Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I owe many thanks to the people who have supported me throughout the past decade spent working on this book. Since Beyond the White Negro focuses on the reception of African American literature and culture among white audiences, my biggest thanks go out to the twenty-one book clubs who generously welcomed me into their homes and to the many students at Bridgewater State University, Bentley College, and Harvard University who participated in my study of film reception. Their participation vastly enriched my understanding of the connections between empathy and cultural consumption. I am also grateful to my senior-seminar and graduate students at Bridgewater for sharing their feedback on my work in progress. Particular thanks are due to the novelist Adam Mansbach for being such an insightful and funny interview subject. This book might never have been completed without the intellectual and emotional support of my writing-group comrades, Lori Harrison-Kahan and Shilpa Davé. For seven summers, they read scores of drafts, gave brilliant editing advice, and cheered me on through every stage of my career. Special thanks to Lori for her expertise in black/Jewish relations and for introducing me to Mansbach’s work, and to Shilpa for her insights on neoliberalism and race in media culture. I am deeply grateful to the anonymous reviewers at the University of Illinois Press, whose smart revision suggestions clarified my argument in myriad ways. Thank you to my editor Larin McLaughlin and to Dawn Durante for guiding me through the publication process with grace, and I appreciate the efforts of all the staff at Illinois Press who worked on the production of this book. Thanks are owed to Patsy Schweickart, La Vinia Jennings, Cecilia Konchar Farr, and Jaime Harker for including my research in their edited collections and journal issues. Part of chapter 1 appeared in a different form in At Home and Abroad: Historicizing Twentieth-Century Whiteness in Literature and Performance (University x . acknowledgments of Tennessee Press), and earlier versions of chapter 2 were first published in the journals LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory and the International Journal of Cultural Studies. Institutional support in the form of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University was instrumental at the genesis of the project, and a Faculty Research Grant and a CARS Small Grant from Bridgewater State University allowed me to finish it ten years later. I appreciate the support of the following colleagues who heard presentations of the work in progress or whose ideas have influenced my thinking: Biodun Jeyifo, Shirley Samuels, Tim Murray, Paul Sawyer, Hortense Spillers, Liz DeLoughrey, and Nancy Wadsworth at Cornell University; Mike Frank, Bruce Herzberg, Traci Abbott, Samir Dayal, Linda McJannet, and Ken Stuckey at Bentley College; and Steven Biel, Andy Romig, Karen Flood, Stephanie Lin Carlson, Amy Spellacy, Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, Robin Bernstein, Lisa Szefel, and Tim McCarthy at Harvard’s History and Literature Program. I am indebted to all my generous and inspiring colleagues in the English Department at Bridgewater State University, but especially to Ben Carson, John Kucich, Ann Brunjes, Molly Robey, Heidi Bean, Matt Bell, and John Mulrooney for the rich conversations we have shared about empathy, African American literature, American studies, and film studies. Many thanks to my graduate-school mentor, Rita Felski at the University of Virginia, for encouraging me twenty years ago to pursue reception studies and to read and think across disciplinary boundaries. I am also profoundly grateful to Toni Morrison for writing such powerful books that were the first to disrupt my white adolescent ways of looking at the world. Thanks are due to family members Zoë Davis and Rebecca Deeks for reading chapters, to Beth Davis for inviting me to attend her book club, and to Josh and Emma for keeping me well grounded in the “real world” outside of academia. And finally, my deepest gratitude to Jon for the collaboration of our lives, and for making absolutely everything possible. Beyond the White Negro ...