Eversley The Real Negro

The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature
Erscheinungsjahr 2004
ISBN: 978-1-135-88335-5
Verlag: CRC Press
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 132 Seiten

Reihe: Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to that race. Consequently, Paul Laurence Dunbar's Negro dialect poems were prized in the first part of the century because - written by a black man - they were not 'imitation' black, while the dialect performances by Zora Neale Hurston were celebrated because, written by a 'real' black, they were not 'imitation' white. The second half of the century, in its dismissal of material segregation, sanctions a notion of black racial meaning as internal and psychological and thus promotes a version of black racial 'truth' as invisible and interior, yet fixed within a stable conception of difference. The Real Negro foregrounds how investments in black racial specificity illuminate the dynamic terms that define what makes a text and a person 'black', while it also reveals how 'blackness', spoken and authentic, guards a more fragile, because unspoken, commitment to the purity and primacy of 'whiteness' as a stable, uncontested ideal.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Eversley, Shelly

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Black Man, Blackface: The Case of Paul Laurence Dunbar
Chapter Two: Racial Hieroglyphics: Zora Neale Hurston and the Rise of the New Negro
Chapter Three: "Unspoken Words Are Stronger": Narrative Interiority and Racial Visibility in Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha
Chapter Four: Sex and Violence: The Poetics of Black Power
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Shelly Eversley, an Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York, writes on 20th Century African American Literature, race, gender and sexuality theory. She has two forthcoming books, Integration and Its Discontents and Race and Sex: Theorizations of Literature, Culture and Desire (edited with Robert F. Reid-Pharr).