Re-Inscription of Black History/Body in Morrison's Beloved and Paradise

This article contends how Toni Morrison has used her black fiction to reject the dominant conceptions of reality and truth constructed by the white pahllogocentric discourses that tended to perpetuate white power interests. The poststructuralist assumption that knowledge and reality are socially constructed phenomenon provides useful insight into Morrison's narrative strategies and helps understand how, on one hand, she represents the ways the history of the black Africans had been badly disfigured in the white discourse resulting in the construction of the negative stereotypes of the black people as barbarians, savages, and uncivilized people whose mythical history and social values were invalidated as inauthentic and savage that needed the enlightening intervention of the white Europeans and, on the other hand, apart from revealing the discursive facts that control reality formation, she disrupts and displaces dominant and oppressive white knowledges.

Fugitive Slave, Fugitive Novelist: The Narrative of James Williams (1838)

This essay argues for reading a discredited slave narrative—the Narrative of James Williams (1838)—as an early black novel. Reading this narrative as a founding black novel à la Robinson Crusoe complicates the genealogy and theoretical parameters of literary criticism about early US black fiction. Such a reading revises accounts about the emergence of the third-person fictive voice inaugurated by Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown in the 1850s. It also offers a new understanding of the antislavery movement’s quest for authenticity. More importantly, reading NJW as novelistic fiction illustrates how a fugitive slave might narrativize muddied textual politics and effectively challenge the reparative vision with which we theorize the genres and politics of early African American literary texts.

From the Freaks of Freaknik to the Freaks of Magic City

This chapter argues that funk produces mythologies about the body, labor, leisure, and pleasure, and that these occur in music as well as in black fiction, art, and performance centered on the potential force or energy that excites or that neutral sexual pleasures might yield. Adding to Tony Bolden's “Groove Theory: A Vamp on the Epistemology of Funk,” where he argues that the sensing techniques that black dancers employ have been central to innovations in black musicianship generally, the chapter discusses how funk's sensing techniques innovate sexual cultures as sites of memory. It brings three disciplines together—literature, performance, and dance—to theorize nonhuman agency in the street party Freaknik, as well as black strip clubs.