In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the original blonde bombshell Peggy Hopkins Joyce. According to Hopkins’ biographer, however, Basil Woon, an English playwright and gossip columnist was supposed to have been the ghostwriter of this book. My paper will address this discrepancy by focusing on the lack of evidence supporting the Woon theory, and through an analysis using stylometry, close reading and an examination of historical documents, I will argue that Thurman is the more likely candidate as a ghostwriter for Hopkins’ memoirs, just as Hughes suggests. I will be looking specifically at the way the text, which is presented to the reader as a diary written by Hopkins from her early youth to the present day, satirizes the shallowness and excesses of the “roaring twenties.” I will argue that the text is clearly ironic and satirical in style and approach and not only satirizes celebrity, but also a society that unselfconsciously celebrates celebrity, much the way Thurman satirizes the excesses of the Harlem Renaissance in his novel Infants of the Spring. In conclusion, I will show how this book, which has been largely dismissed as celebrity gossip, is transformed into something highly literary by the way Thurman, as ghostwriter and editor, takes Hopkins’ life story and turns it into a satire of the excesses of an era.
This paper examines the transnational dimensions of the March
1925 issue of Survey
Graphic, the “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” issue that
eventually led to the publication of Alain Locke’s New Negro Anthology. The paper examines
this text by looking at the work of German artist Winold Reiss, who
largely influenced artist Aaron Douglas; Jamaican author W.A. Domingo;
Jamaican poet Claude McKay; and Puerto Rican-German author Arthur A.
Schomburg. This paper contends that as transnational actors, Black
artists were just as responsible for contributing to the purportedly
all-white European culture that they inherited in the United States as
they were for creating the hybrid African American forms that are
inherent elements in all American culture.
This chapter looks at the new television series Star Trek: Discovery, and investigate the troubling relationship Gabriel Lorca has with women of colour, particularly Michael Burnham. It specifically wants to analyse Lorca’s sense of propriety over the black body, one with a history that goes back to slavery, and that manifests itself here not only across time, but across alternate universes as well. It argues that the fact that certain assumptions about white male privilege manage to cross time, space and alternate universes in a series that successfully upends and criticizes many other racist and sexist tropes says a lot about how much room there is for us to examine aspects of our culture we accept uncritically. This chapter shows that afrofuturism as a critical approach is a strong tool for interrogating our cultural products and our cultural moment(s), past, present and future.
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