The Jay B. Hubbell Award is given each year to a scholar who has made
an extraordinary contribution to the study of American literature over
the course of his or her career. In 2010, committee members recognized
Professor Frances Smith Foster for her outstanding work. Members of the
Hubbell Award Committee for 2010 were as follows:
Dana Nelson (Vanderbilt U), 2010 Chair
Mary Loeffelholz, Northeastern University, (2011 Chair)
Shirley Samuels, Cornell University, (2012 Chair)
William L. Andrews, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, (2013
Chair)
Ivy Schweitzer, Dartmouth College, (2014 Chair)
Citation for Professor Frances
Smith Foster from the Award Committee
On behalf of the Award Committee
and the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association,
it is my great pleasure to present the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for
Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies to Frances Smith
Foster. The Hubbell Medal recognizes scholars who have made major
contributions to the contemporary understanding of American
literature. The roster of Hubbell Medal award winners reads like
a who's who of renowned scholars and critics. This year's winner
upholds this high standard, and then some.
Frances Smith Foster is
currently the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women's
Studies at Emory University, where she has served as the English
Department Chair from 2005 to 2008, as well as the Director of Emory's
Institute for Women's Studies. Frances earned her Bachelor's
degree in Education from Miami University in her home state of
Ohio. She took an M.A. from the University of Southern California
and earned her PhD in British and American literature from the
University of California, San Diego in 1976.
Frances began her professorial career
at San Diego State University in 1972, chairing Afro-American Studies
there from 1975 to 1976, serving as an Assistant Dean from 1976 to
1979, and as Coordinator of Special Projects in the Chancellor's Office
from 1979 to 1980. From 1988 to 1994, Frances was professor of
American Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
She moved to Emory in 1996. During her busy and highly visible
career, Frances has authored, edited, or co-edited 13 books; written
scores of articles in numerous key journals; and has served on more
academic committees than anyone should ever have to, unless on
salary. Such work is as necessary as it is underappreciated and
too often unrecognized, so I'm going to mention at least a few of the
high points of Frances's professional leadership roles.
Within the MLA: the Delegate
Assembly; the Division of American Literature and its Executive Board;
the Committee on Academic Freedom, Professional Rights and Professional
Responsibilities, which she chaired; the Division of Ethnic Languages
and Literatures; and a pioneering role in what was once known as the
Afro-American Literature Discussion Group. All this plus three years on
the labor-intensive Executive Council of the MLA from 1995 through 1998.
Frances has played leadership
roles in the National Women's Studies Association, the Philological
Association of the Pacific Coast, of which she was executive director,
the Society for the Study of Women Writers, the Collegium of African
American Research, the College Language Association, the American
Studies Association and the American Literature Association. As for
memberships on editorial boards – another brand of service we all
depend on but rarely recognize adequately – African American Review,
Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature, American Quarterly, Legacy, and
American Literature all can claim the distinction of having had the
name of Frances Smith Foster on their mastheads.
You won't be surprised to learn
that the Hubbell award isn't the first honor that Frances's scholarship
has brought her. Frances has been a National Endowment for the
Humanities Research Fellow, a California State University
Administrative Fellow, a Harvard Divinity School Research Associate, a
Fulbright Senior Fellow, an Honorary Fellow at the University of
Wisconsin's Institute for Research in the Humanities, a Senior Fellow
at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, and a Womanist Scholar in
Residence at the Interdenominational Theological Center in
Atlanta. At the 2009 MLA conference, the Association of
Departments of English conferred on Frances the Francis Andrew March
award for her lifetime contribution to the profession of
literature. The College Language Association has also paid
tribute to Frances's work by awarding her its Creative Scholarship
award.
As a scholar, Frances is
best known for having authored three books, each one a pioneering
volume, as well as a number of influential editions. Her first book,
Witnessing Slavery: The Development
of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives,
published by Greenwood in 1979, was the first thoroughgoing study of a
genre that has become central to re-evaluations of American and African
American literature over the past quarter century. Reading
Witnessing Slavery taught me,
as I was just beginning to try to map the
terrain of early African American writing, that the slave narrative was
much more diverse and experimental than a reading of Douglass or Wells
Brown or Harriet Jacobs would suggest. Frances proved that the
slave narrative was a dynamic and ever-evolving genre of black
self-expression that would sustain the sort of critical exposition and
theoretical analysis that was unheard of when Witnessing Slavery came
out but which is standard nowadays.
In 1993, Frances's second
book, Written By Herself: Literary
Production by African American Women, 1746-1892, appeared from
Indiana University Press. Written
by Herself was the most complete examination ever undertaken of
the multiple literary traditions and cultural interventions of African
American women writing before the twentieth century. Just as Witnessing Slavery gave us the most
authoritative review of the slave narrative up to the time that book
appeared, Written by Herself
quickly became the most reliable guide we had to the literary history
of African American women up to the 1890s.
Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and
Marriage in African America, which came out last year from
Oxford University Press, has been widely and deservedly praised as,
once again, a paradigm-shifting book. As one historian noted,
Frances's "challenging. . . important book," takes on a subject too
often ignored, pathologized, or sentimentalized and then
"demolishes stereotypes about the history of love, sexuality, and
marriage among antebellum African Americans," while definitively
establishing the "complexity, variety, and richness of the intimate
relationships forged by enslaved and free African American women and
men in the past." With its companion anthology, Love and Marriage in Early African America,
which came out in 2007, these two books fill a huge need for a nuanced
and wide-ranging assessment of courtship, love, marriage, and
domesticity in African American cultural and literary history.
One reason I get to deliver this citation this
evening is because Frances and I have worked on several big editing
projects together, including The
Norton Anthology of African American Literature, The Oxford Companion to African American
Literature and The Concise
Oxford Companion to African American Literature. We
experienced our fair share of trials and tribulations working on these
projects, but the only testifyin' I'm going to engage in on this
occasion is to say simply that if you ever have a chance to collaborate
on anything with Frances, you should say yes. The only drawback
you may find is the one I confessed to in a letter I sent to Frances in
the summer of 1996 after she'd sent me the drafts of two long articles
for the Oxford Companion, one on "Diasporic Literature" and the other
on "Class." This is what I wrote:
Dear Frances,
Your articles on DIASPORIC
LITERATURE and CLASS are very impressive. You seem to have been
just the right one to
have written those articles in
the first place. Do you just walk around all the time with all
that information about diasporic
literature in your
head? After I read that article I was depressed for the rest of
the day thinking (again) about all the stuff I don't
know and haven't even heard of in Af Am lit.
I'm very grateful that you were willing to contribute these article to
the
COMPANION and to do so on such short notice.
The Oxford
Companion to African American Literature came out in the fall of
1997, just about a year after Frances wrote those two articles,
originally assigned to other scholars (who shall remain nameless here),
but which Frances took on because we were under the gun to deliver copy
and deliver it fast. Deliver it we did, thanks to Frances's
generosity and hard work.
I consider Frances Foster to be the premier
historian of African American women's writing on the literary and
cultural studies scene today. What undergirds her scholarship and
makes all of her books so original are the following: an engagement
with and respect for not only the canonical but the non-canonical texts
of African American literature from the earliest voices up to now; a
thorough grounding in the African American periodical press as a
cultural institution and a venue for literature; a well-researched
appreciation of the many ways that black Christianity and black
religious literature have shaped and informed the history of African
American writing; and, finally, a wellspring of insight into what
motivated women writers to take up the pen, as well as an uncanny
sensitivity to what their modes of expression signified to female as
well as male readers.
For all these reasons and more that we don't
have time to talk about this evening, Frances, thank you for all you
have taught us and congratulations on winning the 2010 Hubbell Award.
William L. Andrews, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Dana Nelson, Vanderbilt University
Hubbell Acceptance Speech By
Frances Smith Foster
Thank you.
Were it left to me, were this merely a personal moment of triumph,
having said a heartfelt "Thank you," I would seize this medal and sit
down. But, being awarded the Hubbell Medal is not merely a
personal milestone.
I do
take it personally, of course, and I am deeply and profoundly moved by
this honor. I have worked long and hard. And, I have tried to
make a difference in the lives and letters of many people. This
medal, the congratulations I've received, and your presence here
tonight, say that some folk think I've not only succeeded but that I
have made my mark in American Literature. And I'm so happy!
My joy tonight is intensified because despite appearances:
I'll tell you, life for me ain't been no crystal
stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up
And places with no carpet on the stair.1
Did you know
that I started out as a part-time temporary freeway flyer (a.k.a.
"adjunct"); I spent 16 years with a 4-4 teaching load; 6 years at a
public university teaching, publishing, and working very hard to make
African American literature count as more than an elective for English
majors and trying to get more English majors and graduate students of
color? (And here, I must mention my successful collaboration with
Richard Yarborough of UCLA.) Moreover, I had two children – one
during my master's work, one just before I began my PhD studies.
But the blues (as cathartic and instructive as they may be) are not
appropriate songs to sing at an occasion of affirmation and celebration
such as this. Besides, as my good friend, Shereley Anne Williams
wrote in "The Peacock Song"
...if I'm a peacock
my feathers' s'posed to cover
all hurts and if you want to
stay one then you got to keep
that tail from draggin so mines
is always held up sky high. 2
I accept this
award with thanksgiving for the many people – and the "holy" spirits
--who taught me not to wear the grinning lying mask, but to walk with
my head up "for balance and so they can look into my eyes" (Williams,
67). And I in theirs. I give thanks to God and to my family
and friends. I appreciate my sister Cle coming from Ohio and my
daughter Krishna coming from across town.
I realize that
there are many in this room and many more in this profession who
deserve this medal and more. I believe that had some of my
colleagues not worked themselves to death – literally– one of them
would be in this spot tonight. I am honored tonight --in part
--because I am one of the few left standing. I am standing in for
many: Nellie Y. McKay, Barbara Christian, Claudia Tate, Mary
Helen Washington, Kenny J. Williams, Darwin Turner, William Robinson
and others. I am standing here because too many people to mention
have picked me up when I was down and have helped me make a way out of
no way – I send a shout out to Donald Gibson, Thad Davis, Susan
Friedman, Bill Andrews, and Richard Yarbourgh, Paul Lauter, David
Laurence, Elsie B. Adams– especially.
And, perhaps
most important of all, this award symbolizes a professional achievement
for MLA and American Literature Section. My degrees are all in
British and American literature but I have chosen to focus my research
projects on the writings of people who were not on my class
syllabi. (The closest my PhD qualifying exams at University of
Southern California came to black people was a question about William
Faulkner.) My work --on slave narratives, on African American
women writers, on love, marriage and family values in early African
America -- is still not considered by many (most?) to be
"mainstream." But this award says that these and similar subjects
are now considered part of American literature by enough to make a
difference. Tonight, my recognition suggests that our profession
is beginning to acknowledge the importance of scholarship beyond the
monograph, that one doesn't need an Ivy League education to make a
contribution, and that focus on collaboration does not make one
noncompetitive.
Tonight the
profession I chose has chosen me –and I am a peacock with head and tail
held high. Thank you.
