1st Edition

Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-Century African American Writing

By Tania Friedel Copyright 2008
214 Pages
by Routledge

214 Pages
by Routledge

214 Pages
by Routledge

This book engages cosmopolitanism—a critical mode which moves beyond cultural pluralism by simultaneously privileging difference and commonality—in order to examine its particular deployment in the work of several African American writers. Deeply influenced and inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois, the writers closely examined in this study—Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes and Albert... Read more

Credit Lines.  Acknowledgments.  Introduction: Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism  1. Cane’s Betrayal and Jean Toomer’s Untethered Universalism  2. The "Interminable Puzzles" of Race, Class and Gender in the Novels of Jessie Redmon Fauset  3. The Aesthetics of Particularity and the Politics of Integration: The Ways of White Folks and Langston Hughes’s Work with Common Ground in the 1940s  4. The Fine Art Tradition of Albert Murray: Democratic Elitism and Rooted Cosmopolitanism.  Notes.  Selected Bibliography.  Index

Biography

Tania Friedel is a lecturer for the Expository Writing Program and Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where she teaches a course devoted to interrogating ideas of artistic citizenship, the public sphere, and the role of art in the world.