Representing Segregation
Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division
Published on 5. April 2010
Book
Hardback
294 pages
978-1-4384-3033-1 (ISBN)
Description
Examines racial segregation in literature and the cultural legacy of the Jim Crow era.
As a touchstone issue in American history, segregation has had an immeasurable impact on the lives of most ethnic groups in the United States. Primarily associated with the Jim Crow South and the court cases Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), segregation comprises a diverse set of cultural practices, ethnic experiences, historical conditions, political ideologies, municipal planning schemes, and de facto social systems. Representing Segregation traces the effects of these practices on the literary imagination and proposes a distinct literary tradition of representing segregation. Contributors engage a cross section of writers, literary movements, segregation practices, and related experiences of racial division in order to demonstrate the richness and scope of responses to segregation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By taking up the cultural expression of the Jim Crow period and its legacies, this collection reorients literary analysis of an important body of African American literature in productive new directions.
As a touchstone issue in American history, segregation has had an immeasurable impact on the lives of most ethnic groups in the United States. Primarily associated with the Jim Crow South and the court cases Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), segregation comprises a diverse set of cultural practices, ethnic experiences, historical conditions, political ideologies, municipal planning schemes, and de facto social systems. Representing Segregation traces the effects of these practices on the literary imagination and proposes a distinct literary tradition of representing segregation. Contributors engage a cross section of writers, literary movements, segregation practices, and related experiences of racial division in order to demonstrate the richness and scope of responses to segregation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By taking up the cultural expression of the Jim Crow period and its legacies, this collection reorients literary analysis of an important body of African American literature in productive new directions.
Reviews / Votes
"This book deals with more than just aesthetics; it also looks at the very nature of literary and theoretical representations of segregation." - Kathaleen E. Amende, Alabama State UniversityBrian Norman is Assistant Professor of African American and American Literature at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division, also published by SUNY Press. Piper Kendrix Williams is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at the College of New Jersey.
"By defining key figures, practices, and comparative approaches ... [Representing Segregation] clarif[ies] and validate[s] the work of scholarship on the literature of the Civil Rights Movement ... the volume ... is excellent." - MELUS
"Norman and Williams have assembled a collection of fine essays addressing the topic of place and space with regard to segregation ... Presenting not only an eye-opening lesson in African American history but also a study in environmental justice, the contributors to this volume explain how race is embedded in the body, street, city, region, and country ... This book settles any question there may have been about whether segregation or Jim Crow narrative exists ... Highly recommended." - CHOICE
"This book deals with more than just aesthetics; it also looks at the very nature of literary and theoretical representations of segregation." - Kathaleen E. Amende, Alabama State University
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Albany, NY
United States
Target group
College/higher education
US School Grade: From College Freshman to College Graduate Student
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
23 Illustrations, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 160 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
522 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4384-3033-1 (9781438430331)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Brian Norman | Piper Kendrix Williams
Representing Segregation
Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division
E-Book
02/2012
1st Edition
State University of New York Press
from
€84.99
Available for download
Persons
Brian Norman is Assistant Professor of African American and American Literature at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division, also published by SUNY Press. Piper Kendrix Williams is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at the College of New Jersey.
Content
List of Illustrations
Foreward
Joycelyn Moody
Acknowledgments
Introduction
To Lie, Steal, and Dissemble: The Cultural Work of the Literature of Segregation
Brian Norman and Piper Kendrix Williams
In The Crowd, Artist's Statement
Shawn Michelle Smith
1. The Aesthetic Challenge of Jim Crow Politics
American Graffiti: The Social Life of Segregation Signs
Elizabeth Abel
Smacked Upside the Head-Again
Trudier Harris
2. Imagining and Subverting Jim Crow in Charles Chesnutt's Segregation Fiction
Wedded to the Color Line: Charles Chesnutt's Stories of Segregation
Tess Chakkalakal
Charles Chesnutt's "The Dumb Witness" and the Culture of Segregation
Lori Robison and Eric Wolfe
"Those that Do Violence Must Expect to Suffer": Disrupting Segregationist Fictions of Safety in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition
Birgit Brander Rasmussen
3. Inside Jim Crow and His Doubles
White Islands of Safety and Engulfing Blackness: Remapping Segregation in Angelina Weld Grimke's "Blackness" and "Goldie"
Anne P. Rice
"Somewhat Like War": The Aesthetics of Segregation, Black Liberation, and A Raisin in the Sun
Michelle Y. Gordon
Housing the Black Body: Value, Domestic Space, and African American Narratives of Segregation
GerShun Avilez
Diseased Properties and Broken Homes in Ann Petry's The Street
Elizabeth Boyle Machlan
4. Exporting Jim Crow
Embodying Segregation: Ida B. Wells and the Cultural Work of Travel
Gary Totten
Black Is a Region: Segregation and Literary Regionalism in Richard Wright's The Color Curtain
Eve Dunbar
"Que Dice?" Latin America and the Transnational in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Along this Way
Ruth Blandon
5. Jim Crow's Legacy
In Possession of Space: Abolitionist Memory and Spatial Transformation in Civil Rights Literature and Photography
Zoe Trodd
Into a Burning House: Representing Segregation's Death
Vince Schleitwiler
Afterword
Cheryl Wall
List of Contributors
Index
Foreward
Joycelyn Moody
Acknowledgments
Introduction
To Lie, Steal, and Dissemble: The Cultural Work of the Literature of Segregation
Brian Norman and Piper Kendrix Williams
In The Crowd, Artist's Statement
Shawn Michelle Smith
1. The Aesthetic Challenge of Jim Crow Politics
American Graffiti: The Social Life of Segregation Signs
Elizabeth Abel
Smacked Upside the Head-Again
Trudier Harris
2. Imagining and Subverting Jim Crow in Charles Chesnutt's Segregation Fiction
Wedded to the Color Line: Charles Chesnutt's Stories of Segregation
Tess Chakkalakal
Charles Chesnutt's "The Dumb Witness" and the Culture of Segregation
Lori Robison and Eric Wolfe
"Those that Do Violence Must Expect to Suffer": Disrupting Segregationist Fictions of Safety in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition
Birgit Brander Rasmussen
3. Inside Jim Crow and His Doubles
White Islands of Safety and Engulfing Blackness: Remapping Segregation in Angelina Weld Grimke's "Blackness" and "Goldie"
Anne P. Rice
"Somewhat Like War": The Aesthetics of Segregation, Black Liberation, and A Raisin in the Sun
Michelle Y. Gordon
Housing the Black Body: Value, Domestic Space, and African American Narratives of Segregation
GerShun Avilez
Diseased Properties and Broken Homes in Ann Petry's The Street
Elizabeth Boyle Machlan
4. Exporting Jim Crow
Embodying Segregation: Ida B. Wells and the Cultural Work of Travel
Gary Totten
Black Is a Region: Segregation and Literary Regionalism in Richard Wright's The Color Curtain
Eve Dunbar
"Que Dice?" Latin America and the Transnational in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Along this Way
Ruth Blandon
5. Jim Crow's Legacy
In Possession of Space: Abolitionist Memory and Spatial Transformation in Civil Rights Literature and Photography
Zoe Trodd
Into a Burning House: Representing Segregation's Death
Vince Schleitwiler
Afterword
Cheryl Wall
List of Contributors
Index