About
V Efua Prince has been awarded a 2023-2024 Humanities Center Faculty Fellow to complete her manuscript titled, Laundry: How dirt, water, and cleaning clothes became the real work of America, which explores laundry as metonymy, in order to understand critical aspects of African American women’s historical relationship to home, family, work, and industry. The central questions guiding her research seek to unpack the dynamics of black family life. Prince’s writing is rooted in the humanities and encompasses both creative and scholarly arenas. Her work often takes an interdisciplinary form as history, poetry, drama, and performance, in order to transform the history of black women into political art.
Her current work represents a refinement of themes she has been considering for more than 20 years, evident in both Burnin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature (2005), which considers the way that five canonical texts reflect the African American quest for home, and Daughter’s Exchange (2018), a hybrid text that utilizes the vernacular to represent the African American woman’s encounter with the intellectual marketplace.
Prince received her PhD from the University of Michigan in English Language and Literature after completing a doctoral thesis titled Finding a Place of My Own: Home and the Paradox of Blues Expressiveness. She is the author of “Amita,” included in The Other Anthology—Not White/Straight/Male/Healthy Enough: Being “Other” in the Academy, “On Metaphor,” part of the collection The Science of Story: The Brain on Creative Nonfiction, three plays—Waterbearers, Period., and Rhobert—a limited series podcast titled, Presenting Evidence that God Still Loves Women and Writers, and numerous other creative works including “June,” which represents the interconnectedness of rape with global and historical factors.
Prince is a professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University and has served as a director of Black Studies at Allegheny College, the Avalon Professor of Humanities at Hampton University, a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute, and a fellow at Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Center.
Featured Work
Burnin' Down the House: Home in African American Literature
Home is a powerful metaphor guiding the literature of African Americans throughout the twentieth century. While scholars have given considerable attention to the Great Migration and the role of the northern city as well as to the place of the South in African American literature, few have given specific notice to the site of "home." And in the twenty years since Houston A. Baker Jr.'s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature appeared, no one has offered a substantial challenge to his reading of the blues matrix.
Burnin' Down the House creates new and sophisticated possibilities for a critical engagement with African American literature by presenting both a meaningful critique of the blues matrix and a careful examination of the place of home in five classic novels: Native Son by Richard Wright, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, and Corregidora by Gayl Jones.
