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  • Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett by Lesley Larkin
  • Marlo D. David
Lesley Larkin. Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2015. x + 282 pp.

The ambiguous title of Lesley Larkin's new book, Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett, conceals the complexity of her central concerns in twentieth-century African American literature. The specific "literary encounter" that she addresses comprises moments when black-authored texts hail their readers into racial self-reflection and, in doing so, have the power to produce "antiracist reading practices" (22). This outcome cannot be achieved simply by readers trying to identify with black characters and using empathy to connect with their stories. In fact, Larkin critiques empathetic reading in her epilogue and instead pushes for a racial literacy that shows audiences how race is effectively made, implicating readers in the process. Larkin makes the case that readers are summoned by black texts to apprehend, and potentially alter, their understandings of how blackness and whiteness operate not only as social constructions, but also as effects of language. Larkin refers to her strategies as an "ethics of reading" (79), encouraging audiences to "resist the tendency to place an abstract self at the center of the scene of reading and to engage in critical and dialogical self-inquiry and revision" (194).

This approach should engender an awareness of the histories of marginalization, discrimination, and violence as well as the cultural and experiential particularities that have produced not just black people, but also (and especially) white people. To demonstrate, Larkin generates compelling metafictional readings of works by Johnson and Everett, as well as novels by Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Sapphire, Jamaica Kincaid, and Toni Morrison. She also explores the expectations of literary critics, the popular press, and students in university classrooms as a way to discuss the literary encounter between these audiences and black fiction in a variety of historical periods. Larkin traces her subject matter's literary reception by reviewers and readers to provide evidence of how black authors navigated the problem of the double audience by subverting the expectations of white and black readers simultaneously. Larkin best addresses how black authors manage double audience in her chapters on Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Invisible Man as well as a shared chapter on Push and Erasure.

In chapter 1 she takes up Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1927), a modernist tale of racial passing, in order to [End Page 362] demonstrate how Johnson transformed the expectations of his white readers in search of authentic, sociological narratives of black life by handing them a mirror through which they can observe the creation of their own white identities. For example, by witnessing the passing narrator's spectatorship of a lynching, readers undergo the process of becoming white alongside him, thus exposing whiteness as a social creation rather than an unmarked, universal state of being. White readers, poised to assume they are digesting an authentic account of a passing black man's life, are actually witnessing how their voyeurism of lynching, even when it is from an antilynching perspective, is endemic to the foundation of whiteness.

Larkin effectively addresses the double audience again in her reading of Ellison's Invisible Man, asking us to rethink how the unnamed narrator interacts with both audiences within the text—those he addresses in a series of public speeches—and with the readers of the novel, the "you" he addresses throughout the book. The novel ends with the question "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" (qtd. in 93). How one reads that final "you"—as a call either to universal white identity or to understand the specificities of black experience—is the critical point for Larkin, and it hinges on racialized reading practices. Therefore, she suggests taking in Ellison's work with an eye toward his astute apprehension of this paradox of audience. The narrator, who delivers a number of speeches throughout the novel, compares black audience response with the feedback from white audiences...

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