Abstract
One of the twentieth-century writers who followed in the steps of her African American literary foremothers, taking into account not only the content and direction of her artistic project but also the course of her life, was Margaret Walker: poet, novelist, essayist, political activist, and lecturer. In her introduction to Walker’s How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature, Maryemma Graham remarks that Walker’s concerns as a writer share a common ground to those of Ann Plato, Anna Julia Cooper, and Frances Harper.1 Like them, Graham states, “Walker pursues her own sense of individual identity while at the same time committing herself to the stream of collective history.”2 Harper, Graham goes on to say, “appears to be Walker’s closest literary ancestor in her preoccupation with social issues while at the same time maintaining her reputation as a leading poet of her day.”3
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Notes
See Maryemma Graham, introduction to How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature, by Margaret Walker (New York: Feminist Press, 1990), xv.
Margaret Walker, “Growing Out of Shadow,” in How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature, ed. Maryemma Graham (New York: Feminist Press, 1990), 3.
Maryemma Graham and Deborah Whaley, “Introduction: The Most Famous Person Nobody Knows,” in Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker, ed. Maryemma Graham (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 18. See also Graham, introduction to How I Wrote Jubilee, xiii; Walker, “Richard Wright,” How I Wrote Jubilee, 35.
John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 384.
Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: Norton, 1997), 1381.
Joyce Pettis, “Margaret Walker: Black Woman Writer of the South,” in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, ed. Tonette Bond Inge (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 16.
Kay Bonetti, “Margaret Walker,” in Conversations with American Novelists: The Best Interviews from the Missouri Review and the American Audio Prose, ed. Kay Bonetti et al. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 173.
Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work (New York: Warner Books, 1988), 7.
Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 285.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 261.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Frederick Douglass and the Language of the Self,” The Yale Review 70 (July 1981): 593.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (New York: Signet, 1968), 22.
Barbara Christian, “‘Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something’: African-American Women’s Historical Novels,” in Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990), 333.
Toni Morrison, “Site of Memory,” in Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987), 109–10.
Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In a Two Story House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (New York: Random House, 1983), 3.
See Henry Louis Gates Jr., introduction to Our Nig, by Harriet E. Wilson (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), xiii.
Patricia A. Turner, “African Americans,” in American Folklore: An Encyclopaedia, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (New York: Garland, 1996), 9.
Friederike Hajek, “Margaret Walker’s Jubilee: Oral History, the Fiction of Literacy and the Language of a Black Text,” in Rewriting the South: History and Fiction, ed. Lothar Hönnighausen and Valeria Gennaro Lerda (Tübingen, Germany: Francke, 1993), 392.
H. Nigel Thomas, From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988), 137–38.
Jacqueline Miller Carmichael, Trumpeting a Fiery Sound: History and Folklore in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 9.
James E. Spears, “Black Folk Elements in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee,” Mississippi Folklore Register 14, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 15.
Kimberly Rae Connor, “Spirituals,” in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, ed. William L. Andrews et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 693.
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y McKay (New York: Norton, 1997), 13n1.
Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985), 149.
Martha Harrison, as quoted by Maryse Condé in “Some African-American Fictional Responses to Gone with the Wind,” Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 215.
Minrose C. Gwin, “Jubilee: The Black Woman’s Celebration of Human Community,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed. Mar-jorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 137.
Charlotte Goodman, “From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Vyry’s Kitchen: The Black Female Folk Tradition in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee,” in Tradition and the Talents of Women, ed. Florence Howe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 331.
See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 34.
John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 210.
Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1979), 162.
Felix Haywood, “The Death of Slavery,” in Sources of the African-American Past: Primary Sources in American History, ed. Roy E. Finkenbine (New York: Longman, 1997), 81.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: Norton, 1997), 617–18.
Fred D’Aguiar, The Longest Memory (London: Vintage, 1995), 2.
“Individual Testimony,” in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: From the Reconstruction Era to 1910, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Citadel Press, 1951), 582.
Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered (London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 21.
Melissa Walker, Down from the Mountain Top: Black Women’s Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 1966–1989 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 21.
Phanuel Egejuru and Robert Elliot Fox, “An Interview with Margaret Walker,” Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 2, no. 2 (1979): 29.
Hoyt Fuller, “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” in Norton Anthology: African American Literature, 1856.
Larry Neal, “The Blacks Arts Movement,” in Norton Anthology: African American Literature, 2040.
Phyllis Rauch Klotman, “‘Oh Freedom’: Women and History in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee,” Black American Literature Forum 11 (1977): 140.
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© 2011 Ana Nunes
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Nunes, A. (2011). Setting the Record Straight. In: African American Women Writers’ Historical Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118850_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118850_3
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