Mixed Race Studies

Exploring the Afro-Indigenous experience

Indian Country Today
2021-09-28

Nancy Spears
Gaylord News

The author’s new novel looks at the history of a Black family in central Georgia

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a full-tenure professor who’s been teaching nearly two decades in the English department at the University of Oklahoma. The first African American full professor in the history of the department, who is also Afro-Indigenous.

Her new novel explores the Afro-Indigenous experience, an area of literature Jeffers said has been long underrepresented and under-discussed.

The 790-page novel titled “The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois” released earlier this year in July explores the two centuries-old history of a Black family in central Georgia who is descended from Afro-Indigenous origin.

She discussed the book at the virtual National Book Festival event with Karen Grigsby Bates, senior correspondent for NPR’s Code Switch on Sept. 23.

Jeffers sat down with Gaylord News to discuss the themes of her book and reflects on how the narrative can translate to social justice issues across minority groups in the US…

Read the entire interview here.

Author and scholar Adele Logan Alexander appears at the 2010 National Book Festival

2010 National Book Festival
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.
2010-09-25
Running Time: 00:32:45

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University

Speaker Biography: Adele Logan Alexander’s research and teaching incorporate the black Atlantic world, African-American history, family history, gender issues and military and social history. Her first book examined the lives and significance of nonenslaved women of color in the rural antebellum South. Her second explored the Americanization and evolving citizenship of an African- (and Anglo-) American family in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2003 the African American Historical and Genealogical Society recognized her contributions to the study of family history with an award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution. She is an adjunct professor of history at George Washington University. Her books include “Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926” and “Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia.” Her latest book is “Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)Significance of Race” (University of Virginia Press).

Read the Questions and Answers transcript here.

Audience question: In your significant study of African-American families and I guess particularly mixed families, how often did you come across the use of skin products–skin lighteners or whiteners or even darkeners; or was that something that you were able to research or was that something that was talked about at all or written about?

Adele Alexander: Certainly I don’t write about it because I never found it in any of the people that I happen to write about. However, I’ve done a lot of work with a woman you may know about whose name is A’lelia Bundles whose great grandmother was Madame C.J. Walker who developed hair straightening–she called them hair health products, skin health products that also served to create a more–a whiter appearance. But I guess that one of the things is that it almost seems remarkable to me not that so many people did these things, but that so many did not. Because in our culture there was so much of a premium that has been placed on whiteness–day to day inconveniences, legal restrictions and everything else. It’s easy for me to understand why a number of black people wanted to be part of the majority in this country because they were so discriminated against and any steps in that direction I think were understandable.