Congratulations to Professor Trent Masiki

Congratulations to Professor Trent Masiki! His essay, “The Satyr, the Goddess and the Oriental Cast: Subversive Classicism in ‘The Goophered Grapevine’ and ‘Po’ Sandy,’” has been accepted for publication by the renowned scholarly journal African American Review.

This study amends the prevailing Ovidian conjectures of the first two stories in The Conjure Woman (1899) by Charles W. Chesnutt.  Mr. Masiki reveals new insights about how Chesnutt uses the mythology of classical antiquity to debunk the antebellum and late-19th century social myths of African American intellectual, moral, and civic ineptitude.

Mr. Masiki is an 2014 Fulbright Scholar (Panama) and a professor of English at Quinsigamond Community College.

Charles W. Chesnutt, America's first great Black novelist, was born in 1858. His first short story, "Uncle Peter's House," appeared in the Cleveland News and Herald in 1885. Chesnutt's other novels followed, and he became the first African American author to be published in the Atlantic Monthly, one of the major contemporary literary journals. The title of the story that first appeared in the Atlantic was "The Goophered Grapevine," in which he used Uncle Julius as a bridge between the past and the present realms in order to capture the miseries of the slavery and display them to the contemporary reader.