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MSU’s Shaffer explores hope, hardship in ‘Black Migration’ fiction

Contact: Sarah Nicholas

STARKVILLE, Miss.—In his latest book, Mississippi ´ķĪķAPP’s African American Studies Director Donald M. Shaffer examines how early 20th-century African American novels captured the promise and challenges faced by Blacks migrating from the rural South to Northern cities.

Published this month by the University Press of Mississippi’s Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies, “Though There Be Giants: The Ghetto Pastoral Mode in Black Migration Novels” focuses on literature from the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age and how writers portrayed Northern cities as both a symbolic promised land and a place of conflict for Black migrants. In his research, Shaffer examines how these novels reflect the tension between hope and hardship that shaped the Great Migration experience.

“These stories of Black migration reveal the tension that defines the American story—that is, the realization that the possibility of reinvention and opportunity often run up against the persistent realities of inequality and exclusion,” said Shaffer, also an MSU English professor. “The Great Migration novels capture both the promise of the North as a place of freedom and the complicated truth that geography alone cannot erase deeply rooted social barriers.”

In the book, Shaffer analyzes how major works of African American literature engage the push and pull between Southern folk culture and the modern, urban North. Through his study of classics in this genre, including “Flight” by Walter White, “Cane” by Jean Toomer and “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, he demonstrates how these texts complicate understandings of race and identity while seeking to define Blackness within the spaces of Northern city life.

Shaffer authored “The Construction of Whiteness,” a 2018 University Press of Mississippi publication, and in 2012 won the Ochillo Award for best published article for his work in The Griot: The Journal of African American Studies.

For more information aboutĖũMSU’sĖũCollege of Arts and SciencesĖũandĖũthe Department of English, visitĖũĖũand . For more about the African American Studies program, visit .

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