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Books by Claudia Tate
Domestic Allegories of Political Desire /
Black Women Writers at Work /
Dark Princess /
The Selected Works of Georgia Douglass Johnson
The Works of Katherine Tillman
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Professor
Claudia Tate
scholar of
African-American literary criticism,
dies at 55
PRINCETON, N.J. -- Claudia Tate, a professor of English
and African-American studies at Princeton University who was known for
her innovative contributions to African-American literary criticism,
died Monday after a long battle with lung cancer. She was 55.
"She was an extraordinarily important figure in the history of
pushing African-American (literary) criticism to a new and more
sophisticated stage," said Hazel Carby, professor of
African-American studies and American studies at Yale University.
"One of the major innovations of her work was making all of us
look completely differently at African-American literature, from the
point of view of understanding and appreciating the psychoanalytic
perspective that she brought to it," Carby said. "It was not
an easy interpretation or an easy path for her to take, because much of
African-American literary criticism had been very resistant to thinking
about psychological complexity. Claudia was not only brave but very
determined to educate all of us in understanding complexities that many
of us, up until then, had skimmed over."
Tate's first book, titled
Black Women Writers at Work,
was published in the United States in 1983 and subsequently released in
Great Britain, Mexico and Japan. "Her probing, provocative and
insightful questions (in the book) set a new standard for the interview
as a genre," said Valerie Smith, professor of English and
African-American studies at Princeton.
Smith spoke at a symposium held last December by Princeton's Program
in African-American Studies titled "The Work of Claudia Tate,"
at which academics from several institutions gathered to pay tribute to
Tate's contributions to the fields of English, women's studies, history,
African-American studies and psychoanalysis.
Tate, who was born in Long Branch, N.J., earned her bachelor's degree
from the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. in English and American
literature and language from Harvard University. She was a member of the
faculty at Howard University for 12 years before becoming a professor of
English at George Washington University in 1989. She had been a
professor at Princeton since 1997.
"She was an original thinker who was not bound by the
commonplaces of what's African-American and what's not," said Nell
Painter, the Edwards Professor of American History and professor of
African-American studies at Princeton. "She examined the work of
black writers like Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston and their
novels on non-black characters, which was important because she was able
to get to some of the issues the writers wanted to talk about that were
not merely racial issues, but human issues and family issues."
Tate's other books include
The Works of Katherine Tillman,
Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black
Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century and "Psychoanalysis
and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race." All were
published by Oxford University Press.
In addition to her dedication to her own scholarship and her family,
Tate was a generous colleague who gladly read drafts of chapters of
books and gave extensive notes. "Her help was absolutely invaluable
for me and others," Carby said. "When it came to helping
colleagues or students, no was not a word she had in her
vocabulary."
Tate is survived by her sons, Read Hubbard of New York City and
Jerome Lindsay of Norfolk, Va.; a brother, Harold A. Tate of Las Vegas,
Nev.; and her parents, Harold N. and Mary Austin Tate of Fair Haven,
N.J.
In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to St. Thomas Episcopal
Church School, Sunset and Bridge Avenues, Red Bank, NJ 07701.
A memorial service for Tate is being planned for 2 p.m. Friday, Sept.
27, in the Princeton University Chapel.
News from PRINCETON UNIVERSITY /
Office of Communications /
22 Chambers St., Suite 201 /
Princeton, NJ 08542 USA /
Telephone 609-258-3601; Fax 609-258-1301 / For immediate release: July 31, 2002
/ Photo by: Ron Carter.
Contact: Contact: Jennifer Greenstein Altmann, 609-258-3601 or
jlg@princeton.edu
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By Russell Simmons
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 19 December 2011
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