Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature

2003 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Michael Hardin ◽  
Carol E. Henderson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Body

Losing Manhood

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-82
Author(s):  
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Black People ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Self ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Racial Hierarchy

Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative has been central to interpretations that read African American literature through the framework of a petition for human recognition. Douglass, arguably the nineteenth century’s most iconic slave, grounds his critique of slavery in natural law. However, his later speeches problematize his commitment to the natural rights tradition by disrupting its racially exclusive conception of being and challenging the animal abjection that is foundational to its ontology. Toni Morrison’s Beloved recalls rhetorical strategies, such as appeals to sentimentality and the sovereign “I,” employed by Douglass that diagnose racialization and animalization as mutually constitutive modalities of domination under slavery. Chapter 1 examines how we might read Morrison as well as gendered appeals to discourses of the Self rooted in religio-scientific hierarchy, as both discourses have historically recognized black humanity and included black people in their conceptualization of “the human,” but in the dissimulating terms of an imperial racial hierarchy. Beloved extends Douglass’s intervention by subjecting animality’s abjection to further interrogation by foregrounding nonhuman animal perspective, destabilizing the epistemological authority of enslaving modernity, including its gendered and sexual logics. By doing so, Beloved destabilizes the very binaristic and teleological epistemic presumptions that authorize the black body as border concept.

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

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