Jacqueline Goldsby

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My research and teaching focus on African American and American literatures. I’m especially interested in the ways that authors and texts articulate un-archived, “secret” and so, unspeakable developments that shaped American life during the long century of Jim Crow segregation’s reign, from 1865 to 1965.

For instance, my first book, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (2006), examines how literary depictions of anti-Black mob murders at the turn of the 20th century figure the violence as a trope of American modernity. Currently, I’m completing an editorial project–a Norton Critical Edition of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man—that reclaims James Weldon Johnson’s novel as an important harbinger of Afro-Anglo-American modernism. My next monograph, Birth of the Cool: African American Literary Culture of the 1940s and 1950s, focuses on the regenerative aesthetic life that Jim Crow segregation gave rise to during the mid-20th century. How to explain the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of African American literature’s “lost generation”–those fabulous, brilliant writers of the post-World War II/pre-Civil Rights Movement era? What literary ecologies made those authors’ emergence and impact as a cohort both decisive and hard to classify? I want to think these questions through in relation to a Bourdieu-informed “field theory” of Black literary production during those decades.

To research “Birth of the Cool” I’ve had to recover the archives I want to write about.  “Mapping the Stacks” makes manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, and moving images that document Black Chicago’s literary,cultural, and visual histories during the 1930s-1970s accessible to researchers and the public.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man. James Weldon Johnson. Editor, Jacqueline Goldsby. (Norton Critical Edition, 2015).

A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

• Winner, William S. Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association (2007) 
• Finalist, Lora Romero First Book Prize, American Studies Association(2007)

WORKS IN PROGRESS:
“The Art of Being Difficult: African American Poetry and Painting in the 1940s and 1950s”
“A Salon for the Masses: Vivian G. Harsh and the Chicago Public Library’s Book Review and Lecture Forum, 1933-1954”
“About Face: Portraiture, Celebrity, and African American Authorship during the 1940s & 1950s”

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES:  Readings in American Literature, Black Women Writers of the 1940s & 1950s, Introduction to African American Literature II (1900-1970)

GRADUATE COURSES James Baldwin & the Politics of Formlessness