Black California: A Literary Anthology (review)

Aparajita Nanda’s recent anthology offers a kaleidoscopic array of writings by California’s African American pioneers and modern-day residents, well-known and relatively obscure historical figures, social critics and political activists, novelists, poets, and dramatists. Many readers will be familiar with such contributors as Wallace Thurman, Eldridge Cleaver, Wanda Coleman, Walter Mosley, Bebe Moore Campbell, and Arna Bontemps, whose most famous works have been excerpted or reprinted here, though they will also be delighted to encounter less familiar pieces by some of the biggest names in African American literature. For example, Nanda includes Langston Hughes’s previously unpublished one-act play Hollywood Mammy, which addresses the lack of non-stereotypical film roles available to women of color. Written in 1940, the play reflects African American sentiment shortly after Hattie McDaniel won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Gone with the Wind. Also featured is an essay by Chester Himes about the Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles, and a short story by Ernest Gaines, the author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman (1971). Nanda has arranged the selections in roughly chronological order, which would seem to make sense—although it might have been better if she had provided a longer introduction, outlining the evolution of African American culture, or identifying shifts in attitudes as regional writers responded to California over the course of several centuries. Without such a framework, the entries in the anthology feel disconnected and must be evaluated on their individual merits.

The reasons for including certain entries seem unclear. Some writers only resided in California for a brief period of time, including James Madison Bell; James Beckwourth, who spent most of his life as a fur-trapper in the Rocky Mountain West; Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple (1982) while living in northern California; and Terry McMillan, whose story “The End” (1976) is actually set in Detroit.

A number of the entries have nothing to do with California in terms of their content, including Eloise Bibb Thompson’s poem “A Garland of Prayer,” and Stanley Crouch’s essay “Blue-Collar Clarity,” which deals with the notion of identity politics in literature and popular culture. Other contributors, such as Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, was a major political figure in the mid-nineteenth century, though his letter to the United States Consul at Monterey—the first entry in the anthology—is a document of little historical interest.

This book is essentially about the relationship between region and race. However, Nanda hasn’t thought sufficiently about what makes someone a black California writer. Is it the person’s race, place of birth, or the subject matter of the writing itself ?