A01=Shanna Greene Benjamin
African American biography
African American literature
African American women--careers and professions
African American women--higher education
African Americans--correspondence
African Americans--intellectual life and history
Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Author_Shanna Greene Benjamin
Black students at Harvard
Black studies at Harvard
Black Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Black Studies in the Midwest
Black women and the archives
Category=DNBM
Category=DSB
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSL
Darwin Turner and early black critics
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
feminist memoir
Henry Louis Gates
Jr.
Nell Irvin Painter
Nellie Y. McKay
Norton Anthology of African American Literature
pioneers of Black feminist thought
Queens College SEEK program
student
Toni Morrison
Zora Neale Hurston
Product details
- ISBN 9781469661889
- Weight: 565g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 12 Apr 2021
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Nellie Y. McKay (1930-2006) was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. The author of several books, McKay is best known for coediting the canon-making Norton Anthology of African American Literature with Henry Louis Gates Jr., which helped secure a place for the scholarly study of Black writing that had been ignored by white academia. However, there is more to McKay's life and legacy than her literary scholarship. After her passing, new details about McKay's life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her. Why did McKay choose to hide so many details of her past? Shanna Greene Benjamin examines McKay's path through the professoriate to learn about the strategies, sacrifices, and successes of contemporary Black women in the American academy. Benjamin shows that McKay's secrecy was a necessary tactic that a Black, working-class woman had to employ to succeed in the white-dominated space of the American English department. Using extensive archives and personal correspondence, Benjamin brings together McKay's private life and public work to expand how we think about Black literary history and the place of Black women in American culture.
Shanna Greene Benjamin is an independent scholar living in Charlotte, North Carolina.
