Reviewer: Gordon Hutner, Professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Re: Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope: New Literary and Critical Essays, ed. Richard Purcell and Henry Veggian You have asked me to assess Purcell and Veggian's proposal for a collection of essays dedicated to the writings of Barack Obama, and I'm happy to comply. The proposal and sample contents you've provided offer sufficient grounds to encourage a contract for this important, overdue project. I think that the project is so long overdue that it is surprising that there has not yet been a selection of critical essays on this scale, though of course there have been several interesting studies of his works already. So it seems to me that the book will meet a need, certainly an ongoing interest, one that will only intensify, I believe, after 2016, at least until President Obama's next book, presumably his meditation on his administration and political career. Purcell and Veggian seem well qualified to perform this task. Purcell's record of interests may be more directly in line with the issues that the collection takes up, while Veggian's is the surer record of wide-ranging interests and productivity. Taken together, they seem to have created a bright and illuminating set of essays, covering a host of concerns that Obama's writings stimulate. If I had to critique its representative character, I would lament that only one woman has been invited, though she is an estimable figure; it also seems to me that the collection might have done more to connect Obama to an African-American literary tradition, though this is not to gainsay the welcome addition of seeing Obama through the prism of John Lowney's excellent contribution on Frank Marshall Davis. I think in a collection like this, it would not be out of place to have a scholar of gender examine the implications for masculinity studies, though it isn't imperative that the editors include such a piece. As they stand, the essays seem venturesome and fresh. Konstantinou's very wisely situates Obama's writing in its late '80s' and early '90s cultural contexts. It's smart, adroit, and forceful, essay that speaks directly to the interests of scholars of contemporary fiction. Li's essay promises to take Obama seriously as a political autobiographer, a subject she has carved out for herself, beyond her manifest virtues as a scholar of twentieth-century African-American writing. I have a great deal of confidence in the impact her argument will make. Lowney's, as I have suggested, offers much to admire in situating Obama specifically in a tradition of African-American radical politics, a very original take on Obama's and perhaps a nice contrast for the editors to draw with Konstantinou's perspective in their introduction. Another pairing that might be highlighted is comprised of essays by Fitzmaurice and Sirvent. Both mean to excavate contexts of Obama's intellectual biography, his connection to Los Angeles literary culture during the formative years of his study at Occidental College, along with his reading of Reinhold Niebuhr. Obviously, there's an unhappy, if unsurprising vagueness in these two scholars' descriptions of their projects. Fitzmaurice will be relying on his ready access to these materials, while Sirvent never seems to focus a thesis but relies on the manifest interest that Christian realist has exerted on the President. There's already something of a bibliography for Sirvent to confront, including a book that also has more relevance for Fitzmaurice than perhaps he is aware: James T. Kloppenberg's Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition, which is the one book every single one of these essays could read with profit, including the editors, but which appears only in a footnote of Lowney's. Conceivably, Borman's and Pease's essays might also serve as a pair. I admire how Borman ingeniously brings his background as an Africanist to bear on Dreams of My Father and the potential interest that Aminatta Forna's 2002 memoir, The Devil that Danced On the Water poses. If Borman's contribution turns out to be more of a comparison-contrast exercise between the two texts, the occasion, I fear, may be squandered. Readers of this volume will be mainly interested in Forna for the light his memoir casts on Obama's encounter with African political history, not as a text in its own right-rightly or wrongly, I don't say. The interesting source of comparison with Pease perhaps lies in the connections that can be educed out of the latter's concern with the overlapping of racial politics and geopolitical issues with the former's interest in postcolonial issues. Pease's contribution is key insofar as it signals the collection's appeal for the (ever-aging) New Americanists, who may, by and large, become the book's core audience. Purcell and Veggian must take a great deal more care in their formal introduction-as I fully expect they will-to emphasize not only the variety, but also the coherence of these various essays. By 'coherence,' however, I do not mean uniformity at all. These essays are coming from several corners of literary studies. There's nothing of interest here for social scientists or religion scholars, including Sirvent's if his analysis does not extend Josephson/Ward study of the presence of Niebuhr in Obama's thought. Nor do I immediately see the interest historians will take, though I do see that scholars of American studies will be engaged. Students of African-American literary and culture will also find the volume useful, but that enthusiasm might stop short without at least one essay firmly rooting Obama's writing in the mainstream of that tradition. (Nothing on Frederick Douglass or Du Bois, for example, unless Li takes readers there.) Granted, Evans et al have already done such a book, in an inconsequential way, but that doesn't entirely relieve the authors of explaining Obama's place in an African-American literary tradition. The rhetorical burden of the introduction is then to focus squarely on what the volume actually does, not on what the editors want to believe about their ambitions for the book. The Konstantinou and Lowney studies suggest that Purcell and Veggian value well-argued and resourceful analyses. I'm confident that Li's contribution, like Pease's, will also be a fully professional performance. I'm less sure about Borman's, which I trust will be about Obama, where the author's training in African writing might lead him away from the goal of bringing this field of study to bear on understanding Obama, for that is the distinct contribution his study can make. If the editors are too laissez-faire about Fitzmaurice and Sirvent, I worry that the volume will not enjoy a true consistency of execution and that its aims will be ill served, its overall achievement alloyed. Even with these risks, I can recommend that your press offer a contract for Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope: New Literary and Critical Essays. No such collection is ever perfect, and Purcell and Veggian are clear-sighted about what such a volume should do. If it's not too late in the process, it would be good add at least one more essay along the lines I've suggested. At any rate, they need to monitor Sirvent, Fitzmaurice, and Borman to make sure their essays are as deft and as polished as the others.
