Professor Autumn Womack

the way in something like Beloved and even something like Song of Solomon.

She's really interested in, okay, Blue Aside 2.

What is the... I'm interested in the inner life of these characters.

Imagining the things that they were not able to say in that genre, right?

Because it would have either, like...

dissembled the political project or or wasn't you know wasn't in line with it so like their desires and their wants and their interpersonal demands and um their conflicts and their family fights you know the things they liked or where they wanted like where they went to go for a walk things like that right like all the things that make us dynamic individuals you see her building out those worlds and that kind of inner life becomes the subject of her novel so i was able to see that

Yeah.

So I think, yeah, no, that maybe it's not a two-pronged answer.

Because then I was going to say, you know, then I can see how she emerges from this long, long tradition of Black American writing and all the different movements and moments that come up and how it's different than Invisible Man, but also...

you know, responding to it.

So there's this kind of call and response that we see happening, right?

They're all writers are in dialogue with each other.

Yeah, no, I think that's so well put.

And I love the way thinking of it as kind of this living text that's in dialogue.

Like, you know, even there's such kind of a tactile speech quality to the text, right?

Where you can like hear the words.

I know you guys are reading jazz, but like, I mean, jazz is such like an oral text, right?

And I mean, and so you can just kind of hear, right, this long text.

history of language and speech and written speech and everyday speech and that is alive on the pages.

And I think, I mean, one of the things that's so incredible is her insistence that all of these different kinds of texts, for lack of a better word, belong in the novel.