Mixed Race Studies

A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama

Harvard University Press
May 2010
192 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
no illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674050969

Robert B. Stepto, Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies
Yale University

In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

Stepto draws our attention to the concerns that recur in the books he takes up: how protagonists raise themselves, often without one or both parents; how black boys invent black manhood, often with no models before them; how protagonists seek and find a home elsewhere; and how they create personalities that can deal with the pain of abandonment. These are age-old themes in African American literature that, Stepto shows, gain a special poignancy and importance because our president has lived through these situations and circumstances and has written about them in a way that refreshes our understanding of the whole of African American literature.

Stepto amplifies these themes in four additional essays, which investigate Douglass’s correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe; Willard Savoy’s novel Alien Land and its interracial protagonist; the writer’s understanding of the reader in African American literature; and Stepto’s account of his own schoolhouse lessons, with their echoes of Douglass’ and Obama’s experiences.

Table of Contents

• Part One: The W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures
  • Introduction
  • 1. Frederick Douglass, Barack Obama, and the Search for Patrimony
  • 2. W.E.B. Du Bois, Barack Obama, and the Search for Race: School House Blues
  • 3. Toni Morrison, Barack Obama, and Difference
• Part Two
  • Introduction
  • 4. A Greyhound Kind of Mood
  • 5. Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass
  • 6. Willard Savoy’s Alien Land: Biracial Identity in a Novel of the 1940s
  • Afterword: Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives
• Notes
• Index

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

Harvard University Press
2012-11-19
320 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
15 halftones, 2 maps, 4 tables
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674066663

Vivek Bald, Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest.

The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women.

As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

For more information, visit the Bengali Harlem website here.

Table of Contents

• Author’s Note
• Introduction: Lost in Migration
• 1. Out of the East and into the South
• 2. Between Hindoo and Negro
• 3. From Ships’ Holds to Factory Floors
• 4. The Travels and Transformations of Amir Haider Khan
• 5. Bengali Harlem
• 6. The Life and Times of a Multiracial Community
• Conclusion: Lost Futures
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index