Who is trudier harris

Drawing on her own experiences of front-porch storytelling among family, friends, and neighbors, Trudier Harris looks across the generations of twentieth-century southern writers to focus on three African Americans who possess the "power of the porch.

Considering how such dynamics come into play in Hurston's Mules and Men , Naylor's Mama Day , and Kenan's Let the Dead Bury Their Dead , Harris shows how the "power of the porch" resides in readers as well, who, in giving themselves over to a story, confer it on the writer. Against this background of give and take, anticipation and fulfillment, Harris considers Zora Neale Hurston's special challenges as a black woman writer in the thirties, and how her various roles as an anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist intermingle in her work.

In Gloria Naylor's writing, Harris finds particularly satisfying themes and characters. A southerner by birth, Randall Kenan is particularly adept in getting his readers to accept aspects of African American culture that their rational minds might have wanted to reject.

Although Kenan is set apart from Hurston and Naylor by his alliances with a new generation of writers intent upon broaching certain taboo subjects in his case gay life in small southern towns , Kenan's Time Creek is as rife with the otherworldly and the fantastic as Hurston's New Orleans and Naylor's Willow Springs. The back and forth, the presentation and response of porch sitters and porch watchers, says Harris, is a power wielded skillfully by the best black storytellers of the South.

Harris graduated from Ohio State in and then took a position at William and Mary College in Virginia, becoming the school's first tenured African American professor.

She returned to UNC in and retired from the faculty there in Harris joined the University of Alabama 's English department in and was named a distinguished research professor in Harris's literary studies of African American writers and experiences have brought her critical praise. In particular, her respect for strong women such as her mother inspired her work on southern African American women writers, including Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature Harris's participation in activities such as "porch-sitting," where the porch becomes a story-telling space that brings together the private and public worlds of the black community, resulted in her study, The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston , Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan Her memoir, Summer Snow, which critically reflects on and celebrates her life in Tuscaloosa, was published in Martin Luther King Jr.

New York: Oxford University Press, Verdelle, Margaret Walker, and several others. Harris demonstrates that home, a complex and in many cases unsettling place in the literature, offers wonderous creative opportunities for black writers. Depictions of Home in African American Literature is a moving literary experience about home in black life and culture. Trudier Harris, in what amounts to a corporate testimony, rhetorically shouts out that since enslaved Africans arrived in America, home has not been a hospitable environment or haven of shelter, of happiness or love; rather it has been the site of a topography of pain.

It has been a constant reminder of black people's degraded condition: containment, confinement, control. This situation impedes the individual from attaining maturity at all levels. Instead of the mythologized American dream, home is a reminder of the American nightmare. As impressive as is the breadth of coverage of this book — writers canonical to those almost unknown — are the elegant and insightful readings of what home has meant as a domestic space, an imagined and longed for place of origin, and a desired and anticipated haven of refuge and solace.

Harris reveals how complicated those representations have been, how deep is the yearning for a safe haven in a heartless world and how profound the tensions that can and often do frustrate it. In Depictions of Home in African American Literature , Trudier Harris draws upon her expansive knowledge of African American fiction, poetry and drama to trace recurring yet problematic representations of both real and imagined homespaces.

Her painstaking and probing analyses of "home" in selected works that span from James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountai n to Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy deconstruct the familiar archetypal quest for home, ponder the role of slavery, and argue the inability of African American writers to suppress the mimetic urge "to follow on a path of troubling depictions.

Trudier Harris has made a distinguished career of taking on large topics in African American literature.