Details

ISBN-10: 1438448341
ISBN-13: 9781438448343
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Publish Date: 07/02/2014
Dimensions: 9.02" L, 5.87" W, 0.64" H

Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives

Paperback

Price: $32.95

Overview

This book explores how African American social and political movements, African American studies, independent scholars, and traditional cultural forms revisit and challenge the representation of the African American as deviant other. After surveying African American history and cultural politics, W. Lawrence Hogue provides original and insightful readings of six experimental/postmodern African American texts: John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire; Percival Everett’s Erasure; Toni Morrison’s Jazz; Bonnie Greer’s Hanging by Her Teeth; Clarence Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure; and Xam Wilson Cartiér’s Muse-Echo Blues. Using traditional cultural and western forms, including the blues, jazz, voodoo, virtuality, radical democracy, Jungian/African American Collective Unconscious, Yoruba gods, black folk culture, and black working class culture, Hogue reveals that these authors uncover spaces with different definitions of life that still retain a wildness and have not been completely mapped out and trademarked by normative American culture. Redefining the African American novel and the African American outside the logic, rules, and values of western binary reason, these writers leave open the possibility of psychic liberation of African Americans in the West.

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Reviews
What makes this latest book unique is its devotion to the possibilities of a distinctive African American subjectivity that is neither subordinated to the white-black binary nor naïve to its historical effects. – American Book Review
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Details

ISBN-10: 1438448341
ISBN-13: 9781438448343
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Publish Date: 07/02/2014
Dimensions: 9.02" L, 5.87" W, 0.64" H
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