Yogita Goyal
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781479829590
- eISBN:
- 9781479819676
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479829590.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter collides the idiom of post-blackness with the dominant genre of the neo-slave narrative in contemporary African American literature. This distinct body of work—post-black neo-slave ...
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This chapter collides the idiom of post-blackness with the dominant genre of the neo-slave narrative in contemporary African American literature. This distinct body of work—post-black neo-slave narratives—mines the historical scene of slavery in the mode of satire. Through absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures, post-black satirists expose the contradictions of the insistence on the unending history of slavery amid declarations of a break from previous racial regimes. Viewing satire as the lens through which debates about race and postracialism articulate, the chapter explores how fictions by Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson combat the sentimental template of abolition and neo-abolition by refusing to collapse past and present. The chapter concludes with a look at what might be termed a post-black post-satire, as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) stretches time and space to transform the slave narrative into a flexible portal to practices of exploitation worldwide.Less
This chapter collides the idiom of post-blackness with the dominant genre of the neo-slave narrative in contemporary African American literature. This distinct body of work—post-black neo-slave narratives—mines the historical scene of slavery in the mode of satire. Through absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures, post-black satirists expose the contradictions of the insistence on the unending history of slavery amid declarations of a break from previous racial regimes. Viewing satire as the lens through which debates about race and postracialism articulate, the chapter explores how fictions by Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson combat the sentimental template of abolition and neo-abolition by refusing to collapse past and present. The chapter concludes with a look at what might be termed a post-black post-satire, as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) stretches time and space to transform the slave narrative into a flexible portal to practices of exploitation worldwide.
Steven Belletto
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199826889
- eISBN:
- 9780199932382
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199826889.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, ...
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Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), to less frequently discussed works such as Wright’s own second novel, The Outsider (1953), and John A. Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am! (1967). The chapter demonstrates how African Americans writers dramatized a sense of being caught between the competing systems of control represented by Communism on the one hand, and the promise of American democratic freedom on the other. Tracing an arc from Native Son to The Man Who Cried I Am!, the chapter demonstrates the ever-changing relationship between the individual and political rhetoric by showing how the denial of chance was first attributed to Communists, who in Invisible Man simply want to control African Americans for their own purposes, and then moves finally The Man Who Cried I Am!, which shows that, from a black perspective, American democracy masks a fantasy of complete control.Less
Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), to less frequently discussed works such as Wright’s own second novel, The Outsider (1953), and John A. Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am! (1967). The chapter demonstrates how African Americans writers dramatized a sense of being caught between the competing systems of control represented by Communism on the one hand, and the promise of American democratic freedom on the other. Tracing an arc from Native Son to The Man Who Cried I Am!, the chapter demonstrates the ever-changing relationship between the individual and political rhetoric by showing how the denial of chance was first attributed to Communists, who in Invisible Man simply want to control African Americans for their own purposes, and then moves finally The Man Who Cried I Am!, which shows that, from a black perspective, American democracy masks a fantasy of complete control.
Shelley Ingram
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781496822956
- eISBN:
- 9781496823007
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496822956.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Mythology and Folklore
This chapter looks at the fictional folklorists who appear in the work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead. An interesting pattern emerges when you consider the works of ...
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This chapter looks at the fictional folklorists who appear in the work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead. An interesting pattern emerges when you consider the works of these four writers side-by-side: each of the stories are structured through a metafictive, self-conscious framework, each ask the reader to think critically about notions of authenticity, and each are haunted by ghosts, both figurative and literal. The ghostly is not an arbitrary signifier here. It figures an absence that has something to do with knowledge and text, with literary tourism, and with the inability to ever know, really, the shape of a community’s past, present, or future. This chapter thus argues that the character of the folklorist serves as a metonymic signifier of the absence always present in the representation of cultures.Less
This chapter looks at the fictional folklorists who appear in the work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead. An interesting pattern emerges when you consider the works of these four writers side-by-side: each of the stories are structured through a metafictive, self-conscious framework, each ask the reader to think critically about notions of authenticity, and each are haunted by ghosts, both figurative and literal. The ghostly is not an arbitrary signifier here. It figures an absence that has something to do with knowledge and text, with literary tourism, and with the inability to ever know, really, the shape of a community’s past, present, or future. This chapter thus argues that the character of the folklorist serves as a metonymic signifier of the absence always present in the representation of cultures.
Ridvan Askin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474414562
- eISBN:
- 9781474426947
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474414562.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
The third chapter moves away from the more experimental aesthetics of Castillo’s and Ondaatje’s narratives to incorporate an analysis of a formally non-experimental and realist text in order to show ...
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The third chapter moves away from the more experimental aesthetics of Castillo’s and Ondaatje’s narratives to incorporate an analysis of a formally non-experimental and realist text in order to show that Deleuzian sensations likewise underpin and constitute explicitly representational and verisimilar narration. Tracing the novel’s African American protagonist’s progressive immersion in becoming the chapter draws out how she engages in what Isabelle Stengers has termed speculative constructivism—the facilitation of events—in order to create the future to come. Since the protagonist’s speculative trajectory is created by poetic means it is tantamount to the figuration of the narrative’s very own speculative-creative activity and thus emblematic of narration’s own construction work.Less
The third chapter moves away from the more experimental aesthetics of Castillo’s and Ondaatje’s narratives to incorporate an analysis of a formally non-experimental and realist text in order to show that Deleuzian sensations likewise underpin and constitute explicitly representational and verisimilar narration. Tracing the novel’s African American protagonist’s progressive immersion in becoming the chapter draws out how she engages in what Isabelle Stengers has termed speculative constructivism—the facilitation of events—in order to create the future to come. Since the protagonist’s speculative trajectory is created by poetic means it is tantamount to the figuration of the narrative’s very own speculative-creative activity and thus emblematic of narration’s own construction work.
Shirley Moody-Turner
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617038853
- eISBN:
- 9781621039785
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617038853.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
The book’s conclusion makes an implicit call for a more nuanced genealogy connecting representations of black folklore in the post-Reconstruction era to what are typically considered the more ...
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The book’s conclusion makes an implicit call for a more nuanced genealogy connecting representations of black folklore in the post-Reconstruction era to what are typically considered the more “sophisticated” treatments of folklore in later African American literary and ethnographic works, suggesting a shared set of interests and concerns in writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar, to Zora Neale Hurston, to Ralph Ellison, to Colson Whitehead, and beyond. This approach beckons us to recover another layer in the sophisticated and nuanced ways folklore and African American literature have intersected, not just in the post-Reconstruction period, or even in the Harlem Renaissance period and beyond, but indeed from the very foundations of the African American literary tradition.Less
The book’s conclusion makes an implicit call for a more nuanced genealogy connecting representations of black folklore in the post-Reconstruction era to what are typically considered the more “sophisticated” treatments of folklore in later African American literary and ethnographic works, suggesting a shared set of interests and concerns in writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar, to Zora Neale Hurston, to Ralph Ellison, to Colson Whitehead, and beyond. This approach beckons us to recover another layer in the sophisticated and nuanced ways folklore and African American literature have intersected, not just in the post-Reconstruction period, or even in the Harlem Renaissance period and beyond, but indeed from the very foundations of the African American literary tradition.
Frank de Caro
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617037641
- eISBN:
- 9781617037658
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617037641.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
This book starts from the proposition that folklore—usually thought of in its historical social context as “oral tradition”—is easily appropriated and recycled into other contexts. That is, writers ...
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This book starts from the proposition that folklore—usually thought of in its historical social context as “oral tradition”—is easily appropriated and recycled into other contexts. That is, writers may use folklore in their fiction or poetry, taking plots, as an example, from a folktale. Visual artists may concentrate on depicting folk figures or events, like a ritual or a ceremony. Tourism officials may promote a place through advertising its traditional ways. Folklore may play a role in intellectual conceptualizations, as when nationalists use folklore to promote symbolic unity. The book discusses the larger issue of folklore being recycled into non-folk contexts, and proceeds to look at a number of instances of repurposing. Colson Whitehead’s novel John Henry Days is a literary text that recycles folklore, but which does so in a manner that examines a number of other uses of the American folk figure John Henry. The nineteenth-century members of the Louisiana branch of the American Folklore Society and the author Lyle Saxon in the twentieth century used African American folklore to establish personal connections to the world of the southern plantation and buttress their own social status. The writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about folklore to strengthen his insider credentials wherever he lived. Photographers in Louisiana leaned on folklife to solidify local identity and to promote government programs and industry. Promoters of “unorthodox” theories about history have used folklore as historical document. Americans in Mexico took an interest in folklore for acculturation for tourism promotion.Less
This book starts from the proposition that folklore—usually thought of in its historical social context as “oral tradition”—is easily appropriated and recycled into other contexts. That is, writers may use folklore in their fiction or poetry, taking plots, as an example, from a folktale. Visual artists may concentrate on depicting folk figures or events, like a ritual or a ceremony. Tourism officials may promote a place through advertising its traditional ways. Folklore may play a role in intellectual conceptualizations, as when nationalists use folklore to promote symbolic unity. The book discusses the larger issue of folklore being recycled into non-folk contexts, and proceeds to look at a number of instances of repurposing. Colson Whitehead’s novel John Henry Days is a literary text that recycles folklore, but which does so in a manner that examines a number of other uses of the American folk figure John Henry. The nineteenth-century members of the Louisiana branch of the American Folklore Society and the author Lyle Saxon in the twentieth century used African American folklore to establish personal connections to the world of the southern plantation and buttress their own social status. The writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about folklore to strengthen his insider credentials wherever he lived. Photographers in Louisiana leaned on folklife to solidify local identity and to promote government programs and industry. Promoters of “unorthodox” theories about history have used folklore as historical document. Americans in Mexico took an interest in folklore for acculturation for tourism promotion.
David James
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- July 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198789758
- eISBN:
- 9780191831447
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198789758.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Criticism/Theory
The Introduction elucidates the central theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological arguments in the book. It explains how the coming chapters navigate the representation of consolation by ...
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The Introduction elucidates the central theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological arguments in the book. It explains how the coming chapters navigate the representation of consolation by examining both the formal and the thematic elements of contemporary narrative. The Introduction also situates the contribution Discrepant Solace makes to recent conversations in affect studies, the history of emotions, literary aesthetics, and ethical criticism. It explains the book’s rationale for selection and comparison, while summarizing each of the core chapter’s arguments and focal texts. As a way of offering preliminary examples of the book’s larger metacritical and literary-historical claims, the Introduction integrates close readings of Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave (2013); Christina Crosby’s A Body, Undone (2016); and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016).Less
The Introduction elucidates the central theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological arguments in the book. It explains how the coming chapters navigate the representation of consolation by examining both the formal and the thematic elements of contemporary narrative. The Introduction also situates the contribution Discrepant Solace makes to recent conversations in affect studies, the history of emotions, literary aesthetics, and ethical criticism. It explains the book’s rationale for selection and comparison, while summarizing each of the core chapter’s arguments and focal texts. As a way of offering preliminary examples of the book’s larger metacritical and literary-historical claims, the Introduction integrates close readings of Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave (2013); Christina Crosby’s A Body, Undone (2016); and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016).
Michele Elam
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041587
- eISBN:
- 9780252050244
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041587.003.0015
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
The afterword argues that so-called neo-passing narratives distinctively highlight the performative dimension to racial formation and are, moreover, particularly attentive to the social and political ...
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The afterword argues that so-called neo-passing narratives distinctively highlight the performative dimension to racial formation and are, moreover, particularly attentive to the social and political consequences of race. This essay argues that the desire for passing to be a phenomenon of the past can be problematic in that it wills away the social insights afforded by cultural and literary narratives of passing in the post–Civil Rights era.Less
The afterword argues that so-called neo-passing narratives distinctively highlight the performative dimension to racial formation and are, moreover, particularly attentive to the social and political consequences of race. This essay argues that the desire for passing to be a phenomenon of the past can be problematic in that it wills away the social insights afforded by cultural and literary narratives of passing in the post–Civil Rights era.