Violence in the Black Imagination: Essays and Documents / Edition 2

by Ronald T. Takaki

Overview

1992 has been an explosive year for racial relations in the United States—from the reactions to the Rodney King verdict to debate about Malcolm X and the film portrayal of his role in American history. What relations do the recent events in Los Angeles have to the Watts Riots in 1965? Violence in the Black Imagination shows that these recent events force us to understand the history of racism in America and its legacy of antagonism and violence. Ronald T. Takaki presents three short novels of major African-American leaders in the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist; Martin Delany, the father of black nationalism; and William Wells Brown, a pioneer of the black novel. The novels are accompanied by substantive essays which provide both biographical information on the author and explore the common theme of their work—the issue of black revolutionary violence in antebellum America. The work includes a new preface which examines the 1992 South Central Los Angeles racial explosion in relationship to Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the 1965 Watts Riot.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195082494
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/01/1993
Edition description:	Expanded
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.74(d)

Table of Contents

	Preface	1
	Introduction	9
Part I
	Not Afraid to Die: Frederick Douglass and Violence	17
	The Heroic Slave	37
Part II
	War Upon the Whites: Black Rage in the Fiction of Martin Delany	79
	Blake: or, the Huts of America	103
Part III
	Violence in Fantasy: The Fiction of William Wells Brown	215
	Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States	231
	Bibliographical Essay	341