The School House Blues--Stepto's Analysis of Schoolhouse Episodes in African American Narratives

In this essay, Stepto focuses on the schoolhouse episode, "a staple event in African American narratives no doubt because it is remembered or imagined as a formative first scene of racial self-awareness...perhaps the first day of school, in which the narrative's protagonist is 'schooled' in being colored, sometimes made aware for the first time that he or she is colored."

Stepto presents the narrative of W.E.B. Dubois from his The Souls of Black Folk, in which a "tall newcomer" girl refuses to accept a visiting card from the young Dubois in a classwide exchange.  Stepto goes on to analyze parallel episodes in James Weldon Johnson's book The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).  Stepto then examines Obama's own schoolhouse episode in the light of this literary tradition.


This provocative essay contains much food for thought for students, parents, teachers, and anyone else interested in questions of race and identity.  We hope you'll add your thoughts below.

A Reading from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston's Niece

W.E.B. DuBois on Double Consciousness

How Novels Begin:  The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man

Toni Morrison, Barack Obama, and Difference

        

In the chapter of his book by the title above Stepto writes:
In this lecture series on reading the African American classics in the age of Obama, we are discussing themes and tropes that are not new (indeed they are "classic") but that are received anew because we have been reading and listening to Barack Obama's personal narratives, and because we have been observing him living out and, in a sense, performing his narratives often on a very public stage.  For example, narratives of the absent parent, and of the black father who has absconded, are in truth twice-told tales, but we read or receive those tales in new ways in the present moment because our president has shared with us his own versions of those stories.  Indeed, with African American folklore and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) in mind, we can even say (with a bit of blues intonation) that Mr. Obama knows all about Africans flying off to Africa, leaving children who must try to find family and home in new arrangements and, often, new geographies.

  

Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom and the Search for Identity

Stepto writes, "Douglass's writings of 150 years ago have much to offer, especially to someone with the issues Obama has wrestled with.  Douglass's autobiography is preeminently about raising himself and becoming a black man in America, most certainly while living with no one who 'seemed to know exactly what that meant.'" A Home Elsewhere (2010)

How does this book inform the search for identity in the American and African American literary traditions?

Dreams from My Father and A Home Elsewhere

"Obama's narrative is a marvel in many ways; these include the ways it refreshes our readings and recollections of the whole of African American literature." 

-Robert Stepto, A Home Elsewhere (2010)







Below, Obama reads from his book Dreams from My Father.

What do you think about the role of Obama's Dreams of My Father in the African American literary tradition?