Western Fictions, Black Realities: Meanings of Blackness and Modernities

by Isabel Soto (Editor), Violet Showers Johnson (Editor)

Overview

This anthology interrogates two salient concepts in studying the black experience. Ushered in with the age of New World encounters, modernity emerged as brutal and complex, from its very definition to its manifestations. Equally challenging is blackness, which is forever dangling between the range of uplifting articulations and insidious degradation. The essays in Western Fictions address the conflicting confluences of these two terms. Questioning Eurocentric and mainstream American interpretations, they reveal the diverse meanings of modernities and blackness from a wide range of milieus of the black experience. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in thematic and epochal scope, they use theoretical and empirical studies of a range of subjects to demonstrate that, indeed, blackness is relevant for understanding modernities and vice versa.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628954883
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	654 KB

About the Author

Isabel Soto is Associate Professor in the department of Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain.

Violet Showers Johnson is Professor of History at Agnes Scott College, Atlanta, Georgia.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgements Isabel Soto and Violet Showers Johnson | Introduction: Blackness and Modernities: Varieties and Re-Examinations Clarence Sholé Johnson | Resistance to Modernity: Two Contesting Viewpoints María M. García Lorenzo | The Unwhitening of Discourse: The Gothic in African-American Literature Christopher Mulvey | The Modernity of James Weldon Johnson and the African American Twentieth Century Claude Julien | Wolf Whistle and A Killing in this Town: Two Ways to Exorcise Racial Hatred Alexander Beissenhirtz | Theorizing the Vernacular Modernism of Jazz: The New Jazz Studies David Abulafia | The First Atlantic Slaves, 1350-1520: Conquest, Slavery and the Opening of the Atlantic Paul Delaney | From Tourist to Bureau Chief: Witnessing Spain’s Racial Emergence Mar Gallego-Durán | African American Women Travelers: Claiming Voice and Transgressing Boundaries Ime A. S. Kerlee | Somos una Mezcla?: Re-Constructing Race in Dominicanidad Simon Dickel | Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and Negotiations of Black Gay Identity in the 1980s Alison D. Goeller | Zora on the Mountain: Zora Neal Hurston’s Artistic Exodus in Moses, Man of the Mountain Małgorzata Ziółek-Sowińska | African American Modernism and the Music of Duke Ellington Emil Sîrbulescu | Louis Armstrong’s Unknown Addiction, or the (Un)Willing Autobiographer Simone A. James Alexander | Embodied Subjects: Policing and Politicking the Black Female Body Georg Bauer | Challenging the Great White Hopes: Black Boxers in Film Yvonne Gutenberger | I am Remembered as a Hairdo: Angela Davis’s Autobiography as a Revision of the Public Persona and Self-Reconstruction as Political | Activist Notes on the Contributors