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Earlier this summer, I had Tess Chakkalakal, professor of Africana Studies and English at Bowdoin College and author of A Matter of Complexion, a wonderful biography of the writer Charles Chesnutt,on the livestream. That stream was for full subscribers here on the Substack, but today I’m releasing this fascinating conversation for all to enjoy.
If you don’t know who Chesnutt is, you’re not alone. Chesnutt was a pathbreaking African American novelist and short story writer publishing in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Despite his accomplishments, his work fell into semi-obscurity after his death in 1932. Yet he is arguably the first major African American novelist. A subtle ironist and a significant figure in turn-of-the-century race debates, he was part of the first generation of black Americans to come of age post-Emancipation. His life and work provide a fascinating window into a period—“Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem,” as he calls the era in his last speech—that has received comparatively little attention in the literary history of African American literature.
So why don’t you know who he is? Tess talks John McWhorter and me through his work, his life, and his afterlife, and explain how this great writer fell out of favor and why he’s the object of renewed interest.
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