No single work was more important in the revolution in close reading that electrified African American literary studies in the nineteen eighties than was Robert Burns Stepto's From Behind the Veil, a work as deeply insightful as it was engagingly written. Stepto reminded us, after Keats, that one dives into the lake not merely or necessarily to swim to the other side, but to enjoy the dive. Let us hope, at the end of another era of reductive thematic (race, class, gender) criticism, that this marvelous book can once again play that salutary role in redirecting readers to the sheer splendors of close reading, reminding us of the pleasures of luxuriating in the language of African American texts. -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
Robert B. Stepto is Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative.
No single work was more important in the revolution in close
reading that electrified African American literary studies in the
1980s than was Robert Burns Stepto's From Behind the Veil, a work
as deeply insightful as it was engagingly written. Stepto reminded
us, after Keats, that one dives into the lake not merely or
necessarily to swim to the other side, but to enjoy the dive. Let
us hope, at the end of another era of reductive thematic (race,
class, gender) criticism, that this marvelous book can once again
play that salutary role in redirecting readers to the sheer
splendors of close reading, reminding us of the pleasures of
luxuriating in the language of African American texts.
*Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University*
This is a collection of essays both timely and classic.
*Library Journal*
By juxtaposing Dreams from My Father with a variety of texts,
including critical pieces on African-American literature, Stepto
illuminates the lasting validity of these classics and their
importance to our modern times.
*Publishers Weekly*
Provocative… Stepto discusses literature about as well as anyone,
and it's a genuine pleasure to follow his joyful excursions through
Douglass, Du Bois, Morrison and others.
*Washington Post*
Stepto's incisive analysis involves, for example, a very close
reading of how writers from James Weldon Johnson to Du Bois to
Obama himself have written about their school day blues, their
initiation into racial difference by white classmates… Stepto's
willingness to confront the white reader of African American
classics becomes, in the end, the great strength of this book… In
the introduction, Stepto quotes Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)
description of how, in America, African Americans are 'at once
unseen and constantly observed.' Stepto's meditations force the
white reader, including and especially the allegedly 'color-blind'
reader in the Age of Obama, to confront this paradox, this internal
security system of America's racial and racist system of
control.
*PopMatters*
Robert Stepto's A Home Elsewhere is a tour de force. Literary
history and autobiography flow in its pages until one is aware of
what Ellison called time's 'nodes, those points where time stands
still or from which it leaps ahead.' In his introduction Stepto
writes of realizing 'in broad terms that there was a project to
pursue that involved being attentive to how we read African
American literature at the present moment' of Barack Obama's
election. In mid-sentence, Stepto responds to his own call, and his
cadenced subtle prose becomes a prose of revelation: 'knowing, and
actually being stunned by the fact, that an African American writer
is our president.' Reading the chapters on Douglass and Obama, and
Du Bois and Obama, I couldn't shake the feeling that all of
Stepto's distinguished work as literary scholar (From Behind the
Veil) and autobiographer (Blue as the Lake) prepared him in a
unique, almost providential way to write this book. A scene of
communion opens up in his pages. There stands Douglass, there is Du
Bois, there Obama, approaching tentatively until Stepto gallops up,
bends down, lifts all three writers upon his back, and, hooves
pounding the earth, himself soon becomes a son of Pegasus. All four
fly freely through air and sky, the reader borne aloft in the
updraft.
*John F. Callahan, literary executor for Ralph Ellison and author
of In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in
Twentieth-Century Black Fiction*
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