Writing through Jane Crow: race and gender politics in African American literature

2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (03) ◽  
pp. 52-1272-52-1272
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender

“You Got Tuh Go There Tuh Know There”

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-144
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Reluctant Reader

This chapter examines how African American literature models and promotes dual-witnessing by underscoring the necessity of primary witnessing and impelling the reluctant reader to witness the narrative experience secondarily. To explore this doubly testimonial orientation, the chapter analyzes two key texts: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)—in which the life-narrative of the protagonist, Janie, is witnessed dually through conversation with her friend Pheoby—and Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), which likewise embraces dual-witnessing and additionally moves the conversation from two speakers of the same community, race, and gender (e.g., Janie and Pheoby in Their Eyes Were Watching God) to many speakers who partake in an epic-scaled, multiethnic, multi-gendered, and multi-classed communal witnessing. In reading these novels together, the chapter considers how Their Eyes Were Watching God witnesses primarily to Jubilee, which in turn witnesses the earlier work secondarily and intertextually.

“To Be Free to Say So”

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-76
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender

This chapter examines Afra-American emancipatory narratives as fundamentally testimonial literature, foundational to ensuing readings of trauma, blackness, and womanhood. Specifically, the chapter analyzes Sojourner Truth’s Narrative (1850), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes (1868) to consider how black and female speakers witness through nineteenth-century emancipatory narratives. The chapter also considers an Afra-American narrator’s (in)ability to testify to her personal experience of the prevalence of sexual abuse in American slavery and the misogynoir it reflects; how the intrusion of an amanuensis, editor, or pseudonym into a narrative affects its witnessing potential; and how gender and race work together and against each other to help and hinder witnessing. Finally, the chapter considers how contemporary readers may respond to these narratives, laying a foundation for succeeding readings of trauma and reception theory and race and gender studies in (African) American literature.

The Unspeakable Speculative, Spoken

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 564-574
Author(s):  
Rebecca Wanzo
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Racial Representations ◽  
The Us ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Paradigm Shifting

Abstract Exploring various absences—what is or should not be represented in addition to the unspeakable in terms of racial representations—is the through line of three recent books about race and speculative fictions. Mark C. Jerng’s Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (2018) argues racial worldmaking has been at the center of speculative fictions in the US. In Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (2017), Kristen Lillvis takes one of the primary thematic concerns of black speculative fictions—the posthuman—and rereads some of the most canonical works in the black feminist literary canon through that lens. Lillvis addresses a traditional problem in the turn to discussions of the posthuman and nonhuman, namely, what does it mean to rethink black people’s humanity when they have traditionally been categorized as nonhuman? Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2018) speaks to the absence of a framework of disability in African American literature and cultural criticism. In addressing absence—or, perhaps silence—Schalk offers the most paradigm-shifting challenge to what is speakable and unspeakable: the problem of linking blackness with disability and how to reframe our treatment of these categories.

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Sojourner Truth ◽  
Elizabeth Keckley ◽  
Critical Conversation ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
And Gender

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women. Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or “witnessing”—trauma to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature, articulating a theory of reading (or “dual-witnessing”) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. The book then places its original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in American literature. This book also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma’s innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-40
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Criticism

The introduction explicates theories of dual-witnessing and Venn liminality and introduces the reader to the terminology the author developed to address readerly engagement of (African) American traumatic and testimonial literature. The introduction also explains how the author’s modes of reading trauma intersect with American literature, critical race theory, and gender criticism and unpacks what (and how) this Venn conversation contributes to the fields of trauma, race, gender, and reception studies and (African) American literature.

Dick Gregory, Moms Mabley, and Redd Foxx

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
Critical Form ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Dick Gregory

This chapter links the development of comic rage in African American literature to similar and perpendicular changes in stand-up comedy. While Dick Gregory embodies the convergence of the civil rights movement and the emergence of stand-up as a critical form of expression, this chapter also traces influential figures like Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx to identify the elements from which Gregory pulls in his deployment of comic rage. Mabley’s embrace of community allowed her to challenge patriarchal assumptions about sexual and gender relations while Foxx’s performance of, what I call, the Comic Bad Nigger produces a tone of fearlessness that Gregory imbeds in his act. Gregory’s ability to maintain the balance of both elements creates a space where he and his audience constructively explored race in a way that mirrored the push for integration and equality.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document