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

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A fascinating biography of a fascinating woman. - Booklist, starred review This definitive look at a remarkable figure delivers the goods. - Publishers Weekly, starred review "A brilliant analysis." - Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize winner Featured in Ms. Magazines "Most Anticipated Reads for the Rest of Us 2022" (books by or about historically excluded groups) 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 womens history, covering her life from the post-reconstruction era through the Harlem Renaissance. 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. Its a book about the past, but its also a book about the present that nods to the future.

Reviews

Analysis of Dunbar-Nelsons stories and poems are woven into the main episodes of her life, which helps shape Greens exquisite examination of Dunbar-Nelsons public persona. This definitive look at a remarkable figure delivers the goods. * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *
Respectability politics has always been a flashpoint for marginalized groups Few historical figures understood this better than Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the bisexual, feminist, and Black activist most famous for her marriage to poet Paul Laurence Dunbar but deserving of recognition for her poetry and essays. Green makes it clear that as a Black woman, Dunbar-Nelson struggled with conflicting codes of respectability [and] chronicles how, throughout her life as clubwoman, teacher, journalist, activist, and wife to the temperamental and abusive Dunbar, Dunbar-Nelson navigated the contradictions of intersectional Black feminism, carefully guarding her image as a respectable woman while advocating for radical causes, writing openly about colorism and same-sex relationships, and serving as her husbands sexual scapegoat and (literal) punching bag. A fascinating biography of a fascinating woman. * Booklist (starred review) *
This is the first book-length biography of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the trailblazing activist, writer, suffragist and educator, remarkably researched and written by University of North Carolina Professor Tara T. Green. * Ms. Magazine *
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, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emory University, USA, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Tradition *
In this meticulously researched and brilliantly crafted study, Tara T. Green commences to construct 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. Greens investigation of Dunbar-Nelsons vast archive demonstrates with tremendous persuasiveness that far from being a minor figure in African American literary history and cultural production, Dunbar-Nelsons work across creative, political, and activist registers anticipates the kind of work that will be taken up by Zora Neale Hurston, Pauli Murray, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker later in the 20th Century to further the cause of Black feminist organization and to challenge the intersectional barriers to an authentic and fully-realized selfhood. Producing a work that puts Greens talents as literary detective, feminist theorist, and critical interlocutor in bold relief, what ultimately makes this study so valuable is its insistence that Dunbar-Nelson had an unflinching commitment to a life lived on its own terms, emphasizes how one Black womans political agency was contingent on her ability to define whom she could love and how. * Herman Beavers, Professor of English and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA *
The archival work Tara T. Green has done here is remarkable. We know more about Alice Dunbar-Nelson that we imagined we could know. But there's more. This book teaches us about the layers of Black women's lives that go unremarked upon even when they are remarkable. This book about Alice Dunbar-Nelson's life of activism is itself an act of liberation. * Dana A. Williams, Professor of African American Literature, Howard University, USA *

Author Bio

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.