Tara Green
We are delighted to be working with award-winning-teacher-mentor-scholar and author Tara Green on her forthcoming books, Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and See Me Naked.
Professor Tara T. Green is an award-winning teacher-mentor-scholar who has degrees in English from Louisiana State University (M.A., Ph.D) and Dillard University (BA). With nearly twenty-five years of teaching experience, she is currently Professor and former Director (2008-2016) of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Her areas of research include Black gender studies, African American autobiographies and fiction (late nineteenth through contemporary), African women’s literature, African American parent-child relationships, and African Americans in the South. Believing that research should explore major issues of the day, she considers how literature reflects current social and political concerns.
She is a prolific interdisciplinary scholar who has published numerous articles, four books and is the editor of two. Her most recently published book, Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song provides an interdisciplinary perspective on African descendants’ resistance to social death during the Middle Passage and in spaces symbolic of the Middle Passage (Ohio State UP, April 27, 2018). Her book A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men (winner of the 2011 Outstanding Scholarship in Africana Studies Award from the National Council for Black Studies), focuses on the impact of fatherlessness from the perspectives of Barack Obama and other Black men.
Dr. Green is also a community-engaged scholar. During the fall of 2021, she co-led UNCG’s Black Lives Matter Triad Collection project, which is an oral history archive of protestors’ and organizers’ interviews complemented by photos and art. She was the lead interviewer of the protestors and trained her students in her Black Lives Matter course to collect the stories of their peers.
Moving beyond the classroom, she has received recognition for her work as a mentor. She is an active member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., co-editor of Mercer University Press’s Voices of the African Diaspora Series, a voting rights activist, and political news junkie.
Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Until now, Dunbar-Nelson has largely been viewed only in relation to her abusive ex-husband, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. This is the first book-length look at this major figure in Black women’s history, covering her life from the post-reconstruction era through the Harlem Renaissance.
Tara T. Green builds on Black feminist, sexuality, historical and cultural studies to create a literary biography that examines Dunbar-Nelson’s life and legacy as a respectable activist – a woman who navigated complex challenges associated with resisting racism and sexism, and who defined her sexual identity and sexual agency within the confines of respectability politics. It’s a book about the past, but it’s also a book about the present that nods to the future.
See Me Naked
Pleasure refers to the freedom to pursue a desire, deliberately sought in order to satisfy the self. Putting pleasure first is liberating. During their extraordinary lives, Lena Horne, Moms Mabley, Yolande DuBois, and Memphis Minnie enjoyed pleasure as they gave pleasure to both those in their lives and to the public at large. They were Black women who, despite their public profiles, whether through Black society or through the world of entertainment, discovered ways to enjoy pleasure. They left home, undertook careers they loved, and did what they wanted, despite perhaps not meeting the standards for respectability in the interwar era. See Me Naked looks at these women as representative of other Black women of the time, who were watched, criticized, and judged by their families, peers, and, in some cases, the government, yet still managed to enjoy themselves. Among the voyeurs of Black women was Langston Hughes, whose novel Not Without Laughter was clearly a work of fiction inspired by women he observed in public and knew personally, including Black clubwomen, blues performers, and his mother. How did these complicated women wrest loose from the voyeurs to define their own sense of themselves? At very young ages, they found and celebrated aspects of themselves. Using examples from these women’s lives, Green explores their challenges and achievements.
Stay tuned for updates!
