Olivia Ward Bush-Banks and New Negro Indigeneity

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2022-02-01 23:19Z by Steven

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks and New Negro Indigeneity

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 45, Issue 3, Fall 2020
pages 104–128
Published: 03 July 2020
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlaa033

DeLisa D. Hawkes, Assistant Professor of English
University of Texas, El Paso

Among New Negro Renaissance greats such as Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Wallace Thurman, early twentieth-century African American newspapers referred to the Afro-Montauk Olivia Ward Bush-Banks as “the grand dame of the literati” (Byrd A8).1 Her poetry and plays often feature representations of African American and Native American life and speculate on the ways these groups’ interactions with each other influenced cultural and racial identity formation. The few scholars that remember her name today might argue that her earlier works reflect on her African-Native American heritage, while her later works focus exclusively on her African American culture (Grant).2 However, Bush-Banks’s writings on self- and imposed identities, spanning from the 1890s to the 1940s, challenge ideas about indigeneity, race, and…

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“My Uncle’s Cousin’s Great-Grandma Were a Cherokee” and I am Descended from an Ashanti King: The American Blood Idiom in the Simple Stories

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2021-12-23 17:10Z by Steven

“My Uncle’s Cousin’s Great-Grandma Were a Cherokee” and I am Descended from an Ashanti King: The American Blood Idiom in the Simple Stories

The Langston Hughes Review
Volume 27, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” at 100: Part One Shane Graham and Chiyuma Elliott (2021)
pages 29-56
DOI: 10.5325/langhughrevi.27.1.0029

DeLisa D. Hawkes, Assistant Professor of English
University of Texas, El Paso

Langston Hughes satirizes America’s obsession with so-called “racial purity” in his stories featuring Jesse B. Semple to shed light upon internalized racism and white American attempts to erase US histories that complicate the standardized black-white color line. In his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1920), the speaker challenges a singular view of the many Black histories that exist through the metaphor of rivers. In his Simple stories, Hughes’s character Jesse B. Semple reflects on American Blackness and blood stereotypes that impact racial identity formation and community building. By invoking the “Indian grandmother” and royal African ancestor tropes, Hughes complicates those compartmentalized identities and US histories implied via the American blood idiom to denote associations with enslavement that bolster notions of intraracial difference and white supremacist ideology. Hughes’s Simple stories culminate his trajectory in establishing African American pride in African ancestry and an anticolonial rejection of racial purity as a legal and social principle that contributes to monolithic conceptions of American Blackness.

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To Fathom His Very Roots: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and “Evidence” of His Literary Racial Passing

Posted in Articles, Biography, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Passing on 2021-06-04 02:29Z by Steven

To Fathom His Very Roots: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and “Evidence” of His Literary Racial Passing

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2021
page 69-80
DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2021.0008

DeLisa D. Hawkes, Assistant Professor of English
University of Texas, El Paso

During the latter part of the long nineteenth century, actor and author Sylvester Clark “Chief Buffalo Child” Long Lance completely discarded his African American ancestry to assert a composite Native American identity. He did so in hopes of escaping anti-Black violence. His writings suggest that he believed that performing the racialized stereotype of the “noble savage” would better position him to achieve inclusion in US society, which was otherwise denied to him in his legal “colored” (read: Black) racial identity. His complex and problematic approach to his ancestry and racial identity invites scholars to critically consider how some authors simultaneously challenged yet adhered to social expectations regarding racial identification when reflecting on their personal lives and asserting their racial identities in literature. Long Lance’s life and writings invite scholars to question what counts as “evidence” to prove so-called racial passing when authors or their characters reflect on certain aspects of their ancestry and racial identity. In this essay, I examine the complexities of racial passing in nineteenth and twentieth century literatures with attention to Long Lance’s unique perspective of his racial identity and shows how he used literary and legal racial passing to challenge racial binarism.

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