Polite, Carlene Hatcher (1932– )
One of the most original and, until recently, least-
read major writers of her generation, Carlene
Hatcher Polite was born on August 28, 1932, in
Detroit, Michigan. She attended Sarah Lawrence
College in New York and later studied at the Mar-
tha Graham School of Contemporary Dance be-
fore embarking on a successful career as a dancer.
In the early 1960s Polite became extremely active
in the burgeoning black CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT,
eventually organizing the Northern Negro Lead-
ership conference in 1963. In 1964 Polite moved
to Paris, where she stayed until 1971. During her
time in France, Polite’s primary interest shifted
from dance to literature, and she began work on
her first novel, The Flagellants, which was origi-
nally published in French in 1966; it was published
in English by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1967. Po-
lite’s second novel, Sister X and the Victims of Foul
Play, appeared in 1975. In 1971 Polite accepted a
position as associate professor of English at the
State University of New York at Buffalo, where she
would later be promoted to full professor.
Of the African-American novelists who began
publishing in the late 1960s, Polite is second only
to ISHMAEL REED in her seemingly total commit-
ment to formal experimentation and her willing-
ness to work outside of and contest the essentially
realist conventions to which most black novelists
of the time adhered. Unlike Reed, however, Po-
lite’s political agenda and convictions are always
manifest. Each of Polite’s novels uses avant-garde
techniques to explore the cultural and emotional
politics of American and international racism and
the difficult particulars of African-American life
and gender relations.
The Flagellants unfolds as an intensively ex-
tended presentation of the discursive battles of the
heroine, the tellingly named Ideal, and her lover,
Jimson, as they attempt to find some common
ground on which they can build the kind of lov-
ing and mutually satisfying relationship that they
seem to both desire and dread. Deploying long and
often disorienting theatrical monologues, as well
as internal musings that serve as corrective coun-
terpoints to their ravings, the couple lacerate each
other with historically inflected accounts of the
damage that they and, by implication, all African-
American men and women, do to each other. Po-
lite’s point seems to be that, by refusing to attend
to the reality of their similarities and differences
and the necessity of a united front in their struggle
against a white world committed to the eradica-
tion of black humanity and self-respect, black men
and women can meet only as “flagellants.”
Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play offers a
more emotionally measured and playful consider-
ation of many of the same issues. With an almost
burlesque linguistic exuberance and formal dar-
ing, the novel presents a day in the life of the expa-
triate black American Abyssinia and her friend and
sometime lover Willis B. Black (Black Will) as, over
a breakfast of grits in her Paris apartment, they re-
member the life and attempt to piece together the
truth of the death of their friend, the celebrated
black dancer Arista Prolo, or Sister X.
In part because of the critical attention that has
been accorded African-American women’s fiction
over the last two decades and the republication of
The Flagellants by Beacon Press in 1987, in recent
years there has been a resurgence of interest in Po-
lite’s work. This renewed attention will no doubt
be greatly bolstered by the appearance of the two
novels that she is purported to have been working
on since the publication of her last novel in 1975.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Coles, Robert. Black Writers Abroad: A Study of Black
American Writers in Europe and Africa. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1999.
Dubey, Madhu. Black Women Novelists and the Na-
tionalist Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1994.
Reid, Margaret A. “The Diversity of Influences on
Carlene Hatcher Polite’s The Flagellants and Sister
X and the Victims of Foul Play.” Connecticut Re-
view 18 (Spring 1966): 39–50
Terry RowdenPowell, Kevin (1970– )
Considered one of the most prolific voices of the
hip-hop generation, Kevin Powell has producedPowell, Kevin 417