Local Americanists Works-in-Progress Series: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus
Local Americanists Works-in-Progress Series: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus
Please join us for a Local Americanists Works-in-Progress event featuring Associate Professor Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus of the University of Southern California, who will discuss her paper "The New Jack Renaissance: Black Literary and Cultural Production and the Institutionalization of African American Literary Studies."
If you are interested in attending, please contact Bob Levine or Edlie Wong for the link and for the draft essay.
Description:
The 1990s were to African American literary, cultural, and scholarly production what the 1920s and 30s were to the Harlem Renaissance: a time of immense artistic and intellectual flourishing. If the concept of the “New Negro” embodied the ethos of the Harlem Renaissance, then the 1990s equivalent was the “New Jack Swing.” A term coined by Barry Michael Cooper, the New Jack Swing refers to the fusion of rap/hip-hop with R&B. More than just a genre of music, the New Jack Swing was a whole mood and vibe that was as much about musical innovation as it was about the totality of Black creative expression and collective identity in America. It was also a part of a much broader aesthetic-political project that coincided with the growing popularity and commodification of Black culture and the rise of Black popular fiction and African American literary studies. This paper maintains that engaging this kind of historical and contextual periodization is key to understanding African American literature as a dynamic and ongoing aesthetic-political project that takes up a diverse set of subjects and themes, encompasses a variety of genres and formats, and is always in a state of transition.
About the Speaker:
I’m a Southern California native, born in Duarte and raised in Monrovia, and I research and teach classes in African American literature and culture.
I’m currently working on a new book entitled “Fly Girl in the Academy,” a memoir and study of contemporary African American literature. In this collection of essays, I use autocritography as a means of illuminating my experiences as a Black woman in academia and African American writing after the Civil Rights era. I posit that this merger of personal narrative and literary criticism can open up new ways to read and write about literature that may resonate with a broader audience and attract more students, especially Black ones, to literary studies in an era of STEM and plummeting humanities enrollments.
My first book, Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel (LSU Press, 2020), which won the SAMLA Studies Book Award and received Honorable Mention for the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, focuses on literary production during the nadir, 1877-1919. I explore how Black and white writers used more speculative forms of realism to reimagine Black representation in fiction as well as the future of race in America. In this way, I challenge facile generalizations about what constitutes a “Black text,” how we define the project of literary realism, and problematic assumptions about literary history and the segregated nature of literary invention.
Please join us for a Local Americanists Works-in-Progress event featuring Associate Professor Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus of the University of Southern California, who will discuss her paper "The New Jack Renaissance: Black Literary and Cultural Production and the Institutionalization of African American Literary Studies."
If you are interested in attending, please contact Bob Levine or Edlie Wong for the link and for the draft essay.
Description:
The 1990s were to African American literary, cultural, and scholarly production what the 1920s and 30s were to the Harlem Renaissance: a time of immense artistic and intellectual flourishing. If the concept of the “New Negro” embodied the ethos of the Harlem Renaissance, then the 1990s equivalent was the “New Jack Swing.” A term coined by Barry Michael Cooper, the New Jack Swing refers to the fusion of rap/hip-hop with R&B. More than just a genre of music, the New Jack Swing was a whole mood and vibe that was as much about musical innovation as it was about the totality of Black creative expression and collective identity in America. It was also a part of a much broader aesthetic-political project that coincided with the growing popularity and commodification of Black culture and the rise of Black popular fiction and African American literary studies. This paper maintains that engaging this kind of historical and contextual periodization is key to understanding African American literature as a dynamic and ongoing aesthetic-political project that takes up a diverse set of subjects and themes, encompasses a variety of genres and formats, and is always in a state of transition.
About the Speaker:
I’m a Southern California native, born in Duarte and raised in Monrovia, and I research and teach classes in African American literature and culture.
I’m currently working on a new book entitled “Fly Girl in the Academy,” a memoir and study of contemporary African American literature. In this collection of essays, I use autocritography as a means of illuminating my experiences as a Black woman in academia and African American writing after the Civil Rights era. I posit that this merger of personal narrative and literary criticism can open up new ways to read and write about literature that may resonate with a broader audience and attract more students, especially Black ones, to literary studies in an era of STEM and plummeting humanities enrollments.
My first book, Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel (LSU Press, 2020), which won the SAMLA Studies Book Award and received Honorable Mention for the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, focuses on literary production during the nadir, 1877-1919. I explore how Black and white writers used more speculative forms of realism to reimagine Black representation in fiction as well as the future of race in America. In this way, I challenge facile generalizations about what constitutes a “Black text,” how we define the project of literary realism, and problematic assumptions about literary history and the segregated nature of literary invention.
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To attend, please contact Bob Levine or Edlie Wong.