched on a few of these things now, but I wanted to sort of lay down the context of the 1930s to the 1950s and what black American writers were facing during this period. Maybe before we talk about the war and Brown vs Board of Education and some of those milestones, maybe we should just talk about what writers were facing, were they being published and what publication options did they have Were there audiences for their work, who were they writing for, and that kind of thing.
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Eve Dunbar
I think those questions of audience are always difficult for African American writers writing. And so the audience is always going to be mixed. It's historically been a dual audience for black writers. Since Wheatley publishes poems on various subjects, that's probably a white audience, not just because of literacy, but because mainstream publishing, if you can get mainstream publishing. And so to kind of place these writers within a literary history. The writers that I'm writing about come after the Harlem Renaissance, which is an important moment, or the new Negro movement, which is an important moment in literary history, African American literary history, because it is a kind of watershed or it's perceived to be a watershed moment for black writers in that it is one of the first times that a large group of black writers are able to access mainstream publishing in the form of presses and magazines. Right. And literary magazines and get their stories beyond slave narrative. Right. Which historically was the form that African American writers were able to access in the 19th century. Of course, there's novels in the 19th century, but what comes in the Harlem Renaissance is this kind of greater access to the publishing world, more eyes on black writing and the stories that black writers have to tell. And so they come after that, right? So there's the Renaissance, and then there's the Great Depression. And that stymies not the production, not black literary production, but the avenues and the ways in which black writers get their work out. And so many of the writers of the mid century coming out of the Harlem Renaissance and writing into that Depression era are going to access their audience through federal programs, right. That were put into place and then kind of later than their white counterparts. But these black writers and artists are able to access federal monies and federal positions through the wpa, let's say. So a lot of the writers are kind of cultivating themselves in this writing moment. It's much more socialist than the previous generation, the Harlem Renaissance. It's much more focused on critique. It's, you know, I'm speaking really broadly now. And so they're coming out of that. And it's why you have someone like in the mid century, the kind of premier writer, Richard Wright, comes out of this moment and ushers in a new era of African American writing.
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Host
Did it seem to them that they had a kind of artistic or political freedom, or did it seem to them like they were still bumping up against constraints, either of the publishing world or audience expectations or anything that was kind of dictating how free they were in Terms of saying what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it.
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Eve Dunbar
I mean, that's always the constraint for, you know, what do white readers, white publishers, want to read and hear? And I think someone like, you know, I think we always talk about Richard Wright because a book like Native Son, kind of the first bestseller or, you know, the Book of the Month club pick, that sort of makes the impact of black literature visible again, to mainstream American readership, white readership. And so what he does with that book is kind of usher in the expectation of social realism, of naturalism, of a kind of urban realism for African American writing. So I think the constraint for a lot of writers of the period who want to be published is kind of breaking free of the norms of the type of natural social realism, if you will, urban realism that Wright ushers in. So, you know, I write about Ann Petry, and she, with a book like the street, is perceived as a counterpart to Wright's native son. So Wright's bigger. Her character Ludy, is his counterpart or perceived to be. But I think what you find when you start reading the literature is even if, you know, the publishing world imagines this is what black literature looks like, and this is what black literature should do, the writers are always pushing the boundaries within their text, are always innovating. So I think that part of what you see as a tension between producing something that'll be published that is recognizable to the publishing world, and something that actually speaks to the concerns that you have as a writer. And I think that that is a tension kind of throughout history. Right. Throughout literary history, particularly for black writers.
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Host
Mm. And at this moment in particular, there is this movement toward integration. And to remind listeners, Brown versus Board of Education, which desegregated the schools, was in May of 1954. But throughout that period and with World War II and the men who were coming home from the war and so on, there was just this in the atmosphere. It seems like it would be hard to be a black writer and not be taking into account this kind of political environment where integration is being discussed and is in the air. And maybe we could talk about Zora Neale Hurston's response to Brown versus Board and how her response was interpreted and maybe misinterpreted to just sort of lay some of the arguments and counter arguments onto the table.
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Eve Dunbar
Yeah. So about a year after Brown, so in 1955, she writes a letter to the editor of the Orlando Sentinel, which is. You know, she's in Florida, so it's kind of her local magazine where she's basically coming out against the ruling. And I think that just when I say that, it makes her sound retrograde and it makes her sound like a tool, if you will. And you know, in kind of going through her papers in the archives, what you notice is she receives a lot of mail or a number of pieces of mail from white citizens councils, other groups that we might call white supremacist groups who are like, yeah, read your piece. We'd love to republish it in our newsletter. You're spot on. No integration, never.
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Host
Right, right, right.
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Eve Dunbar
So that's one interpretation that, that what she's arguing for is this, the separation of the races into perpetuity. And I think if you read more closely what she's saying, she's saying, and I think it gets misinterpreted by of course, this white supremacist, but also by the black mainstream. And after her death, it continues to be misunderstood. What she's really saying is, you know, I do not believe that this particular case is a case that is at all interested in the health and well being of black people. The presumption that somehow proximity is to white people is going to make black people better. Right. Or that black children are so under educated by their black teachers. Right. That somehow just access to white people is going to improve their lives. I don't buy it. Right. And so in the letter she kind of walks through her argument. She's also like a rabid anti communist. So she also has some of that too where she's like, you know, this is just a ploy of the kind of communist state to undermine us. So you have to kind of weed through that. But at the core of her argument is that we have to be really mindful and in fact, integration. Right. That's not the solve necessarily for Americans problems, racism, but in fact what we need is equal access to the money. Really what she's saying is if you were to invest in black schools and in black students, then these black students would perform just as well as white students. It's not putting them into white situations, but giving them the resources that you give white students. And I think this is borne out over the 20th and into the 21st century with kind of public education as a whole. The kind of gutting of public education, the gutting of public education for like the resources for poorer students, for urban students, for rural students. Right. The ways in which we underfund and thus undereducate. She already sees that. Right. And so she's not impressed by brown and in Fact is calling us to sort of think really critically about what it's offering.
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Host
Okay. There is more that I want to ask you about that, but let's take a quick break and then we'll come back. And I want to get some more of your terms and concepts out there so we understand what we're talking. Okay, we're back. So, Eve, let's start with your title, I guess. What do you mean by monstrous Work?
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Eve Dunbar
So that is a concept that I'm kind of developing that revolves around the understanding that anytime you work against the state, you are kind of marginalized or represented as kind of monstrous, as somehow not human. These are ideas that I'm working through in the book that somehow the work that black women in particular do against the state is always monstrous work. And trying to retool that idea of the monstrous. Right as not pejorative, but as positive. Right. So monstrous work is work that is done, that doesn't actually produce the conditions that would promise upward mobility, that would promise integration, that would promise any of the sort of social, political, cultural benefits that working for the state or working for whiteness or working towards productivity in that kind of normative way are supposed to produce. Again, I think about monstrous work as really productive work for black people and black women in particular.
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Host
Hurston is a great example of this. Right. Because here she is, I think America, certainly white America, at the time of brown versus Board, was giving itself this huge pat on the back.
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Eve Dunbar
Yeah.
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Host
And to be a black woman who, I think your phrase is, who refuses to center and do the work of whiteness, it felt monstrous to imagine. And so you were looking for examples of that in the works that you read. And. And that they had something in place of that. Instead of just accepting the assumed good, like integration, they had a kind of emphasis on other kinds of pleasures or other kinds of ways of living that wouldn't be necessarily in the political realm or the, you know, we scored one for the team kind of realm, but something else that they had this sort of daily joy, which I guess is what you call radical satisfaction.
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Eve Dunbar
Yeah. Yeah. I think that thinking about. And, you know, we're taping this the day after the election, and it feels really poignant for me at this moment to be thinking about, okay, another way in which the, you know, if you can't count on the nation to supply you with the very. I mean, with equity, with equality, with liberation, then how do you kind of move forward with your life? Where do you find this sense of completeness, this sense of wholeness, this Sense of, you know. Yeah, joy. How do you foster that in your life? And so in reading writers like Ann Petry, Alice Childress, Dorothy West, Gwendolyn Brooks, when I'm reading them, I'm really reading for a kind of blueprint for feeling, for being complete, for having some kind of sense of wholeness in a world that feels radically unstable and at some level, dishonest. Right. If we go back to what Hurston is saying in her letter to the editor, that there's a dishonesty to what, the national promise for equality. Right. Or civil rights, that it doesn't get at the very foundations of black liberation.
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Host
There's a dishonesty to it. And there's even in a kind of deeper way than just, you know, we're going to hold out this carrot and then we're going to yank it away. But it's sort of baked into the whole project. I mean, that's my understanding of what you meant by do the work of whiteness is that it's basically the way things were set up and the way they still are. Is this idea that black people need to show that they're deserving of inclusion. And coming out of World War II, there was this feeling of, well, geez, they fought in our war, so of course we need to make sure that they live in proper houses or that they're able to go to college or that kind of thing. But it still assumes this white supremacy. And it says, you're clean and you work hard and you're articulate, and you fought as a soldier and served in the military, so you now deserve to be included.
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Eve Dunbar
But that inclusion is never whole or complete. Never. It's always, always already out of reach. Right. And even when you feel like you've grasped it, you know, it can't be guaranteed for a next generation. Right. And I feel like we're living that right now. Right. That none of the things you were promised are guaranteed.
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Jack Wilson
Right.
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Host
But it's also that white people will say, we should treat these people better, but they don't say we're monstrous for treating people like this. You know, we're the ones who have the flaw. The flaw is that before this, you were lazy. Before this, you hadn't proved yourself as being, you know, deserving of inclusion. And what I'm taking from your book and from the writers that I've read from this period is that black people can rightfully say, well, we shouldn't be looking toward white people for examples of morality or perfection or. Or humanity, because you're the ones with this huge moral blind spot, you should be, if anything, looking to us because we've been unencumbered by this past moral stain and this continuing insistence on white supremacy.
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Eve Dunbar
Absolutely. That's incredibly succinct. And I think. Absolutely. What I mean, you know, coming out of this from a black studies tradition, right, you have to presume or, you know, part of that is a presumption and a clarity that the United States is built upon a deep commitment to white supremacy, to anti blackness, to misogyny, to settler colonialism. Like all of these isms, if you will, all of these things are at the core foundation of the nation, Right? It's built into the DNA. And if you understand that, then you can understand that any kind of widening of the umbrella to include doesn't get at the root cause of the umbrella's like faultiness. And so I think, like, yeah, if you're looking to inclusion, simple inclusion, without the kind of wholesale restructuring, eradication in some ways of the system, then it's always going to be faulty. And I think it's very difficult, you know, for us as citizens, for black people, for white people, for any of us to sort of say, okay, like, what will it take to make this place, this country better? And it means giving up a lot. And I think particularly white people historically haven't wanted to give up much. And so, yeah, I think the writers that I'm looking at are saying, okay, if they're not going to give it up, how do we, how do we build something different for ourselves? How do we live in this place differently, Right?
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Host
And maybe Hurston might be saying, you might be willing to give up a desk to a black kid who's going to be bused into the school, but you're not willing to give up, you know, the idea that you're keeping that black kid in a horrible housing situation or in a condition of poverty. But even more than that, you're not willing to give up the idea that your white school, taught by the white teacher, is the best and is the model and should be the model. And so black people should feel grateful for being included in that. And she also had this advantage from her own biography of having grown up where she did, where there was an all black community, and she could kind of, I think, draw upon that memory of there's a different way to do this and a different way to assess the quality of what happens here. But I'm wondering about the other writers. Not everybody was writing about integration, of course, and you're finding this radical Satisfaction. What types of things did you find when you went to look for monstrous work in the writers of this period?
- [36:54]
Eve Dunbar
You know, I think I found a lot of different things. Right. So when I write about the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, we know her best as a poet, but I write about her novella Maud Martha, and that is a really beautiful little counter in some ways, to write Native Son, Right. Same period and same place, you know, Chicago. Right. But it is really about this protagonist Martha's capacity to experience the racism and sexism of her time and find other ways of being happy and whole. And in that book in particular, I'm interested in the way that she relates to animals. Right. And it sort of is reminding me of something you said earlier in terms of, like, why should we look to white people as moral, as ethical, as ideal kind of models for being human? And I think Brooks says, yeah, why should we? What if we were to look at animals? But she's also a realist because she's like, it's not just because there's a line in the book where Maud Martha is about to sort of break down a chicken to cook, and she says, but what if chickens were human? And what if we kind of lived by them, right. And saw them raising their children? So this is. This is the model of integration, right? That. What if. That somehow, if we could just see these people as human, then they would be human. Right. But she ends that little kind of moment of reflection about what it means to be human and what it means to kind of fold people into or fold other beings into that category by eating the chicken. Which is to say, like, it's all good and well to imagine, but if you're not actually going to change your behavior, then what are you doing? Right. So she's interested in the capacity of black women to imagine something in excess of integration as possible as a possibility for being in the world. And that might mean not looking towards kind of these white models. In another chapter I read, there's a playwright, Alice Childress, and I read a set of. She has a book titled One of the Family, which is taken from a newspaper column that she wrote for Paul Robeson's Freedom Paper. Right. Robison is kind of a really incredibly famous actor, singer, just kind of a Renaissance man, if you will, who gets targeted by the state, and ultimately his life and career are ruined because he's a communist. So she's writing for his paper, and she's writing from the perspective of a domestic worker. And what I love about her version of this domestic worker is that she's really bold and she's really insightful and she is politically astute. And she also has all of this understanding about the world in which she lives. Right. Which we often don't think of working class people and domestic workers as being kind of really soundly politically aware. And Childress kind of writes that into the DNA of this character and what this character does is find all of these ways to resist her marginalization, her dehumanization at work and in society at large. And part of the way she does that is through friendship. You know, she's telling these stories to her friend Marge. Her name is Mildred. Mildred is telling stories to her friend Marge about her life. And so this idea that having somebody that listens deeply to you is a way of resisting the kind of larger dehumanization that you experience as a worker, as a woman, as a black person.
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Host
In the U.S. i think that was similar to a criticism that James Baldwin had of Richard Wright in his book that it's almost like one suspects that Richard Wright was concerned about if he painted too rosy a picture of a black community, for example, that it might strike the audience, especially the white audience as well. See, these conditions aren't so bad.
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Eve Dunbar
Right.
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Host
You know, there. It must be a line that they were all walking of. Well, how do I keep from this seeming like everything is all sunshine and rainbows, but also try to kind of value some of these things that people are taking pleasure in or the strong ties of community and things that are genuine positives in the community.
- [42:21]
Eve Dunbar
Yeah. I think that Wright's first collection, Uncle Tom's Children. Right. Is a set of short stories that are incredibly sentimental. He would say they're really amazingly depressing to me, but they capture kind of Southern life or even kind of. Yeah. And the experience of racism and segregation and. And all of that. Profoundly powerful, I think. But he writes that. And ultimately he says he wants to write a book in Native son that won't make bankers daughters cry.
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Host
Right.
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Eve Dunbar
And he does it. He does it with bigger. He makes bigger a really hard character to like. You know, he's terrible to his sister and his mom. He kills. Well, he kills a white girl, but he also kills and rapes a black. His black lover. Yeah. How do you like this guy? But, you know, he's, you know, ultimately he says if you keep. You white people keep doing what you're doing, the world will be filled with biggers. And so, like, that's one way to approach things is, you know, to say, like, you're producing A society that produces this kind of person because you won't let people live. I always think about the scene in Native Son where Bigger and his friend look up in the sky.
- [43:46]
Jack Wilson
The airplane.
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Eve Dunbar
And see the plane.
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Host
Yes.
- [43:49]
Eve Dunbar
And they, they're like, could we, you know, could you be a pil. And his friend is like, you'll never be a pilot. They won't let you. And you know, just the kind of squashing of dreams.
- [43:58]
Host
Right, right.
- [43:59]
Eve Dunbar
It's like constant squashing. And so, yeah, that's one way to do it. Right. And it's powerful and it does, it shakes, it shakes the literary world, that novel. And you know, I always say to friends and students about that book, like, the first two books are amazing. Like, he understands pacing. He's like an amazing writer. Even if you have problems with the book, it's an enjoyable. In this, in that kind of, you know, page turner way, an enjoyable book. There's murder, there's all sorts of stuff.
- [44:34]
Host
Yeah.
- [44:34]
Eve Dunbar
You know, the third book is like a brick wall. That's the politics part. Yeah, there's a way. That's one way. But I, you know, but these other writers, these women in particular are, are going to say, you know, all of that and like, I have friends and I have an imagination. Right. So, and, and I have, I figured out a way to be. And that is, you know, that doesn't discount racism and it doesn't discount misogyny and it doesn't discount all of the, like, problems that I'm up against. But there's also, you know, we're human and we're alive in the world.
- [45:20]
Host
And I also wonder, did you find that, I mean, slavery lasted hundreds of years and Jim Crow lasted another hundred and racism is still with us and whole lives could be spent living in one of these eras or institutions waiting for something that never arrives. I mean, is it fair to say that the writers have an attitude of I can't, I can't know that I'm going to change the world and my life is only so long. I need to focus on the moments and the events that help me build my own self esteem and record my satisfaction?
- [46:00]
Eve Dunbar
I think that there's some of that. I also think that because I'm interested in this case, black women writers, I think that if there's a difference, and I don't, you know, I don't think there's an essential difference, but if there is a difference in the writers that I look at from, let's say, my first book, which I focused on Wright and Baldwin And a writer named Chester Himes and Hurston, but, you know, mostly the big heavy hitters of the mid century men and the women writers that I look at who are writing during the same period, I think that while the male writers, many of them are much more kind of internationally focused, thinking about kind of what it means to resist the nation outside of the nation or through kind of mobility, geographical mobility, the women are saying or looking at kind of a less mobile group of people, a less geographically mobile. This is not to say all black women are bound to where they come from. Obviously, the great migration in, you know, even my own parent family story, like there's movement there, but it's to say, like there is a large group of people who are not going to be serving in the military and moving in the same way because of their gender. And so how do we see their lives as productively radical? And I think that these women writers are kind of interested in that question. How do you build a world for yourself even if you're not able. Willing to leave the country to try to build it? Right. How do you rework the world on the small scale?
- [47:54]
Host
Right. Or if your lot in life is being someone who is doing child rearing and cooking and the domestic living in that kind of a sphere, it might not be in the cards for you to have a sort of adventure. And I'll go try my hand at exile in France or moving to Harlem or things like that. It might be, this is where I am and this is going to be the limits.
- [48:25]
Eve Dunbar
Right. And what are some productive ways that I can make this work? Radical? You know, how can I resist without kind of looking like what we perceive resistance to be, like outright refusal to live in the nation, in the country. Right. Okay. Most people are here. Most people are not going to be exiles. So how do you find meaning and work within the small scale domestic of the home, large scale domestic of the nation? And so kind of moving up and down those two that scale. I'm interested in thinking about the way the writers kind of allow us to think from that kind of very local to much more national and a little bit international as well.
- [49:20]
Host
Okay, so as you mentioned, we are recording this morning, we're just hours from the results of the election in which Kamala Harris was nominated for but did not win, it appears the presidency. Would the writers, the black women writers from this era that you've studied, 1930s to 1950s, have recognized the America in which tens of millions of voters voted for a black woman as their choice to lead them as president, would they view this as progress or do you think they'd take a more skeptical view?
- [49:55]
Eve Dunbar
I think you have to take a skeptical view. I think, I mean, again, this is at some level very similar to the moment that Hurston writes into right there. Is this what looks like progress? Right. But what are the conditions of this progress and what does progress actually mean in a country that refuses to really deal with history, with a path, with the kind of baked in DNA of inequity? And so I think there has to be and I think that the writers that I'm interested in, I would say historically black writers, have to be hopeful and skeptical. So there is hope that, that in the fact that a non white woman was and someone of African descent was the party's, the Democratic Party nominee. But we have the problem of history to attend to. What does that mean in this country? Is that even, you know, I feel like I've been talking with friends all morning about this. Obama was. That was an anomaly in the nation history. That was an amazing anomaly. I don't know. I don't know if it will ever happen again. And I don't know if a woman of color, I just don't know. I'm skeptical. And I think that that skepticism is grounded in kind of a refusal of the nation to deal with its relationship to race, to difference, to women and to elitism even. Right. Like, for all we have to say about Trump, I guess his most recent win is on the backs of kind of working class white people who have historically voted against their own self interest. It's just really like the history's repetition. We can read the now, the present, if we read the past. And I think that all of the writers that I'm interested in reading are hyper aware of that relationship between the present and the past.
- [52:22]
Host
And they would have been aware whether she had won or not. I think they would have seen it for what it is, that it's partially a sign of progress, but also there is much reason to be skeptical about what it actually portends.
- [52:41]
Eve Dunbar
Yeah. And I think like we have the short history of having lived through many of us, Obama's terms, two terms, and to recognize that as a momentous moment, but also to also understand it brought to the forest kind of all of the police violence that we've been watching now for years, over a decade on our phones, you know, police brutality against black people, all of that stuff is part and parcel of the nation too. So you can't just celebrate what looks like progress without tending to, again, history. But also the daily reality of life in the United States for many black people and for many people of color and for women.
- [53:30]
Host
Yeah. The book is called Monstrous Work and Radical Black Women Writing Under Segregation. The author has been our guest, Eve Dunbar. Thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [53:43]
Eve Dunbar
Thank you so much.
- [53:46]
Jack Wilson
And finally today we hear from Denny Casa. After he and I discuss Politics and Grace in Early Modern Literature, I asked him this special question.
- [53:59]
Host
Okay.
- [54:00]
Jack Wilson
I'm joined now by Danny Kassa of the University of Oxford, whose works include the Politics of Grace in Early Modern Literature. Denny, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [54:21]
Denny Casa
Hard, hard, hard question. I think in a way it feels like cheating, but I would say the King James Bible and the reason I say it feels like cheating said this. It just inspired so much of the poetry that I've grown attached to the aspects of the Bible, the metaphors of it are woven into all the poets I'm talking about in the book, but also the poets I've read and taught and thought about. And so there's. It's a text that contains a lot of genres in it, a lot of generative. You know, the Psalms are so important. Right. For Lanier and for other poets in this period that the book of Psalms alone would be enough for me to remember what these poets were doing. And so if I can't have them all, I would have the book that inspired the metaphors that they all use.
- [55:20]
Jack Wilson
Right, right. And we, I, I mean, Ernest Hemingway famously said that it was one of the key books to understand English literature and that he based a lot of.
- [55:31]
Host
His views of prose.
- [55:32]
Jack Wilson
He based on that. And it's very. I could see that where you could read a book like that and feel like all of literature that came after in English, there's kind of a rippling effect and that you could hear the sounds of all of the writers that you've loved that have come afterwards and kind of hear it in that prose.
- [55:57]
Denny Casa
Yes, that's exactly right. It was a text that was heard every Sunday by a very wide cross sectional population. It wasn't just one part of society who could actually read. Even if you couldn't read, you could hear. And so the language of the Bible is important. Setting aside all religious commitments, it's important as something that was very, it was very familiar. Okay. Even if we don't speak about the actual formal theological side of the question. But the reason I say it's a bit like cheating is that often what that kind of question has in mind by the last book, is the last book of literature something that we understand as literature or poetry, as something that is secular and. And that's a very hard one to answer. I would say a novel that was very important for me personally is the Brothers Karamazov. It was not at all what I've researched and that's probably a big plus for me that I want, if it's going to be my last book, to be something that I am not simply researching, but have that the pleasure of the non professional pleasure, if you will, of just enjoying something, of reading something for enjoyment as well. Something that I enjoyed before when I was much younger and not simply or not only something that I've published on.
- [57:22]
Host
Yeah.
- [57:23]
Jack Wilson
Something that has maybe to some sense.
- [57:26]
Host
Exhausted you at some point or you feel like you could use a break from it.
- [57:31]
Jack Wilson
It would be a time to return to a simpler form of reading where when reading didn't have all of the professional trappings associated with it.
- [57:42]
Host
That's right.
- [57:43]
Denny Casa
I'm finding it's a lot of pleasure in returning to literature that I don't know much about and trying to read it for enjoyment or to think about my life and the world at large. I think that there's a really important role for that.
- [58:00]
Host
So.
- [58:01]
Denny Casa
Yes. So there's two answers. The Bible and the Brothers Kaaba's up.
- [58:06]
Jack Wilson
Well, I think like most people have more than one book on their nightstand. We'll let you have two there and you can kind of trade them off and read. Dip into one and then dip into the other. And I think that'll be. That's perfectly allowable. Okay. Danny Casa, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [58:29]
Denny Casa
Thank you very much for having me.
- [58:38]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. King James Bible and Brothers Karamazov. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to listener Lila out there in California where it's probably a lot warmer than I am here in D.C. but that's, that's the benefit of living in paradise, I suppose. And my thanks to Denny Casa for his cameo appearance. And of course to Eve Dunbar. Next week, a two part episode on the Dead provided to you without commercial interruptions. Our Christmas gift to you, dear listeners. Think of it as your Christmas bonus. And then we'll have some Keats from the archives and we'll kick things off. Kick the New Year off with Mike Palindrome and I dreaming some winter Winter dreams. And then a huge new season of the History of Literature podcast with episodes on Sway Sin Far, Librarians Turned Spies, Herman Melville, Edna Ferber, Zora Neale Hurston, Marianne Moore Should I keep going? Dylan Thomas, Thomas Kidd, Russian Poetry, Fernando Pessoa, the Great Gatsby turns 100 race in European Fairy Tales and more. That's just the first couple of months, people. 2025 is coming into focus. I'm Jack Wilson, the chief lens grinder, helping us all focus. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
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Dutch Bros Sponsor
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Host
The idea of Barney is something that.
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Denny Casa
I want to live up to.
- [60:18]
Eve Dunbar
You know I love you, you love me. I call it the Purple Mantra.
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Jack Wilson
Barney taught me how to be a man.
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Eve Dunbar
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