Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)
Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a writer, educator, and social activist born in New Orleans to mixed-race parents. Her African American, Anglo, Native American, and Creole heritage contributed to her complex understandings of gender, race, and ethnicity, subjects she often wrote about. Her first book, Violets and Other Tales (1895), was published when she was just 20. Later that year she published The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Short Stories. During her career, she wrote four novels, two volumes of oratory, dramas, newspaper columns, two collections of essays, poetry, short stories, and reviews, many of which drew on her extensive knowledge of Creole culture. Dunbar-Nelson was among the major voices of the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the few female African-American diarists of the early 20th century, she portrayed the complicated reality of African-American women and intellectuals, addressing topics such as racism, oppression, family, work, and sexuality.
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Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow by
A New York Times Notable Book of 2002! On February 10, 1906, Alice Ruth Moore, estranged wife of renowned early twentieth-century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, boarded a streetcar, settled comfortably into her seat, and opened her newspaper to learn of her husband's death the day before. Paul Laurence Dunbar, son of former slaves, whom Frederick Douglass had dubbed "the most promising young colored man in America," was dead from tuberculosis at the age of 33. Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow traces the tempestuous romance of America's most noted African-American literary couple. Drawing on a variety of love letters, diaries, journals, and autobiographies, Eleanor Alexander vividly recounts Dunbar's and Moore's tumultuous affair, from a courtship conducted almost entirely through letters and an elopement brought on by Dunbar's brutal, drunken rape of Moore, through their passionate marriage and its eventual violent dissolution in 1902. Moore, once having left Dunbar, rejected his every entreaty to return to him, responding to his many letters only once, with a blunt, one-word telegram ("No"). This is a remarkable story of tragic romance among African-American elites struggling to define themselves and their relationships within the context of post-slavery America. As such, it provides a timely examination of the ways in which cultural ideology and politics shape and complicate conceptions of romantic love.
Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories by
Race and Culture in New Orleans Storiesposits that the Crescent City and the surrounding Louisiana bayous were a logical setting for the literary exploration of crucial social problems in America. Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories is a study of four volumes of interrelated short stories set in New Orleans and the surrounding Louisiana bayous: Kate Chopin's Bayou Folk; George Washington Cable's Old Creole Days; Grace King's Balcony Stories; and Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. James Nagel argues that the conflicts and themes in these stories cannot be understood without a knowledge of the unique historical context of the founding of Louisiana, its four decades of rule by the Spanish, the Louisiana Purchase and the resulting cultural transformations across the region, Napoleonic law, the Code Noir, the pla#65533;age tradition, the immigration of various ethnic and natural groups into the city, and the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction. All of these historical factors energize and enrich the fiction of this important region. The literary context of these volumes is also central to understanding their place in literary history. They are short-story cycles--collections of short fiction that contain unifying settings, recurring characters or character types, and central themes and motifs. They are also examples of the "local color" tradition in fiction, a movement that has been much misunderstood. Nagel maintains that regional literature was meant to be the highest form of American writing, not the lowest, and its objective was to capture the locations, folkways, values, dialects, conflicts, and ways of life in the various regions of the country in order to show that the lives of common citizens were sufficiently important to be the subject of serious literature. Finally, Nagel shows that New Orleans provided a profoundly rich and complex setting for the literary exploration of some of the most crucial social problems in America, including racial stratification, social caste, economic exploitation, and gender roles, all of which were undergoing rapid transformation at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana's Free People of Color by
The word Creole evokes a richness rivaled only by the term's widespread misunderstanding. Now both aspects of this unique people and culture are given thorough, illuminating scrutiny in Creole, a comprehensive, multidisciplinary history of Louisiana's Creole population. Written by scholars, many of Creole descent, the volume wrangles with the stuff of legend and conjecture while fostering an appreciation for the Creole contribution to the American mosaic. The collection opens with a historically relevant perspective found in Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson's 1916 piece "People of Color of Louisiana" and continues with contemporary writings: Joan M. Martin on the history of quadroon balls; Michel Fabre and Creole expatriates in France; Barbara Rosendale Duggal with a debiased view of Marie Laveau; Fehintola Mosadomi and the downtrodden roots of Creole grammar; Anthony G. Barthelemy on skin color and racism as an American legacy; Caroline Senter on Reconstruction poets of political vision; and much more. Violet Harrington Bryan, Lester Sullivan, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Sybil Kein, Mary Gehman, Arthi A. Anthony, and Mary L. Morton offer excellent commentary on topics that range from the lifestyles of free women of color in the nineteenth century to the Afro-Caribbean links to Creole cooking. By exploring the vibrant yet marginalized culture of the Creole people across time, Creole goes far in diminishing past and present stereotypes of this exuberant segment of our society. A study that necessarily embraces issues of gender, race and color, class, and nationalism, it speaks to the tensions of an increasingly ethnically mixed mainstream America.
The goodness of St. Rocque and other stories by
E-book available via Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes by
From the earliest mystery story by an African American to new fiction by modern mainstream authors, this eclectic, rich, and immensely entertaining collection holds multiple delights for a wide and varied audience. A fascinating guide to black mystery fiction and its subgenres.--Emerge magazine.
American Women Civil Rights Activists by
Ranging from such pioneers as Elizabeth Blackwell, Mary L. Bonney, Kate Barnard, Mariana Bracetti, and Amelia Stone Quinton, to contemporary figures such as Iola M. Pohocsucut Hayden, Rosa Parks, Angela Davis, and Shirley Chisholm, these 68 women have worked passionately for civil rights in the United States. The issues that they have championed have been as varied as the women themselves: African Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, children, lesbians and gays, adoptees, older adults, differently-abled persons, prisoners, education, political reform, health issues and many others. Many have been active in women's rights and suffrage issues. A short biographical sketch of each woman is provided, listing place of birth, schools, important events and achievements, children, parents, siblings and individuals who had a significant influence on her work. The second part of each entry is an extensive bibliography of works by and about the activist. Included are print and nonprint sources, as well as dissertations, theses, manuscript materials and personal papers. The work is thoroughly indexed.