The twenty-first century African American novel and the critique of whiteness in everyday life : blackness as strategy for social change / E. Lâle Demirtürk.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Demirtürk, Emine Lâle, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American fiction.

American fiction--African American authors.

American fiction--21st century--History and criticism.

African Americans--Intellectual life--21st century.

African Americans.

White people in literature.

African Americans in literature.

African Americans--Intellectual life.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xxxvi, 277 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, [2016]

Summary:

This book examines the post-9/11 African American novels, developing a new critical discourse on everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in the racial context of post-9/11 American society is important in considering diverse forms of the lived experiences and subjectivities of black people in the novels. Since the real power of Whiteness lies in its discursive power, the book reveals the urgency to understand how whiteness works in everyday life in American society. African American urban novels published in the twenty-first century respond to the discursive power of normative Whiteness that regulates black bodies, selves and lives. This book demonstrates how black people contest white dominant social spaces as sites of black criminality and exclusion in an attempt to re-signify them as the sites of black transformative change through personal and grassroots activism and their performativity of Blackness as an agential identity formation in their interpersonal urban social encounters with white people. Hence, it pervasively addresses those moments of transformative change, enacted by black character, in the face of the discursive practices of whiteness in everyday life. These novels celebrate multifarious representations of black individuals, who are capable of using their agency to subvert White discursive power, in finding ways in their personal and grassroots activism to transform the culture of fear that locates Blackness as such in an attempt to make a difference in the American society at large. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 The Contemporary African American Novel as Strategic Intervention in Post-9/11: Re-Inscriptions of Emmett Till / Olympia Vernon Vernon, Olympia, Daniel Black Black, Daniel, Bernice L. McFadden McFadden, Bernice L. 1

2 The "Politics of Small Things" as Transformative Change: Living "Thought in Action" in Walter Mosley's The Right Mistake 49

3 Hybrid Spatialities in "Gentrified" Discursive Terrain: Undoing the Walls of Whitely Modes of Being in Nathan McCall's Them 103

4 Navigating Inferiority in the Interstices of "Black(Police)Mair as Resistance: Transformative Politics of Mourning in Marita Golden's After 147

5 (Dis)Articillations of Racial Scripts in the Black Performative: Savage Junctures of (Neo)Colonial Whiteness in Walter Mosley's The Man in My Basement 181.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Demirtürk, Emine Lâle, author. Twenty-first century African American novel and the critique of whiteness in everyday life

ISBN:

9781498534826

1498534821

OCLC:

948360791