America and the Black Body: Identity Politics in Print and Visual Culture

by Henderson, Carol E.

• ISBN13: 9780838641323
• ISBN10: 0838641326
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-09-30
• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Pr

Summary

America and the Black Body is a timely exploration into the creative, literary, and visual uses of the black body in American print and visual culture. More specifically, this volume contemplates the social development of American identity and the multifarious ways this identity coalesces in the small gestures of preclusion that establish discemable markers of national belonging. Such investigations underscore issues of power and disenfranchisement, of race, class, and gender that mediate the representations of the black male and the black female body in real and imagined ways, as it also reveals the invisible social and political ties that connect white men and women's identities to these racial imaginings.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 9
Acknowledgments	p. 11
Introduction: Bordering on the Black Body: Text and Subtext in America's Literature and Culture	p. 13
Race Matters: Texts and Contexts
Narrating African American Subjectivity through the Body: Critical Race Theory and Legal Discourse	p. 29
Distorted Images in Travel Literature: An Exploration of the Subjugation of Blackness in the Western World	p. 55
The Culture of Sentiments and the Black Female Body in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace	p. 75
Emerson's Platonic Influence: Working toward a “Well Colored and Shaded Globe”	p. 87
The Bodies of Black Folk: From Kant and Hegel to DuBois and Baldwin	p. 103
Mutual Relations: Race, Gender, Formation
The Sentimental Slave Body in Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave	p. 137
Writing Realism, Policing Consciousness: Howells and the Black Body	p. 158
Genealogical Ambiguity and Racial Identity: Adoption and Passing in Kate Chopin's “Desiree's Baby” and Jessie Redmon Fauset's “The Sleeper Wakes”	p. 180
Body/Language: Visions and Revisions
The Body against Itself in Faulkner's Phenomenology of Race	p. 199
Policing the Racial Divide: The Body, The Nation, and the Emmett Till Murder	p. 224
A Space beyond Beulah: Assessing the Mixed Race Body in Danzy Senna's “The Land of Beulah”	p. 237
A Phenomenology of the Black Body	p. 252
Afterword: The Black Body: Under the Weight of White America's Microtomes	p. 266
Notes on Contributors	p. 279
Index	p. 283
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