![Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery
224![Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery
224Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
In this book, Keizer examines theories derived from fictional works in light of more established theories of subject formation, such as psychoanalysis, Althusserian interpellation, performance theory, and theories about the formation of postmodern subjects under late capitalism. Black Subjects shows how African American and Caribbean writers' theories of identity formation, which arise from the varieties of black experience re-imagined in fiction, force a reconsideration of the conceptual bases of established theories of subjectivity. The striking connections Keizer draws between these two bodies of theory contribute significantly to African American and Caribbean Studies, literary theory, and critical race and ethnic studies.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780801440953 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 06/02/2004 |
Pages: | 224 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
"By focusing her attention on the ways that contemporary black writers from the United States and the Caribbean represent slavery and its continuing legacy, Arlene R. Keizer broadens our understanding across boundaries between nations and between canonical and non-canonical writers. In a deftly rendered series of readings, she sheds light on new ways of theorizing issues of power, race, identity, and knowledge."
"This is no doubt one of the best books on contemporary African diaspora narratives of slavery. In a most eloquent mixture of persuasive close readings and theoretical subtlety, Arlene R. Keizer examines not just why many African diaspora writers haunt slavery as the primal scene in the refashioning of African diasporan subjectivity, but also how they do that in enabling, liberating, and even contradictorybut always unfailingly and suggestively complexways. A terrific achievement."
Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery is a superb analysis of contemporary narratives of slavery from the United States and the Anglophone Caribbean. Arlene R. Keizer argues that these fictions theorize the nature and formation of black subjectivity. Juxtaposing these 'fictionalized' theories with mainstream theories of subjectivity, Keizer decisively shifts the conversation between black literature and the dominant theoretical discourses in the humanities. Persuasively argued and elegantly written, Black Subjects is a work of creative insight and critical imagination.
"Black Subjects offers an extended analysis and meditation on narratives of slavery in a significant portion of the African Diaspora. It concerns itself with memoryindeed, postmemoryand theories of subject formation, most of them postmodern and postcolonial in origin. It is about the legacy of slavery rather than slavery itself. Its topic is literature, fictive narratives of slavery by contemporary writers from throughout the post-civil rights and post-colonial English speaking African Diaspora. Black Subjects demonstrates how much is missed when history shuns or shies away from the aesthetic dimension of the past. The work of identity formation that Keizer so skillfully uncovers and interrogates in the works she analyzes (so perceptively and so passionately) is the thing most glaringly missing from even our most recent and most substantial histories of slavery in Americathe black subject, as distinct from black agents."
Black Subjects is one of the most illuminating and suggestive explorations of contemporary narratives of slavery to date. From among the myriad themes and occupations of the genre, Keizer identifies a common and compelling narrative drive: to imagine the vexed relation between slavery and subjectivity. Ranging gracefully over texts throughout the African diaspora, she offers a model example of thinking in the round—not only about slavery and subjectivity, but also about the forms, the modes, the missions of critical theory.