Faculty Directory
Lovalerie King
Associate Professor of English
Affiliate Faculty in Women’s Studies
116 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
814 863 2178
Interim Director of the Africana Research Center
217 Willard Building
University Park, PA 16802
814 865 5227
Bio: B.A. Michigan State University (1994), M.A. Emory University (1996), Ph.D. UNC-Chapel Hill (1999). Lovalerie King specializes in African American literary history, African American culture and legal discourse, black women authors, and black feminist thought and theory. She is the author of Race, Theft and Ethics: Property Matters in African American Literature (LSU, 2007), and The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston (2008). She has co-edited James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays (Palgrave, 2006) and New Essays on the African American Novel: from Hurston and Ellison to Morrison and Whitehead (Palgrave 2008). She has contributed numerous essays, reviews, and articles to journals, essay collections, and literary and cultural reference volumes. She is currently completing another co-edited collection tentatively titled “Justice Unveiled: African American Culture and Legal Discourse.”
Books:
The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp.162.
New Essays on the African American Novel, from Hurston and Ellison to Morrison and Whitehead, co-edited with Linda F. Selzer. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Pp. 302.Race, Theft, and Ethics: Property Matters in African American Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. 192.
James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays, co-edited with Lynn Orilla Scott. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Pp. 312.
Selected Articles:
“Resistance, Reappropriation, and Reconciliation: The Blues and Flying Africans in Gayl Jones’s Song for Anninho.” Callaloo 27.3 (Summer 2004): 755-67. Reprinted in After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones, edited by Fiona Mills and Keith Mitchell, 241-57. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.
“Womanism from Zora Neale Hurston to Alice Walker.” In The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel, edited by Maryemma Graham, 233-52. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
“Counterdiscourses on the Racialization of Theft and Morality in Douglass's 1845 Narrative and Jacobs's Incidents.” MELUS 28.4 (Winter 2003): 54-82.
Recent Selected Presentations:
“Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone.” Speculative Histories of the American South Conference. Chapel Hill, NC. November, 2007.
“The Feminist Critique.” Callaloo’s Thirtieth Birthday Celebration. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. October 25, 2007.“Forms of Neo-Slavery in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” A Tribute to Octavia Butler. ASALH Conference, Charlotte, NC. October 6, 2007.
“Baldwin’s Legacy,” closing plenary roundtable, James Baldwin Conference, Queens College, London, UK, June 30, 2007.
Course Descriptions:
English 566 - African American Literature Genres: Sexual Experience in the Black Woman's Novel
Hortense Spillers once wrote that "black women are the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb." Spillers referred to a record of muted sexualities among black female literary characters dating back to the nineteenth century. Even Zora Neale Hurston's convention-breaking novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), resorted to metaphor in describing Janie Crawford's orgasms. Our primary task this semester is to examine how authors have dealt with this problem of representation in their novels. To that end, we will read several highly representative novels from the past one hundred years alongside seminal theoretical and critical formulations. A manageable number of readings will be selected from among the following theorists, critics, and authors: Hortense Spillers, Hazel Carby, Barbara Smith, Evelynn Hammonds, Audre Lorde, Valerie Smith, Barbara Christian, Deborah McDowell, Jewelle Gomez, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Zora Neale Hurston, Michelle Cliff, Sister Souljah, Gloria Naylor, Alice Randall, Pearl Cleage, Deborah Gray White, bell hooks, Nella Larsen, Sapphire, and possibly others.
English 568 – African American Literature – Gender: Gender Matters in African American Literature and Theory
The seminar will explore ways that gender-related questions have helped to inform (and therefore shape) the literature and conversations about it since the late 1960s. Our approach will be historical, and we will begin at a specific cultural moment in the late 1960s. We will first consider the cultural backdrop for articulations of African American feminist and womanist agendas that took note of the African American woman’s positionality in white, patriarchal, and capitalistic America. Such works will include The Moynihan Report, The Black Woman, All the Woman are White, All the Blacks are Men, But some of us are Brave, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” and other black feminist statements. Secondly, we will read literary works that allow us to continue our focus on gender matters while investigating the relationship between literary production and the broader social and cultural climate.Texts may include Carlene Hatcher Polite’s The Flagellants, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Trey Ellis’s Platitudes, James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Toni Morrison’s Sula, or others. Finally, we will consider several moments during the past 20 years (such as the 1987 exchange among Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston Baker, Jr., and Joyce Ann Joyce in New Literary History) when gender matters were at the core of discussions about the literary tradition and its relationship to the dominant culture. We will conclude with the question of how African American women’s call for more attention to gender in literature and culture continues to impact the literary tradition and the theoretical conversations (including conversations about masculinities) about that tradition. Other authors for this aspect of the seminar will include Michael Awkward, Ann du Cille, Hazel Carby, Barbara Christian, Mark Anthony Neal, bell hooks, and others.
English 135 – Alternative Voices in American Literature
The course explores issues related to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity through plot, theme, and character via a selection of readings from among the following: Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World; Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies; Julia Alvarez. How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents; Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother: A Memoir; Audre Lorde, Zami; andMaxine Hong Kingston, China Men.
English 139 – African American Literature
This course introduces students to major authors, periods, movements, and themes in the African American literary tradition. The course will be divided almost equally among lecture, collaborative activities, and discussion. Required readings will come from Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition or The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.
English 300 – Honors Seminar: Toni Morrison
Fall 2008: We will compare several classics of African American literature with their film adaptations, with two exceptions. In the first exception, we will read a memoir about the Montgomery Bus Boycott that took place in the 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama. No direct adaptation of that memoir exists, but we will view two films about the boycott that offer two very different perspectives. In the second exception, we will read a 2001 parody of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, Gone with the Wind and its 1939 film adaptation. In this case, the film actually came long before the novel we will be reading. Primary readings will include one short story, one play, three novels, one autobiography, and one memoir. Our comparative approach to literary and audio-visual texts in this seminar will include attention to contexts, music, message or agenda, and representative identity or identities. Most films will be viewed in seminar; however, for the sake of allowing adequate seminar time for discussion and presentations, you will be asked to view several films and/or parts of films outside of class.
Spring 2006: We will examine Toni Morrison’s explorations of LOVE in at least seven of her novels. We will consider socio-historical and socio-cultural contexts along with the author’s use of language, music, plot, theme, and narrative strategies and devices. We will explore the following general questions as well as more specific questions for each text: How is LOVE or the lack thereof represented? Is LOVE manifested in more than one way in a given text? (Explain.) Are there multiple sites where LOVE is allowed to develop? How does the author make use of music in advancing a story about LOVE? What conditions are present where LOVE has no chance to develop? What sociohistorical and/or sociocultural concerns serve as a backdrop for the period covered by the story? How does the novel interface with these concerns? What overall statement about LOVE emerges from the text? In regard to the possibility for LOVE, does the novel end on an optimistic or pessimistic note? By the end of the seminar, you will be able to identify recurring themes and issues in Morrison’s novels and produce an extended fluid and coherent analysis of the author’s use of language, theme, plot, and/or narrative strategies to explore LOVE both as literary trope and as a central and continuing concern or issue for formerly enslaved Americans and their descendants.
English 462 – Reading Black, Reading Feminist
Let’s talk about sexuality. Beginning with a look at nineteenth-century perceptions about black women’s bodies, we will use our time this semester exploring the ways that contemporary black women continue to revisit, critique, and challenge the very foundations of those perceptions. The questions we will explore in discussion and elsewhere will be those you raise as students in response to the primary and secondary readings. Authors will include Sander Gilman, Evelynn Hammonds, Barbara Smith, Hortense Spillers, Octavia Butler, Harriet Jacobs, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, and others.
English 466 – The African American Novel, Part I
This course explores explore thematic, structural, and stylistic characteristics of the African American novel from the 1850s through the Harlem Renaissance. Required texts include the following. Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave, Harriet Wilson, Our Nig, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Three Classic African American Novels; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; Nella Larsen, Passing; Wallace Thurman. Infants of the Spring; Jean Toomer, Cane; Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were