Everybody's Protest Novel

Thursday 11th March | 5:30-7pm GMT | Zoom 

In this session we will consider the protest novel as a genre, beginning with Baldwin’s thoughts from his essay ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, published in Notes of a Native Son in 1955. In this essay, he examines the flaws in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, arguing that it adopts an overly simplistic view of complex racial issues. He then goes on to argue that this is also true of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son. This essay, along with another essay in that same collection (‘Many Thousands Gone’) were partly responsible for a rift between Baldwin and Wright which continued until Wright’s death.  

Alongside ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, we will then read an essay by Richard Wright, ‘How Bigger Was Born’, which looks at the motivations behind his writing of Native Son. We will consider whether Baldwin’s comments on the novel seem justified in light of this, and what a successful protest novel might look like.  

There is no expectation that you will be familiar with Native Son or Uncle Tom’s Cabin to attend the session, and we look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at the meeting on Thursday 11th March. The meeting is being held over Zoom so please email en17jog@leeds.ac.uk for the link to the session. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Robinson session 3: Robinson and the Decolonial

Thursday 29th February November | 5:30 – 7:00pm | The Alumni Room (School of English) We are happy to announce interdisciplinary reading group Quilting Points will return after a short break. Following our readings of  Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition  last term, we will begin this year by reading two short essays in which Robinson develops the ideas of that book in relation to thinking about the legacy of decolonial struggles on the African continent. In ' The appropriation of Fanon ', Robinson takes issue with what he sees as postcolonial theory's depoliticized conception of Fanon, and opens this up into a critique of the "native bourgeoisie", which he then develops in ' In Search of a Pan-African Commonwealth ', into thinking through the association between Pan-Africanism and the form of the Nation-State.  Everyone (at whatever level of study & whether enrolled at the University or not)  is welcome, and no prior familiarity w
Read more

CFP | Quilting Points 2024: Racial Capitalism and Cultural Resistance

  Quilting Points Call for Papers     CFP | Quilting Points 202 4 :    Racial Capitalism and Cultural Resistance     01 st Ma y 2024    Call for Papers – PGR-led symposium   Deadline: 15th December     Abstracts: 250 -words    The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures that emerged from capitalism (2)   Cedric Robinson – Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (2021)   Originally published in 1983, Cedric Robinson’s work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition has proved critical in thinking through the relationship between race and capitalism in a global context . It has experienced a renewed wave of interest over the last decade because of the purchase that some of his concepts such as ‘racial capitalism’ and the ‘Black Radical Tradition
Read more

Sylvia Wynter and The Tempest: 'Beyond Miranda's Meanings'

Image
Thursday 18 May | 5:30 - 7:00pm | Meeting Room G01 Written as an afterword to Out of the Kumbla (1994), the first edited collection of critical essays on Caribbean women’s literature, ' Beyond Miranda's Meaning: Un/silencing the "Demonic Ground" of Caliban's "Woman" ' analyses the ways in which race complicates gender, taking a discussion of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a point of departure. According to Sylvia Wynter, this play not only posits Caliban as ‘the irrational native subject’ but in doing so also relegates 'Caliban’s "woman"' to a space of non-being. As such, the play reenacts the founding structure of the onto-epistemic order of Western Man. Analysing the function of the “ontological absence” of the Black female subject position, it is in this essay that Wynter coins the term “demonic ground”, which has since been taken up by various scholars in different ways, most notably by Katherine McKittrick. As always this sessio
Read more