Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the “Divine Comedy” by Dennis Looney (review)

Dennis Looney hooks his readers from the first pages of his introduction with a fascinating examination of a Cincinnati wax museum installation of [End Page e-14] Dante’s otherworld in the late 1820s, and he never lets his readers’ attention waver. He notes a nineteenth-century description of the Hiram Powers wax sculpture of a “poor old negro” freezing in the ice of hell and calls it “most likely the earliest association of Dante and African American culture in art [and possibly] the earliest sculpted representation of an African American by a white artist in the United States” (18). Part history, part sociology, part literary scholarship of the highest order, this volume presents the African American reception of Dante’s Divine Comedy across the disciplines of literature, film, art, music, and education during the last two centuries.

African American readers saw in the Divine Comedy and in the figure of Dante various ways of addressing their own cultural contexts. For example, Dante the politician, exiled from a hostile homeland, helped them to comment on issues of migration and the consequences of speaking truth to power. Moreover, Dante’s poem, narrating the otherworldly journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise, could represent a slave narrative on an Exodus paradigm. But just as importantly for Looney, African American readers were particularly attuned to Dante as “a master craftsman of poetic language who forges a new vernacular out of the linguistic diversity around him, not unlike what authors of color have had to do in this country” (3). The book thus engages not just the political readings of Dante’s work for Americans of color but also key religious and aesthetic considerations as well. In fact, the great strength of Looney’s study derives from how he pulls together, synthesizes, and establishes a commanding foundational critical interpretation of such a broad array of sources, influences, and outcomes.

The book is divided into four large chapters based on temporal perspectives on Dante. Looney terms them “Colored Dante,” “Negro Dante,” “Black Dante,” and “African American Dante.” In “Colored Dante,” Looney focuses on the nineteenth-century efforts to abolish slavery in the United States and to unify a nation in Italy and how political partisans in both of these struggles invoked Dante. Of particular interest are the motivations that William Wells Brown had for referring to Dante in the later versions of his novel (published under the titles Miralda in 1861 and Clotelle in 1864 and 1867) and which prompted H. Cordelia Ray’s poem “Dante” (1885).

Spencer Williams and Ralph Waldo Ellison provide the primary sources for Looney’s examination in the “Negro Dante” for the period that spans roughly 1900 until the 1950s. While the black intelligentsia and important filmmakers who have done retrospectives on African American cinema history, including Spike Lee, have almost entirely ignored Williams for his role in the controversial television comedy Amos ’n’ Andy (72–73, 223–24), Looney makes great strides in rehabilitating Williams’s important cinematic legacy. [End Page e-15] Williams borrowed clips from previous Italian film depictions of Dante’s Inferno in order to create a beguiling race movie, depicting an old, European white Dante and a light-hued Satan along with an all-black cast in Go Down, Death! (1944). The fruits of Looney’s research in the archives include a particularly keen perspective on the Ohio regional censorship board, which recommended that Williams cut all of his scenes depicting hell in Go Down, Death! including the sequence in which the devil chews a sinner, prompting Looney to ask: “Was it an all-white board that passed judgment on this all-black film? … Did the board members have any inkling of what Spencer Williams was doing with his elaborate allusions to Dante through his use of the Milano Films L’inferno? Was there, perhaps, the sense that this black man had no right to...