Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay
Shanna Greene Benjamin
University of North Carolina Press
McKay is best known for coediting the canon-making Norton Anthology of African American Literature with Henry Louis Gates Jr., which helped secure a place for the scholarly study of Black writing that had been ignored by white academia. But after her passing, new details about McKay's life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her. Shanna Greene Benjamin examines McKay's path through the professoriate to learn about the strategies, sacrifices, and successes of contemporary Black women in the American academy. Benjamin shows that McKay's secrecy was a necessary tactic that a Black, working-class woman had to employ to succeed in the white-dominated space of the American English department. Benjamin brings together McKay's private life and public work to expand how we think about Black literary history and the place of Black women in American culture.