Female Subjects in Black and White : Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism / Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Abel, Elizabeth, 1945- author.

Christian, Barbara, 1943-2000, author.

Moglen, Helene, 1936-2018, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American literature.

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

Psychoanalysis and literature--United States.

Psychoanalysis and literature.

African American women--Intellectual life.

African American women.

Feminism and literature--United States.

Feminism and literature.

Women and literature--United States.

Women and literature.

African American women in literature.

Psychology in literature.

Race in literature.

Race relations in literature.

African Americans in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (392 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, California : University of California Press, [1997]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This landmark collaboration between African American and white feminists goes to the heart of problems that have troubled feminist thinking for decades. Putting the racial dynamics of feminist interpretation center stage, these essays question such issues as the primacy of sexual difference, the universal nature of psychoanalytic categories, and the role of race in the formation of identity. They offer new ways of approaching African American texts and reframe our thinking about the contexts, discourses, and traditions of the American cultural landscape. Calling for the racialization of whiteness and claiming that psychoanalytic theory should make room for competing discourses of spirituality and diasporic consciousness, these essays give shape to the many stubborn incompatibilities--as well as the transformative possibilities--between white feminist and African American cultural formations. Bringing into conversation a range of psychoanalytic, feminist, and African-derived spiritual perspectives, these essays enact an inclusive politics of reading. Often explosive and always provocative, Female Subjects in Black and White models a new cross-racial feminism.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION: THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE

I. Crossdressing, Crossreading, or Complementary Theorizing?

The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies

Doing Justice to the Subjects: Mimetic Art in a Multicultural Society: The Work of Anna Deavere Smith

"Racial Composition": Metaphor and the Body in the Writing of Race

Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation

II. Representing the Unrepresentable: The Symbolic and the Real

'All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother": Psychoanalysis and Race

Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye

"Beyond Mortal Vision": Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig and the American Racial Dream-Text

Redeeming History: Toni Morrison's Beloved

III. Race, Psychoanalysis, and Female Desire

Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism

The Quicksands of the Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut

Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen's Psychoanalytic Challenge

The Stories of O(Dessa): Stories of Complicity and Resistance

IV. Healing Narratives

Pauline Hopkins and William James: The New Psychology and the Politics of Race

Channeling the Ancestral Muse: Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrick

The Poetics of Identity: Questioning Spiritualism in African American Contexts

Fixing Methodologies: Beloved

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780520918153

0520918150

9780585041100

0585041105

OCLC:

1394118953