Favor, J. Martin

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Favor, J. Martin

PERSONAL: Education: University of Michigan, Ph.D., 1993.

ADDRESSES: Home— NH. Office— Department of English, Dartmouth College, 6032 Sanborn House, Hanover, NH 03755. E-mail—J.Martin. [email protected].

CAREER: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, associate professor of English, chair of African and African American studies department.

WRITINGS

Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1999.

Contributor to periodicals, including Callaloo and Soul: A Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society.

SIDELIGHTS: African American studies scholar J. Martin Favor explores the concept of racial identity in Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. In doing so, he relies on four texts of the Harlem Renaissance era that include James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and George Schuyler’s Black No More. Michele Gates-Moresi noted in American Studies International that Favor “questions a privileging of the folk, especially in the theories of Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and its meaning for literary constructions of racial identity. Baker posits authentic blackness in the lower classes (blues performance) and Gates privileges the vernacular as a basis for literary theory by asserting a particular African American cultural experience.” Favor feels that their approaches avoid the issue of race itself. “Authentic Blackness is an important contribution to African American literary study because it prompts consideration of how various discourses privilege, shroud, and (re)produce African American identity,” wrote Adam Hotek in American Literature.“Favor attempts to rehabilitate, to recenter, the agency of a black ‘speaking subject’ who seeks to ‘transform’ race as an ‘older category’ into a ‘significant, controllable literary trope that resists deterministic, essentializing categorization.’”