Forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press in Summer 2020!
A book-length study inspired by the recognition that African Americans, especially women, continue to invest in traditional domesticity even while seeing the signs that it won’t yield for them the respectability and safety it should. This project therefore grows out of the insights that writing Living with Lynching provided. Most often, African Americans were lynched not because they were criminals but because they were successful. Black men and women of achievement became targets because their deaths would terrorize survivors, reminding blacks to stay in their “proper” place. African Americans living in the midst of mob violence understood a basic truth that most Americans still deny: in the United States, the success of marginalized groups inspires aggression as often as praise. Because mainstream society continues to resist rewarding success unless it comes in white packaging, the question is: What does the tendency to meet traditional standards of success—even while knowing it won’t likely be rewarded—reveal about African American culture?
From Slave Cabins to the White House argues that when African Americans seem to be investing against the odds, they are not responding to the forces that oppose them so much as they are continuing community traditions. African Americans have always engaged in practices of making home and making citizenship, often from scratch, and they’ve done so through an on-going, dynamic community conversation about success and citizenship. Black cultural production provides one access point for understanding the richness of that conversation.
While tracing the contours of this community conversation, Koritha examines a wide array of works produced between slavery and the Age of Michelle Obama. Whether examining a novel, a play, or the performance text that is Mrs. Obama’s public persona, Koritha’s approach is informed by performance studies as well as an understanding of U.S. history and culture.
The basic shape of the forthcoming book is below, giving a sense of the texts and historical periods that figure in the study. Koritha is happy to offer lectures based on this material. BOOK A LECTURE »
From Slave Cabins to the White House:
Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture
Introduction: House Slaves, Housekeepers, Homemakers
Chapter 1: A Home of One’s Own – primarily examines Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; Or, Thirty Years a Slave & Four Years in the White House (1868)
Chapter 2: No, Really: A Home of One’s Own – primarily examines Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900)
Chapter 3: New Negroes, New Homes – primarily examines Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Chapter 4: Home as Human Right and Black Power – primarily examines Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness (1969)
Chapter 5: Still the Master’s House? – primarily examines novels that revisit slavery, Kindred (1979) by Octavia Butler and Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
Chapter 6: The Ultimate Home: Michelle Obama in the White House
Coda: From Mom-in-Chief to Predator-in-Chief