Chaotic justice : rethinking African American literary history / John Ernest.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ernest, John.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

African Americans--Intellectual life.

African Americans.

African Americans in literature.

Criticism--United States.

Criticism.

United States.

Physical Description:

xii, 316 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2009]

Summary:

What is African American about African American literature? Why identify it as a distinct tradition? John Ernest contends that too often scholars have relied on naïve concepts of race, superficial conceptions of African American history, and the margin-alization of important strains of black scholarship. With this book, he creates a new and just retelling of African American literary history that neither ignores nor transcends racial history.

Ernest revisits the work of nineteenth-century writers and activists such as Henry "Box" Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, and Sojourner Truth, demonstrating that their concepts of justice were far more radical than those imagined by most white sympathizers. He sheds light on the process of reading, publishing, studying, and historicizing this work during the twentieth century. Looking ahead to the future of the field, Ernest offers new principles of justice that grant fragmented histories, partial recoveries, and still-unprinted texts the same value as canonized works. His proposal is both a historically informed critique of the field and an invigorating challenge to present and future scholars.

Contents:

Loosed canons: the race for literary history

Representing chaos and reading race

Truth stranger than fiction: African American identity and (auto)biography

The shortest point between two lines: writing African Americans into American literary history

Choreographing chaos: African American literature in time and space

The story at the end of the story: African American literature and the Civil War

Covenants and communities: the demands of African American literature.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780807833377

0807833371

9780807859834

0807859834

OCLC:

317929521