Gayl Jones, Then and Now

in progress

The long-awaited publication of Gayl Jones’s epic novel Palmares (2021) has been heralded as the author’s return to the literary world following a two-decade absence. Indeed, Jones’s career has been repeatedly framed in terms of Lazarus-like disappearance and resurrection. But how much of Jones’s supposed “disappearance” is less a historical fact and more a symptom of her works’ exceedingly uneven reception? In other words, to what extent did she disappear, and to what extent have we as readers, critics, and scholars made her disappear? Or, to what extent has her work been disappeared?

This Post45: Contemporaries cluster takes this lopsided reception—whereby novels like Corregidora are widely read, taught, and studied while several of Jones’s works of fiction, poetry, and drama remain obscure or out of print—as an opportunity for two broad interventions: first, to reframe the arc of Jones’s career not as a story of death and resurrection but instead as a longstanding project peripheralized by predominant protocols of reception; and second, to refocus attention on Jones’s lesser-studied works like Chile Woman (1974) and Xarque and Other Poems (1985) in light of the release of Palmares and several additional volumes to be published by Beacon Press over the next year.