Producing American races : Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison / Patricia McKee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McKee, Patricia, 1945-

Series:

New Americanists.

New Americanists

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Faulkner, William, 1897-1962--Criticism and interpretation.

Faulkner, William.

James, Henry, 1843-1916--Criticism and interpretation.

James, Henry.

Morrison, Toni, 1931-2019--Criticism and interpretation.

Morrison, Toni.

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

American fiction.

Race in literature.

Literature and society--United States--History--20th century.

Literature and society.

White people--Race identity--United States.

White people.

African Americans--Race identity.

African Americans.

African Americans in literature.

White people in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (252 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In Producing American Races Patricia McKee examines three authors who have powerfully influenced the formation of racial identities in the United States: Henry James, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Using their work to argue that race becomes visible only through image production and exchange, McKee illuminates the significance that representational practice has had in the process of racial construction.McKee provides close readings of six novels—James’s The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, and Morrison’s Sula and Jazz—interspersed with excursions into Lacanian and Freudian theory, critical race theory, epistemology, and theories of visuality. In James and Faulkner, she finds, race is represented visually through media that highlight ways of seeing and being seen. Written in the early twentieth century, the novels of James and Faulkner reveal how whiteness depended on visual culture even before film and television became its predominant media. In Morrison, the culture is aural and oral—and often about the absence of the visual. Because Morrison’s African American communities produce identity in nonvisual, even anti-visual terms, McKee argues, they refute not just white representations of black persons as objects but also visual orders of representation that have constructed whites as subjects and blacks as objects.With a theoretical approach that both complements and transcends current scholarship about race—and especially whiteness—Producing American Races will engage scholars in American literature, critical race theory, African American studies, and cultural studies. It will also be of value to those interested in the novel as a political and aesthetic form.

Contents:

Introduction: race and media

Reproducing whiteness: The wings of the dove

Collective whiteness in The golden bowl

Self-division as racial divide: The sound and the fury

Playing white men in Light in August

Black spaces in Sula

Off the record: Jazz and the production of Black culture.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages [207]-236) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822323631

082232363X

9780822397663

0822397668

OCLC:

891395190