Arthur F. Thurnau Professor
sgunning@umich.eduOffice Information:
4733 Haven Hall, 1045
734-763-5525
Fields of Study:
American studies; 19th- and 20th-century American literature; African American literature; African diaspora studies; interdisciplinary approaches to literature, femininsm and gender studies, and travel writing
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., UC-Berkeley, 1991Highlighted Work and Publications
Moving Home, Gender, Place, and Travel Writing in the Early Black Atlantic
Sandra Gunning
In Moving Home, Sandra Gunning examines nineteenth-century African diasporic travel writing to expand and complicate understandings of the Black Atlantic. Gunning draws on the writing of missionaries, abolitionists, entrepreneurs, and explorers whose work challenges the assumptions that travel writing is primarily associated with leisure or scientific research. For instance, Yoruba ex-slave turned Anglican bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther played a role in the Christianization of colonial Nigeria. Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a formerly enslaved girl "gifted" to Queen Victoria, traveled...
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Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas
Sandra Gunning, Tera Hunter, and Michele Mitchell
From Brazil to Germany, New York to Ghana, Dialogues of Dispersal examines intersections of gender and sexuality within Afro-diasporic communities.
- Considers communities in Brazil, the Caribbean, Germany, the UK, the US, and West Africa, and how they overlap.
- Contains innovative analyses of knowledge production, globalization, popular culture, identity, colonialism, maternalism, dress, and transnational networks.
- Features interdisciplinary work by both established and emerging scholars.
- Acknowledges the accomplishments...
The Marrow of Tradition
Charles W. Chesnutt, Edited by Nancy Bentely and Sandra Gunning
This teaching edition of Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel about racial conflict in a Southern town features an extensive selection of materials that place the work in its historical context. Organized thematically, these materials explore caste, gender, and race after Reconstruction; postbellum laws and lynching; the 1898 Wilmington riot upon which the narrative is based; and the fin de siecle culture of segregation. The thematic sections are rich with documents such as letters, photographs, editorials, speeches, legal decisions, journalism, and essays from leading periodicals...
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Rape, Race, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912
Sandra Gunning
In the late nineteenth century, the stereotype of the black male as sexual beast functioned for white supremacists as an externalized symbol of social chaos against which all whites would unite for the purpose of national renewal. The emergence of this stereotype in American culture and literature during and after Reconstruction was related to the growth of white-on-black violence, as white lynch mobs acted in “defence” of white womanhood, the white family, and white nationalism. This book investigates American literary encounters with the conditions, processes, and consequences of such violence...
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