Congratulations to Dr. Jean Lutes, whose article, "A Queer Tale of Two Endings: Alice Dunbar-Nelson and 'His Heart's Desire,'" was just published in J19, a scholarly journal for nineteenth-century Americanists.
Combining archival research with childhood and Queer studies, Dr. Lutes's essay analyzes multiple versions of "His Heart's Desire," an extraordinary but little-known short story by Alice Dunbar-Nelson about a racially unmarked boy who wants a blonde, blue-eyed doll. While the story was originally meant to be part of a never-finished story collection, it has seen print separately in two different versions, one published during Dunbar-Nelson's lifetime and one posthumously. In this essay, Dr. Lutes argue that the story's two published versions, when read together, make a devastating case for the damage wrought by global imperialism and its fetishizing of white femininity. Dr. Lutes's comparative textual study also indicates Dunbar-Nelson may have engaged in savvy self-censorship that ultimately contributed to her relative obscurity in the current day, even among scholars of African American studies and Queer studies.
Be sure to check out Dr. Lutes's acknowledgments, which names the team of six students, undergraduate and graduate, who helped her with this project: Gia Beaton, Michael DeAngelo, John Flynn, Lucy Mileto, Elena Patton, and Jackie Solomon.
