Boundary-Breaking Courage

South History Across the Color Line. By Nell Irvin Painter. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. 256 pp. $37.00 cloth; $17.95 paper.

South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature. By Trudier Harris-Lopez. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002. xii + 230 pp. $24.95.

Nell Painter's Southern History Across the Color Line and Trudier Harris-Lopez's South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature highlight scholarly careers of originality and complex vision. These texts move beyond traditions of historiography and literary criticism, which often forestall critical wholeness and "down-home" fun, to demonstrate excellence marked by the transgressive verve of two innovative and progressive scholars. In these texts, Painter and Harris-Lopez offer insights beyond the borders of popular critical models. They demonstrate boundary-breaking courage that distinguishes their work from the volumes of often "ordinary" and sometimes-redundant essay collections available today. This two-part review looks at both books, highlighting moments that reveal why the courage and vision found in the best-of-the-best in African American studies shines through most dynamically in these scholars' work.

I. Standing in the Breach

Nell Painter's journey towards intellectual distinctiveness frames and structures her collection while encouraging a decompartmentalized articulation of American history. Each essay here bypasses tightly defined race, class, and gender categories of exploration, which Painter describes as the "blunt tools of analysis." They bridge "the old habit of writing only about white people or writing only about black people" with a conscious exploration of "individual subjectivity" and the inter-subjective arrangements of time and place as defined by various patterns of personal and communal growth.

Painter investigates class, the body, cultural symbolism, and sexuality from a materialist perspective with many of her interpretations and insights illuminated by what she characterizes as her interdisciplinary "auto-education." "I had to learn a great deal more than what my graduate education had provided," she explains. The thoroughness and thoughtfulness of the essays that result from her self-taught interdisciplinarity inspire and open a conversation about scholarly possibilities and exchange that ultimately reject traditional academic paradigms, particularity those that are "locked-down" by the notion of area specializations. The value of engaging in a versatile and trangressive intellectual exchange among disciplines and among a variety of analytical tools is evident in the opening chapter.

"Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting" is one of Painter's best essays. In it she asks readers to sojourn with her into the painful psychology and body politics of slavery. It is an extremely successful attempt to move with intellectual rigor and consistency toward a meaningful interpretation of a world mapped in blood by cruelty and violence. While crossing analytical racial boundaries as well as violating class and gender sectioning, Painter engages feminist and "social science scholarship on child abuse and other forms of torture," psychology, and African American literary studies in her broad, interpersonal view of the wounds and perpetual assaults of slavery and its legacies.

Painter's methodological chronicle and challenge continues in essays focusing on the life, individual development and "auto-education" of two southern activists whose personal identities and psyches were affected deeply by the race and gender politics of their time, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas and Hosea Hudson. Painter reveals how each adjusted to personal realities couched within worlds and ideologies that molded their lives broadly and, sometimes, in unexpected and dramatic ways. For Hosea Hudson struggling for the civil rights of slave descendents and other minorities during the mid-twentieth century carried him from sharecropper to popularity as an organic intellectual (one who "educated himself out of the thrall of conventional thinking"). On the other hand, Painter's discussion of Gertrude Thomas reveals how this southern lady's formal education fell short of providing what she needed to survive a change in circumstances brought about by the end of the Civil War.

Painter's collection is consistent in its concern for...