2. While author interviews have been receiving more attention lately as objects of critical inquiry (including at MLA 2021 #176), author interviews in a postwar African American literary and cultural contexts in particular have not been thoroughly or adequately explored.
3. There is not much scholarship on the topic, and so the special session will help to start the conversation.
4. Each presenter will have 12 minutes, while the respondent will have 10 minutes to comment on the four papers, leaving 17 minutes for unstructured discussion.
Brief description:
de la Piedra: In 1956 at the American Academy in Rome, Ralph Ellison (with the help of Eugene Walter) spent a long evening interviewing Robert Penn Warren for the Paris Review’s celebrated “Art of Fiction” series. This largely forgotten interview profoundly affected both the criticism and fiction that Ellison produced in the months, years, and decades that followed. Ellison’s questions to Warren, about his literary biography and creative process along with matters of history, morality, and perspective in American fiction, show Ellison thinking through the major themes of “Society, Morality and the Novel,” the finished version of which bears important traces of Warren’s answers in this interview. The interview also contains an exchange with Warren about his narrative decisions in All the King’s Men, which I argue, based on the timeline, affected Ellison’s decisions for framing his own first-person peripheral narrator, Welborne McIntyre.
Gifford: For the past year, I have been interviewing Delany on a weekly basis, logging over one hundred hours of conversations. His testimonies—which cover everything from breaking the racial barrier in science fiction to documenting gay Black life in pre-Stonewall New York—provide heretofore overlooked insights into the development of postwar African American literature. My paper provides an account of these riveting interviews, exploring how Delany created a queer Afrofuturism to represent the identities of gay Black men in new ways.
Davenport: In 2018, New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz described African American author William Melvin Kelley, Jr. (1937-2017) as “the lost giant of American literature.” How did this giant seemingly disappear? The only answer Kelley himself gave came in July 2015, eighteen months before his death, during an interview conducted in his Harlem home with Andrew M. Davenport. Their four-hour conversation—Kelley’s final interview—has never been published. Davenport will analyze the themes that emerge from the interview, which include Kelley’s complex family history and other biographical details, his love for theater and gifts of mimicry, his conversion to Judaism during exile in Jamaica in the 1970s, his views on race and racism in the United States, his reflections on his declining health, and his hopes for recognition. Davenport will compare Kelley’s final interview with previously published interviews, detail transcription/editing challenges and the heretofore unsuccessful attempts to publish this interview with one of the most enigmatic writers in American literary history.
O'Malley: Looking beyond the traditional movie review, I argue that interviews served as a crucial
form of film criticism for Black women authors and artists. Focusing in particular on author
interviews with Toni Cade Bambara, Kathleen Collins, and Maya Angelou, I show how these artists used the
genre as a powerful platform to critique mainstream American film culture – long sutured to
racist and sexist practices – and to help shape an expanding Black feminist discourse on film.
Just as important as the interview themselves were the means to share these conversations with
broader audiences, so I also examine publications such as the Black Film Review which enabled
interviews-cum-film criticism to circulate. Author interviews and the texts that printed them
were, I argue, a powerful part of a still undertheorized film history of Black feminism.
These papers explore aspects of postwar African American cultural politics through the interview.