Afro Realisms And The Romances Of Race

From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.

Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.

In this insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, examining the relationship between film, race and culture. Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination.

Theories of Race and Racismis an important and innovative collection that brings together the work of scholars who have helped to shape the study of race and racism as a historical and contemporary phenomenon. The Reader'scontributons have been chosen to reflect the different theoretical perspectives and to help readers gain a feel for the changing terms of the race and racism debate over time. Theories of Race and Racismis divided into the following main sections: Origins and Transformations Sociology, Race and Social Theory Racism and Anti-Semetism Colonialism, Race and the Other Feminism, Difference and Identity Changing Boundaries and Spaces The editors go futher to shed light on the relatively new areas of interest that are likely to attract attention in years to come. Contributors include; Theodor Adorno, K. Anthony Appiah, Michael Banton, Zygmunt Bauman, Ruth Benedict , Homi Bhabha, Chetan Bhatt, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Avtar Brah, Hazel Carby, Barbara Christian, Oliver C. Cox, Richard Dyer, Frantz Fanon, Ruth Frankenberg, Sander Gilman, Paul Gilroy, David T. Goldberg, Stuart Hall, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Max Horkheimer, Winthrop Jordan, Michael Keith, Anne McClintock, Kobena Mercer, Robert Miles, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, George Mosse, Gunnar Myrda, Robert Park, John Rex, John Solomos, Stephen Steinberg, Ann Laura Stoler, Tzvetan Todorov, Russo and Lourdes Torres, Patrica Williams, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Howard Winant, Lola Young, Slavoj Zizek.

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the fantastical, Ewing takes us from the streets of Chicago to an alien arrival in an unspecified future, deftly navigating boundaries of space, time, and reality with delight and flexibility.

This study is an addition to the growing body of scholarly analysis examining the Afro-American contribution. It is based on the premise that in the last 25 years the traditional canon of American literature excluded important minority authors. Proceeding chronologically from William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), to experimental novels of the 1980s, Bell comments on more than 150 works, with close readings of 41 novelists. His remarks are framed by an inquiry into the distinctive elements of Afro-American fiction. ISBN 0-87023-568-0 : $25.00.

Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel restores to its rightful place a body of American literature that has long been overlooked, dismissed, or misjudged. This insightful reconsideration of nineteenth-century African-American fiction uncovers the literary artistry and ideological complexity of a body of work that laid the foundation for the Harlem Renaissance and changed the course of American letters. Focusing on the trope of passing -- black characters lightskinned enough to pass for white -- M. Giulia Fabi shows how early African-American authors such as William Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, James Weldon Johnson, Frances E. W. Harper, and Edward A. Johnson transformed traditional representations of blackness and moved beyond the tragic mulatto motif. Celebrating a distinctive, African-American history, culture, and worldview, these authors used passing to challenge the myths of racial purity and the color line. Fabi examines how early black writers adapted existing literary forms, including the sentimental romance, the domestic novel, and the utopian novel, to express their convictions and concerns about slavery, segregation, and racism. She also gives a historical overview of the canon-making enterprises of African-American critics from the 1850s to the 1990s and considers how their concerns about crafting a particular image for African-American literature affected their perceptions of nineteenth-century black fiction.

In Approximate Gestures, Anthony Stewart argues that the writing of Percival Everett, the acclaimed author of Erasure and more than twenty other works of fiction, compels readers to retrain their thinking habits and to value uncertainty. Stewart maintains that Everett’s fiction challenges its interpreters to question their assumptions, consider the spaces in between categories, and embrace the potential of a larger, more uncertain world in an effort to confront bigotry and similarly limiting patterns of thought. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Stewart proposes that their notion of the schizorevolutionary figure captures the in-between status of many of Everett’s characters as they refuse the constraints of the binary, categorical structures that govern so much of human life. Approximate Gestures engages specifically with the vexed question of discussing race in Everett’s fiction. Stewart frames the stakes of analyzing such subject matter in the writing of an African American novelist whose work rigorously questions critical approaches to race. Requiring readers to engage with black males who are hydrologists, ranchers, college professors, romance novelists, and in one case, a toddler, means entering a world released from habitual frames of reference. Through an examination of a broad selection of novels, Stewart demonstrates the extent to which Everett’s characters inhabit “infinite spaces in between conventional categories” and understand themselves as subjects attempting to navigate social and psychological worlds. Approximate Gestures: Infinite Spaces in the Fiction of Percival Everett encourages readers and critics to think more deeply about how they position themselves in and engage with the world around them. As one of the first books of literary criticism devoted to Everett’s fiction, Stewart’s pathbreaking study models a method for reading the formidable body of work being produced by a major contemporary writer.