Black regions of the imagination : African American writers between the nation and the world / Eve E. Dunbar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dunbar, Eve, 1976-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

Ethnology in literature.

Physical Description:

xvii, 212 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2013.

Summary:

Black Regions of the Imagination focuses on the fiction and non-fiction that Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes produced between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Eve Dunbar examines how these African American writers-who lived and traveled outside the United States-helped develop the concept of a "region" of blackness that resists boundaries of genre and geography. Each writer represents-and signifies- blackness in new ways and within the larger context of the world. As they negotiated issues of "belonging," these writers were more critical of social segregation in America as well as increasingly resistant to their expected roles as cultural "translators." Book jacket.

Contents:

Becoming American through ethnographic writing: Zora Neale Hurston and the performance of ethnography

Escape through ethnography: literary regionalism and the image of non-racial alignment in Richard Wright's travel writing

Deconstructing the romance of rthnography: queering knowledge in James Baldwin's Another country

Ethnography of the absurd: Chester Himes' detective fiction and counter-images of Black life

Conclusion: Look down! the Black arts affirmation of place and the refusal to translate.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [173]-203) and index.

ISBN:

9781439909423

1439909423

9781439909430

1439909431

9781439909447

143990944X

OCLC:

785873661