UNE professor delivers article on legacy of early 20th-century Black author
Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health in the University of New England School of Arts and Humanities and 2021-2022 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has published a journal article based on her recent sabbatical research.
The publication, titled “Dora Mitchell/Dolores Michel (1891–1970),” is an analytical profile of an author who is almost entirely unknown but whose life story and diverse creative output shed substantial light on Black women’s writing in early twentieth-century Los Angeles.
The profile, which introduces Mitchell to the world, is accompanied by a reprint, edited by Tuttle, of Mitchell’s courtroom murder mystery, “The Shadowed Witness,” which appeared serially in LA’s premiere Black newspaper, the California Eagle, in the summer of 1923; this month’s re-publication thus celebrates the story’s centenary. This work appears in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, but both the profile and the reprint are being offered free without a subscription by the University of Nebraska Press at the above links.
Mitchell and her ancestors are nearly invisible in the historical record, and most traces of her life, along with a portion of her work, have crumbled into dust. Yet, Tuttle argues that “their lives mattered: the experiences of Mitchell and her family are an important part of American history, Black history, women’s history, and the history of the US West.”
Moreover, Tuttle explains that recovering Mitchell’s creative work (which appeared in silent films, newspaper inserts, pulp magazines, and local theater – all ephemeral venues) “helps substantially to expand researchers’ expectations about what constitutes Black women writers’ historical archive.”
That is, Tuttle said, “it prods us to rethink where to look, and what to look for, when seeking out Black women’s lives and work in the West before 1930.”
Tuttle spoke about the research process for this project in her Ludcke Lecture earlier this year.