Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

by Tara T. Green

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.

Buy on Amazon Buy on BN.com Buy on Bookshop.org

*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.

Pub Date Jan 13 2022 | Archive Date May 09 2022

Bloomsbury Academic

Biographies & Memoirs | LGBTQIAP+ | Nonfiction (Adult)

Talking about this book? Use #AliceDunbarNelson #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!

Description

"This definitive look at a remarkable figure delivers the goods." - Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A brilliant analysis." - Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize winner

Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Until now, Dunbar-Nelson has largely been viewed only in relation to her abusive ex-husband, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. This is the first book-length look at this major figure in Black women’s history, covering her life from the post-reconstruction era through the Harlem Renaissance and the love she had for her race, of men and women, and, finally, of herself.

Tara T. Green builds on Black feminist, sexuality, historical and cultural studies to create a literary biography that examines Dunbar-Nelson's life and legacy as a respectable activist – a woman who navigated complex challenges associated with resisting racism and sexism, and who defined her sexual identity and sexual agency within the confines of respectability politics. It’s a book about the past, but it’s also a book about the present that nods to the future.

****Please note this is an uncorrected proof.****

"This definitive look at a remarkable figure delivers the goods." - Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A brilliant analysis." - Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize winner

Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a...

A Note From the Publisher

Tara T. Green is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA where she teaches literature and Black women's studies courses. She is the author of Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song (2018), A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men (2009), and See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure during the Interwar Era (2022), and she is the editor of two books, including From the Plantation to the Prison: African American Confinement Literature (2008). She is from the New Orleans area.

Tara T. Green is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA where she teaches literature and Black women's studies courses...

Advance Praise

“Tara Green proves herself the scholar born to make the sojourn through archives of every kind to bring us Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. This book is superb in its ability to show through the example of a secretly queer and always revolutionary Dunbar-Nelson how Black people continue to subvert the very systems in which we participate for the sake of or survival. Thanks to Professor Green, we can finally see full-fledged that Harlem Renaissance figure whose name too many of us know better than we know her work. This is a brilliant analysis." - Jericho Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Tradition

“In this meticulously researched and brilliantly crafted study, Tara T. Green constructs a portrait of Alice Dunbar-Nelson that lifts her from the shadows and resituates her in a space where her talents as a writer, organizer, editor, and activist are consistently foregrounded ... Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson emphasizes how one Black woman’s political agency was contingent on her ability to define whom she could love and how.” - Herman Beavers, University of Pennsylvania, USA

“Tara Green proves herself the scholar born to make the sojourn through archives of every kind to bring us Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. This book is superb in...