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African American literature guides scholar's fiction currirulum

Fellow LaMonda Horton-Stallings and
Vice-President for Student Development
and Diversity Charlie Nelms chat
at the May 16 reception for summer fellows.

LaMonda Horton-Stallings was invited to teach two sections of L204, Introduction to Fiction, in the English Department during first summer session. She focused her course on African American texts, including some films; many of the students, she said, had not come into contact with African American literature before.

"It was interesting to see how they responded. For the most part, it was positive." Students' main reservations seemed to stem from the depressing quality, the lack of happy endings, in many of these novels, although they understood the situations from which these characters arose. "They liked Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle best. Even though it's depressing, it's full of satire. And it's full of stuff about American culture in general, and African American culture specifically." Among other texts, her course also featured the writing of Gayl Jones, upon whose work her M.A. thesis focused.

"My thesis actually led me to some of the research in my dissertation," Horton-Stallings said. Reading and researching Gayl Jones' books developed in her a growing interest in issues of orality and sexuality.

"There are a lot of things in African and African American folk and oral traditions that don't adhere to Western notions of gender or sexuality. You have the trickster figure, African gods and goddesses that don't fall into divisions of homosexuality/heterosexuality, male/female. Those lines are blurred, and offer a liminal subjectivity rather than a fixed subjectivity. When looking at the history of African Americans in this country, because we've been so misdefined, especially regarding sexuality, it's crucial to find new ways to talk about sexuality that are empowering."

Horton-Stallings added that African American literature, reaching as far back as the slave narratives, has already undertaken this project, but that literary studies haven't sufficiently read these texts for such gendered themes. "Research on black oral traditions has always been masculinized," through its ties to nationalism, she said; and the nationalist lens is inevitably "heterosexual and patriarchal. That research has basically limited [our sense of] what black folk traditions do and what they can say."

Horton-Stallings' dissertation, being written to complete her program in Michigan State University's English Department in East Lansing, Michigan, has a historical frame guided by the most prominent moments of black nationalism. But the texts are not limited to literature. Instead, she also considers film and popular culture fiction. "Some of the writers I'm using are Gayl Jones, John A. Williams, Ann Allen Shockley, Red Jordan Arobateau, and Donald Goines, as well as films like Mahogany, Eve's Bayou, and Watermelon Woman. In my dissertation, I'm looking at how a nationalist agenda has influenced the study of African and African American oral and folk traditions, and how the folk and oral can offer new discourses on gender and sexuality if we reread them without that nationalist agenda in tact."

"Being in Bloomington this summer, and having my own office among cordial and collegial faculty and staff, has helped me get a lot of my writing done, even though I've been teaching," she said, adding that the department faculty - particularly new Chair Steve Watt - have been warm and helpful. Watt kindly offered to review Horton-Stallings' teaching style for inclusion in her professional application materials.

She said that she will enter the job market this October, and will defend her dissertation the following April. In the future, she hopes to turn her dissertation into a book, one that would include chapters she does not have a place for now. She'd like to include one on black female comedians, for instance, and one on hip-hop culture. Meanwhile, Horton-Stallings will continue doing the conference circuits and publishing articles in such journals as Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire (formerly printed by IU Press) - her "Goin Trickster: African American Oral Traditions Changing U.S. Language Etiquette," appeared in the spring 2001 issue.

- Written by Amy Locklin