Racial tensions during the 20th century manifested themselves in literature, attendees of Monday’s English Department Speaker Series learned on Monday.
Assistant English professor, John Williamson, talked about The Real Slaves of the Twentieth Century: Richard Wright and the African American White Novel Monday evening. Students and faculty interested in learning more about post-war African American life attended the event. Williamson specializes in African American and American literature.
Williamson started off his lecture by discussing white-life novels, which are novels written by African Americans telling the stories of white characters.
“The authors [of these novels] are often as sympathetic of their treatment of white characters as they are critical,” Williamson said during his lecture.
White-life novels were highly uncommon during the 20th century. It was common for white authors to write from the point of view of other races — typically minorities — and to sympathize with the main characters, but black writers did not have this privilege.
“Black privacy was violated in the name of protecting white privacy,” Williamson said. “Midcentury black writers had to confine their visions to tragic versions of being a black man in a white man’s world. In turn, this sort of repression served as a restriction of an African American author’s life as an artist.”
Williamson spent a substantial portion of his discussion speaking about Richard Wright, an African-American author who wrote numerous pieces of controversial literature. Williamson has written a book including information on Richard Wright and other famous African-American novelists called, Abandoning the Black Hero: Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life Novel.
Williamson said many factors have influenced him to research White-Life novels.
“I came across these ‘white novels’ as a graduate student but I knew very little about them,” Williamson said. “I had heard of some of the authors but I came across someone named Frank Yerby who I had never heard of before. He was an African-American novelist who is fairly unknown and who wrote literature with a noncritical vision of the south, something that was relatively uncommon.”
Williamson said that he wanted to know what he could learn from these works that were so foreign to him and that influenced him to write his novel and conduct his research.
“I enjoyed the presentation as it exposed me to a new area of literary history,” said Justin Hills, a senior in human biology. “It was interesting to learn of how the creativity of many celebrated African-American authors was stifled.”
Hills said he was fairly intrigued by the idea of white-life literature.
“This area was of interest to me primarily because I believe that African-American literary history greatly enriches world history, in its entirety,” Hills said.
