1st Edition

The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art Performing Identity

By Caroline Brown Copyright 2012
308 Pages
by Routledge

326 Pages
by Routledge

308 Pages
by Routledge

This book examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to re-present the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Brown considers how the writings of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Andrea Lee, Gloria Naylor, and Martha Southgate... Read more

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Gaps and Contradictions: Righting the Black Body in the White Text 1: The Poetics of Late Capitalism and the Black Cultural Imaginary: Revising Modernity’s Archive through Postmodern Praxis 2: A Complicated Anger: The Performative Black Body as Postmodern Bricolage 3: When the Circle Has Been Broken and No Words Can Heal the Pain: Possession-Performance as Ritual Mourning 4: The Haunted Echo and the Riddle of the Word: the Black Musical Tradition as the Renegotiation of Identity 5: The Scopic and the Scene: Performance, Performativity, and the Destabilization of the Racial Gaze 6: The Silenced Tongue, a Rebellious Art: the Body as Tableau Notes Bibliography Index

Biography

Caroline Brown is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Montreal. She specializes in African-American and diasporic literature, 20th century U.S. literature, and women’s studies. Her articles have appeared in African American Review, Obsidian III, NWSA Journal, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.