The Black female body in American literature and art : performing identity / Caroline A. Brown.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brown, Caroline A., 1967-

Series:

Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature ; 5.

Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American fiction.

American fiction--African American authors.

American fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

American fiction--Women authors.

African American women novelists--20th century--Aesthetics.

African American women novelists.

Art and literature--United States.

Art and literature.

Aesthetics.

United States.

Physical Description:

xvi, 289 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Routledge, 2012.

Summary:

"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 are bound to such contemporary, postmodern visual artists as Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Betye Saar, and Faith Ringgold. While the artists and authors rely on radically different media--photos, collage, video, and assembled objects, as opposed to words and rhythm--both sets of intellectual activists insist on the primacy of the black aesthetic. Both assert artistic agency and cultural continuity in the face of the oppression, social transformation, and cultural multiplicity of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book examines how African-American performative practices mediate the tension between the ostensibly de-racialized body politic and the hyper-racialized black, female body, reimagining the cultural and political ground that guides various articulations of American national belonging. Brown shows how and why black women writers and artists matter as agents of change, how and why the form and content of their works must be recognized and reconsidered in the increasingly frenzied arena of cultural production and political debate."--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

1 The Poetics of Late Capitalism and the Black Cultural Imaginary: Revising Modernity's Archive through Postmodern Praxis 19

2 A Complicated Anger: The Performative Body as Postmodern Bricolage 32

3 The Haunted Echo and the Riddle of the Word: The Black Musical Tradition as the Renegotiation of Identity in Lorna Simpson, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison 74

4 When the Circle Has Been Broken and No Words Can Heal the Pain: Possession-Performance as Ritual Mourning in Carrie Mae Weems, Paule Marshall, and Edwidge Danticat 108

5 The Silenced Tongue, a Rebellious Art: The Body as Tableau in Betye Saar, Gloria Naylor, and Martha Southgate 148

6 The Scopic and the Scene: The Aesthetics of Spectatorship and the Destabilization of the Racial Gaze in Kara Walker, Andrea Lee, and Jamaica Kincaid 191.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [257]-272) and index.

ISBN:

9780415895507

0415895502

OCLC:

698324479