American Body Politics: Race, Gender, and Black Literary RenaissanceBody politics have played a decisive role in American literature, especially in the work of African Americans, whose sensitivity to the tradition of misrepresenting black bodies in American culture has left indelible traces. InAmerican Body Politics Felipe Smith tracks the emergence of particular gender images in association with specific social, political, and economic pressures and explores the impact of interrelated discourses on race, gender, and nation upon the development of African American literature from the turn of the century to the early modern period. Smith focuses on gender images such as the white witch, black madonna, mammy, and white lady and examines the broad utility of body images in the discourse of black national belonging. In response to literary criticism that brackets the politics of representation under the phrase "extra-literary concerns," Smith articulates a theoretical approach that investigates the "extraliterary" as the source of some of the most powerful and enduring figurative and mythical constructs in the black writing tradition. American Body Politics is a remarkable synthesis of historical readings combined with a highly original contribution to the comprehension of racial thought and literary writing. |
Contents
American Body Politics | 3 |
Meanwhile in Black America | 52 |
The Sness of the Mother | 84 |
The White Delilah | 122 |
W E B Du Bois and the Progress of the Black Soul | 199 |
The Quest of the Black Soul | 248 |
The Darkness of the Mother | 276 |
Other editions - View all
American Body Politics: Race, Gender, and Black Literary Renaissance Felipe Smith No preview available - 1998 |
Common terms and phrases
African American American body Autobiography beauty become black Americans black body black female black male black mother black national black soul black Venus black womanhood black women Bles blood body of death body politic Bois's Boisian Chesnutt civilization color line crime cultural dark daughter discourse double-consciousness Du Bois's embodied ethical fear force gender Griggs Griggs's Herbert Aptheker human idea ideal imagined interracial Jim Crow John Johnson kinship literature lynch law lynching's mammy marriage Miscegenation moral mulatto myth mythic narrative Negro novel one-drop rule physical race chastity race difference racial racist Ralph Ginzburg rape Ray Stannard Baker Reconstruction rhetoric ritual sexual Shaler Shufeldt slave slavery Smith social somatic South southern space spiritual striving symbolic tion tradition University Press veil victim W. E. B. Du Bois Washington Wells-Barnett white America white female white male white nation white race white witch white women Williamson woman York Zora
References to this book
Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics ... Ronald L. Jackson No preview available - 2006 |