A Study Guide for Andrea Lee's "New African"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Andrea Lee's "New African," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535829458

Book preview

13

New African

Andrea Lee

1983

Introduction

New African is a short story by Andrea Lee about a ten-year-old African American girl confronting the ritual of baptism in her family's Philadelphia church in the early 1960s. First published in the New Yorker in 1983, New African became the foundation for a series of vignettes in the same young woman's life, which together were published as the novel Sarah Phillips in 1984. The novel as a whole met with uncertain responses among reviewers and in scholarly circles. Academics have noted that many of their students feel uncomfortable with the text, largely because the narrator fails to live up to conventional expectations for an African American protagonist. Rather than solidifying her black identity in the face of discrimination or oppression in the course of the novel, the light-skinned Sarah distances herself from her black identity, and she seems complicit with discriminatory attitudes.

Appearing as the second chapter of Sarah Phillips, New African comes first chronologically and thus delves deepest into the origins of Sarah's ambivalent attitude toward her blackness. However, this story is as much about religion as about race. Sarah's father is the pastor at Philadelphia's New African Baptist Church, and her aunts and other church ladies have begun pressuring her to get baptized. The story details a defining episode in Sarah's process of maturing into a freethinking individual. New African first appeared in the New Yorker issue of April 25, 1983, under the author's married name at the time, Andrea Lee Fallows. In that version, the protagonist's name is Sarah Ashley. Presenting a nuanced reflection on the role of religion in an adolescent's life, New African is especially appropriate for young adults. Sarah Phillips was republished in 1993 with an insightful foreword by Valerie Smith as part of the Northeastern Library of Black Literature series.

Author Biography

Lee was born in 1953 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where her mother was an elementary-school teacher and her father was a Baptist minister. She had one brother. When Lee was still young, the family moved to the city's suburbs. Her parents were very active in the civil rights movement; they marched in Washington, DC, and Birmingham, Alabama; participated in boycotts in Philadelphia; and through the church operated fellowship weekends, youth clubs, and work camps to support the African American community.

Lee was the only black girl at a summer camp she attended, where the white girls ostracized her with racist rhymes, and she was one of the first two African American students to attend her suburban preparatory school. There, even when fellow students did not treat her with outright prejudice, they generally excluded her, and she was regarded dismissively, as if she did