Writing through Jane Crow : race and gender politics in African American literature / Ayesha K. Hardison.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hardison, Ayesha K., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

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

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

African American women in literature.

Racism in literature.

Sex discrimination in literature.

American literature--Women authors.

Physical Description:

xii, 281 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Charlottesville ; London : University of Virginia Press, [2014]

Summary:

In Writing through Jane Crow, Ayesha Hardison examines African American literature and its representation of black women during the pivotal but frequently overlooked decades of the 1940s and 1950s. At the height of Jim Crow racial segregation-a time of transition between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement and between World War II and the modern civil rights movement-black writers also addressed the effects of "Jane Crow," the interconnected racial, gender, and sexual oppression that black women experienced. Hardison maps the contours of this literary moment with the understudied works of well-known writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright as well as the writings of neglected figures like Curtis Lucas, Pauli Murray, and Era Bell Thompson. By shifting her focus from the canonical works of male writers who dominated the period, the author recovers the work of black women writers. Hardison shows how their texts anticipated the renaissance of black women's writing in later decades and initiates new conversations on the representation of women in texts by black male writers. She draws on a rich collection of memoirs, music, etiquette guides, and comics to further reveal the texture and tensions of the era. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: defining Jane Crow

At the point of no return: a native son and his Gorgon muse

Gender conscriptions, class conciliations and the bourgeois blues aesthetic

"Nobody could tell who this be": black and white doubles and the challenge to pedestal femininity

"I'll see how crazy they think I am": pulping sexual violence, racial melancholia, and healthy citizenship

Rereading the construction of womanhood in popular narratives of domesticity

The audacity of hope: an American daughter and her dream for cultural hybridity

Epilogue: refashioning Jane Crow and the black female body.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780813935928

081393592X

9780813935935

0813935938

OCLC:

862347694