Claudia Tate: in memoriam.

Claudia Tate, Professor of English at Princeton University and longtime advisory editor to African American Review, succumbed to small-cell lung cancer in Fair Haven, New Jersey, on 29 July 2002. She was fifty-five years old. Tate was a brilliant scholar of American, women's, and African-American literature. An innovative thinker, she specialized in psychoanalytic literary criticism and cultural studies.

Tate received her bachelor's degree in English and American Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1968. As one of a handful of black women entering the graduate program in the Harvard English department in 1969, she joined a pioneering cohort of scholars at Harvard who laid the groundwork for the field of African-American studies. In English they included Nellie Y. McKay, Arnold Rampersad, and Cheryl Wall. Tate received a Ph.D. in English and American literature and language from Harvard University in 1977. She belonged to the faculty of Howard University for twelve years before joining George Washington University in 1989, and then the Princeton faculty in January 1997.

Claudia Tate's first book, Black Women Writers at Work (1983), a collection of interviews with a broad range of authors, introduced writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Sherley Anne Williams to a wide readership. In her second book, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century (1992), Tate turned her attention to the domestic fiction of African-American women in the post-Reconstruction era. In this critically acclaimed, scrupulously researched, and persuasively argued book, Tate showed that the domestic plots spoke differently to their first readers than to subsequent generations, and she argued that these works validated post-Reconstruction African-American readers' aspirations to citizenship and public virtue. Her third authored book, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (1998), examines five novels from the 1940s and 1950s with no n-black protagonists. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, she shows that authors such as Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright sought means of transcending what Tate calls the "racial protocol" of protest against white oppression in order to consider issues of personal desire that normally lay outside the purview of black writers and their critics. When she fell ill in the summer of 2000, Tate had just completed a fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and was at work on a fourth authored book on the usually obfuscated figure of the black lady through the medium of American film, having retrained herself in film criticism and the rhetoric of the image.

Venturing off beaten paths of scholarship, Claudia Tate turned a piercing gaze on unexpected writers and themes and persuasively employed a methodology rarely encountered in African-American literary criticism. Her legacies are several: to her scholarly field, a far more capacious literary criticism; to her students and colleagues, friendship and professional advancement; to her family and friends, an unforgettable personality and the warmth of permanent commitment.