Black Hibiscus

African Americans and the Florida Imaginary

John Wharton Lowe

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781496848604
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496848611
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Contributions by Simone A. James Alexander, José Felipe Alvergue, Valerie Babb, Pamela Bordelon, Taylor Hagood, Joyce Marie Jackson, Delia Malia Konzett, Jane Landers, John Wharton Lowe, Gary Monroe, Noelle Morrissette, Paul Ortiz, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Genevieve West, and Belinda Wheeler

The state of Florida has a rich literary and cultural history, which has been greatly shaped by many different ethnicities, races, and cultures that call the Sunshine State home. Little attention has been paid, however, to the key role of African Americans in Floridian history and culture. The state's early population boom came from immigrants from the US South, and many of them were African Americans. Interaction between the state's ethnic communities has created a unique and vibrant culture, which has had, and continues to have, a significant impact on southern, national, and hemispheric life and history.

Black Hibiscus: African Americans and the Florida Imaginary begins by exploring Florida's colonial past, focusing particularly on interactions between maroons who escaped enslavement, and on Albery Whitman's The Rape of Florida, which also links Black people and Native Americans. Contributors consider film, folklore, and music, as well as such key Black writers as Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Gwendolyn Bennett, Colson Whitehead, and Edwidge Danticat. The volume features Black Floridians' role in the civil rights movement and Black contributions to the celebrated Florida Writers' Project. Contributors include literary scholars, historians, film critics, art historians, anthropologists, musicologists, political scientists, artists, and poets.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Yamasee-African Ties in Carolina and Florida
• Chapter Two. The Rape of Florida and Albery Whitman’s Poetic-Political Theory of a Reparative Ontology
• Chapter Three. Grappling with an “Omen of Doom”: Learning from the Ocoee Election Day Massacre
• Chapter Four. From Floridian Ode to National Epic: James Weldon Johnson’s Digressive Quest for a Modern African American Poetics
• Chapter Five. Gwendolyn Bennett’s Florida Renaissance
• Chapter Six. Negotiating Kitsch and Race in Florida Writing and Art: Hurston, the Highwaymen, and Duval-Carrié
• Chapter Seven. “Follow Me through Florida”: The Journey of the Black Federal Writers
• Chapter Eight. Interrogating Ethnography: Hurston’s Critiques of Ethnographic Convention in Polk County
• Chapter Nine. African American and West Indian Folklife in South Florida
• Chapter Ten. The Art of the Highwaymen: Superficial Beauty and the Imagination
• Chapter Eleven: “What Is Florida to Me?”: Shadowing, Danticat, and the Florida/Black Imaginary
• Chapter Twelve. Black and Blue in Florida: Moonlight’s Poetics of Space and Identity
• Chapter Thirteen. Civil Rights by Moonlight: Liberty City and Miami’s Social Justice Histories
• Chapter Fourteen. The Role of Florida in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys
• Coda. The Storm, the Telling
• About the Contributors
• Index