Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus on Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel

Conversations in Atlantic Theory

A discussion with Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She teaches and publishes widely in African-American literary and cultural studies, with a particular emphasis on post-Antebellum literature up to the Harlem Renaissance. Her 2020 book Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel, published by Louisiana State University Press and awarded Honorable Mention in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize for work on African American literature and culture in 2022, is the occasion for our conversation today. This book revisits discourses of race and cultural production in the works of Francis Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Charles Chestnutt. In this conversation, we explore the interracial lines of influence and African American literariness, with special attention to how such literariness marks this early period of writing with a peculiar mix of critique, vision of the future, and the distinctiveness of racial formation in key literary works and then-emerging writerly traditions. She is currently at work on a book-length study of Andrea Lee's fiction, a broad take on which is in a forthcoming essay in The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth Century American Literature.