Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division

Contributors

269 Contributors Contributors Elizabeth Abel is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books and edited volumes on gender, race, and psychoanalysis include Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989), Writing and Sexual Difference (1982), and Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (with Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen, 1997). Recent articles have appeared in Representations, Critical Inquiry, and the African American Review. The essay in this volume is drawn from her forthcoming book, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010). GerShun Avilez is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on African American critical culture and the social meanings attributed to black embodiment. He is completing his dissertation on the artistic legacy of the black arts era. Ruth Blandón earned her doctorate in English from the University of Southern California. Her dissertation is titled, “Trans-American Modernisms: Racial Passing , Travel Writing, and Cultural Fantasies of Latin America.” Tess Chakkalakal is assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at Bowdoin College and her book manuscript, Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, is forthcoming. Eve Dunbar is assistant professor in the Department of English at Vassar College . She specializes in African American literature and cultural expression, black feminism, and theories of black diaspora. Dunbar is completing a book project on the aesthetic and political ties that bind literary genre, American nationalism, and black cultural nationalism in the works of mid-twentieth-century African American writers writing from abroad. Michelle Y. Gordon is assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her current research focuses on the aesthetic and grassroots relationships between twentieth-century black literary movements in Chicago and African American freedom struggles. 269 270 Contributors Trudier Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Her more than twenty authored and edited books include Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991), Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (2001), The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), and Reading Contemporary African American Drama: Fragments of History, Fragments of Self (2007). Her memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, appeared in 2003 from Beacon Press. Her several teaching awards include the UNC System Board of Governors’ Award for Excellence in Teaching (2005). Her latest book is The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South (2009). Elizabeth Boyle Machlan is a lecturer in English at Princeton University. Her book manuscript, “Panic Rooms: Architecture and Anxiety in New York From 1900 to 9/11,” is under contract for the Urban Life, Urban Landscape series at Ohio State University Press. Her work addresses intersections between literary form, architectural history, and urban studies. Her work also appears in Studies in the Novel. Joycelyn Moody is the Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she teaches courses on early African American literature and culture. She served as editor of African American Review (2004–2008). Her publications include Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women (2003) and Teaching with The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2004). She has lectured on U.S. black women in slavery at the University of WashingtonSeattle , Hamilton College, the Harvard School of Divinity, Southern Methodist University, and numerous other institutions. Brian Norman is assistant professor of English at Loyola University Maryland where he teaches American and African American literature. His is the author of The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division (2007). His other work appears in African American Review, Canadian Review of American Studies, differences, Frontiers, MELUS, and Women’s Studies, and collections on James Baldwin, Emmett Till, and Malcolm X. He is working on projects on Jim Crow in post-civil rights American literature, dead women talking, and American stories of class descent. Birgit Brander Rasmussen is assistant professor of American Studies at Yale University. She is co-editor of The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (2001). Her article “Negotiating Treaties, Negotiating Literacies: A French-Iroquois Encounter and the Making of Early American Literature” won the 2007 Nor- 271 Contributors man Foerster Prize for Best Article in American Literature. Other work appears...