Christa Buschendorf

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Jahrgang 62 (2018), Ausgabe 4, Seite 567 - 584

The extent to which the African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois was a Marxist is a highly controversial issue in Du Boisian scholarship. The following paper argues that he seriously grappled with Marxism and socialism throughout his life. This article’s focus is on the much-neglected trilogy of historical novels, ‘The Black Flame’, written in the 1950s. Designed as a sequel to his renowned Marxist revisionist study ‘Black Reconstruction’ (1935), Du Bois’s ambitious narrative project covers the eight decades of American history between 1876 and the mid-1950s. Using “the method of historical fiction,” Du Bois creates highly complex texts that combine various literary subgenres and styles with essayistic and scientific prose to offer a nonorthodox Marxian economic perspective on U.S. and international history. The three novels, ‘The Ordeal of Mansart’ (1957), ‘Mansart Builds a School’ (1959), and ‘Worlds of Color’ (1961), tell the life story of the black educator Manuel Mansart and his extended family. In a wide-ranging educational process meant to be shared by the reader, the protagonist eventually overcomes his provincial view of the “Negro problem” and gains a clear understanding of the role of the colored peoples of the world in global capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

Christa Buschendorf

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Jahrgang 62 (2017), Ausgabe 2, Seite 213 - 234

In her early documentary poetry of the 1930s, the Jewish American poet, writer, and political activist Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) dealt with two famous cases of social injustice, the Gauley Bridge mining disaster where hundreds of workers died owing to unsafe working conditions (‘The Book of the Dead’), and the lawsuit of the Scottsboro Nine, in which nine young black men were falsely accused of having raped two white women (“The Trial”). On the basis of a radical relational poetics that poses a poetic process built on a close interrelation between poet, poem, and reader, a process, moreover, in which the reader is redefined as “witness,” Rukeyser generates poetic spaces of justice. In a brief discussion of ‘The Book of the Dead’ followed by a close reading of “The Trial,” this article shows how Rukeyser—drawing on the analogy between judicial procedures of witnessing and judging in the legal courtroom and multiple acts of witnessing and judging in the court of poetry—conducts retrials that reveal the severe injustice of the official verdicts in these cases, highlight the dreadful suffering of the victims and, in the end, call for a state of higher justice.

Christa Buschendorf

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Jahrgang 61 (2016), Ausgabe 1, Seite 9 - 9

Philipp Schweighauser, Johannes Fehrle, Frank Gado, Nele Sawallisch, Kurt Müller, Joanne van der Woude, Julia Roth, Wolfgang Hochbruck, Günter Leypoldt, Annette G. Aubert, Christa Buschendorf, Maria Daxelbichler, Gerd Hurm

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Jahrgang 59 (2015), Ausgabe 3, Seite 447 - 447