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265 Afterword Afterword CHERYL A. WALL As I read the richly varied articles collected in Representing Segregation, the case of the Jena Six made headlines. Its images of the lynching tree, the manacled black male body, and the self-righteous agent of an unjust justice system resonated with my memories of the Jim Crow era. I was not alone. The images evoked a powerful action: demonstrators by the thousands—most too young to remember segregation but haunted by its history nonetheless—marched on the tiny Louisiana town, where they were met with the same charge of “outside agitator” that had been hurled fifty years before. Yet even as some proclaimed the beginning of a new civil rights movement, they faced a situation that was at least as different as it was similar than that confronted by their predecessors. These twenty-first-century marchers arrived by chartered bus with every expectation that they would spend several hours at most in Jena. I suspect that few of their mothers wept in fear as they saw them off, an experience recounted by many veterans of Freedom Summer in 1964. In 2007, the hangman’s noose remained empty. The stakes were not life and death, except perhaps for the six young men initially charged with attempted second-degree murder and a conspiracy count for beating a white classmate; for them the death in life that constitutes long-term incarceration still threatens. But the stakes are high for the rest of us as well. Our visceral response to scenes from Jena—as from New Orleans and Jasper, Texas—indicates how alive the legacy of segregation is. Although scholars have explored extensively the impact of slavery on the literary imagination, they are just beginning to explore the ways that segregation’s legacy informs the work of most twentieth-century black writers. From Charles Chesnutt and Ida B. Wells-Barnett at the turn of the last century to Richard Wright and Lorraine Hansberry at its midpoint, these writers grappled with the challenge of how at once to represent and to resist the logic of segregation. The concept of race as a fixed identity, visible in its marking and permanent in its effect, was the premise on which Jim Crow rested. If on the one hand, the texts analyzed here show how completely these writers reject that premise, they remind us as well how pervasive the system was and how impenetrable to 265 266 Representing Segregation change it seemed. As the readings of Frank Lloyd Brown’s Trumbull Park and A Raisin in the Sun confirm, the system disciplined interior as well as exterior space. Yet there was room to resist. Hansberry’s ideal of “genuine realism,” writing that encompassed “not only what is, but what is possible” captures the aesthetic to which many of these texts aspire. Wright is this volume’s exemplary figure, as he charts first the physical and psychological terror of segregation in the South in his short stories and in Black Boy, and then maps the segregated precincts of Chicago’s Black Belt in Native Son. “A Survey of the Amusement Facilities of District #35,” an archival find, suggests how social realities fired his imagination. Segregation was also constraining. As the article, “Black is a Region,” demonstrates, Wright remained trapped by its boundaries even as he traveled the world. He was convinced that the concerns of African Americans were too particular, too narrow, to be taken up in a global forum. His stance may give specialists in African American literature pause, as we consider how to situate ourselves in the now globalized world of literary study. The signs of Jim Crow, linguistic and literal, demarcated an impassable color line; consequently, the photographs and visual texts reproduced here are centrally important. So much depended on how African Americans read and were read visually. It is hardly surprising that black writers made poetry out of invisibility. Re-viewing the cartoons in “American Graffiti” and the photographs in “A Negative Utopia” reminds us that African Americans refused to be locked into the social identities they were assigned. Shawn Michelle Smith’s images that explore the legacy of lynching for white women invite us to think about the psychological burden placed on those who would not or could not escape their social identities. Writers from multiple locations take up the paradox of claiming citizenship in a nation that remains substantially segregated even after the victories of the civil rights movement. Published in 1985, Hisaye Yamamoto...

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