Recently, Maryemma Graham’s rich and lucid biography The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker (2022) has deepened and expanded how we understand Walker’s contributions across fields. This scholarly contribution has helped scholars of African American literature realize more than ever how much we’ve only skimmed the surface of Walker’s impacts.
Walker’s single novel Jubilee is considered (perhaps incorrectly) to be the culmination of this her life’s work in fiction. This panel wants to use Jubilee’s publication history, its discoursing on Black culture, and its impact on generations of Black writers to re-engage the significance of Walker as a figure in African American literary history and cultural study. Using Jubilee as a point of departure, this panel analyzes Walker’s use of history, her archives, as well as her direct and impacts on other writers on slavery.
Maryemma Graham begins the panel by exploring "Jubilee's Life and Legacy." Jubilee, Walker’s monumental novel 30 years in the making, reestablished slavery as a horrifying period in American history and one whose legacy and imaginative potential we needed to unpack and excavate for a new generation of writers and readers. Jubilee continues to intrigue scholars who do not always know what to do with the dramatic tensions that the novel presents around race, class, color, and gender. Graham's presentation demonstrates why the novel continues its wide circulation in new editions and multiple foreign language translations as Walker’s main character, Vyry, like the novel itself, becomes much larger than a story of slavery and freedom. The presentation reveals the symbolic dimensions of Jubilee as its main character, Vyry, evolves into a woman who is “black, female, and free.” Readers worldwide, especially women, continue to identify with her ongoing journey. Since Jubilee does not “fit” what we have come to view as the contemporary “neo-slave narrative,” what gives this unique novel its appeal after almost sixty years?
Margo Natalie Crawford investigates Walker's more immediate impact on younger generations of Black writers. In “Jubilee and the Black Arts Movement,” Margo Crawford will analyze Walker’s artistic movement alongside the mid-1960s and early 1970s Black Arts Movement. In 1975, in a Black World interview with Charles Rowell, Walker explains her relation to three BAM-era writers (Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Alice Walker) in the following manner: “Their boldness is not exactly what would have been boldness for me. I am sure people thought of me, when I was their age, as a bold new poet, but I am not at all certain that I had their kind of courage or even their kind of boldness.” Crawford will re-read Walker’s pivotal, bold poem “For My People” through the lens of the Black Arts Movement and imagine ways of hearing the moodscape in “For My People” in Jubilee. Crawford will complicate a 1967 book review that framed Jubilee as a surprising shift from Walker the poet to Walker the less innovative and compelling writer.
Chris Freeburg's presentation, "History in the Sound of Jubilee," focuses on the different ways Walker interrogates and communicates an ongoing challenge of what it means to historical in a novel about slavery. Walker wrote Jubilee over a thirty year period where she struggled with how to use facts and events as well as what kinds of voices had the most impact in her fictional saga. This presentation examines her readings of Hegel, Lukacs, and Faulkner, taking into account why their modes of expressing history impressed her intellectually but lacked the explanatory force she ultimately needed in composing her fiction.Walker turned to Black cultural expression, especially, the Black spirituals, to reveal the tenor, affect, and other impressions of slavery's historical life.
Ivy Wilson will respond to these presentations as a segue from the presentations to open discussion.
Erica Edwards will preside over the panel and briefly introduce the speakers and the respondent. Edwards will also be sure to close the respondents remarks in time to ensure at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.
The panel incorporates professors from state schools and smaller elite private schools, as well as scholars from different generations and genders.