Postblack Aesthetics
The Freedom to Be Black in Contemporary African American Fiction
by Christian Schmidt
Hardback (Published)
(May 2017)
ISBN: 9783825363802
5.31 x 8.31 inches
Price: $59.00
On back order
‘Postblack Aesthetics’ investigates the changing contours of contemporary African American fiction. It argues that the novels and short stories by Paul Beatty, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Charles Johnson (but also white author Adam Mansbach) continue the African American literary tradition even if they do so in satirical, parodic, and highly self-reflexive ways. Through rigorous close readings, the study analyzes form and themes of this fiction as ‘postblack’ (Thelma Golden). Postblack art engages in complex redefinitions of blackness that transcend confining notions of mimetic literary representation while being aware of continuing social discrimination. In their respective attempts to re-write black fiction, these texts revolve around the central topos of freedom – a freedom from, first and foremost, confining notions of ‘literary’ blackness. Among the crucial questions discussed are: What is a (post)black text? What is a black author? How does blackness figure in contemporary literature?
- By (author) Christian Schmidt
Other Titles in this Series
John F. Kennedy and the ‘Thousand Days’
New Perspectives on the Foreign and Domestic Policies of the Kennedy Administration
Volume 144
Physicians of Culture
Healing Catharsis in the Fiction of Toni Morrison and the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Volume 287
Entgrenzung der Geschichte
Eine Untersuchung zum historischen Denken der amerikanischen Postmoderne
Volume 122
Through the Bars of My Memory
Prison Life Writing and the Prison Movement of the 1970s and 1980s
Volume 319
TIME in American and East Asian Thinking
A Comparative Study of Temporality in American Transcendentalism, Pragmatism and (Zen) Buddhist Thought
Volume 193
Modern Domestic Fiction
Popular Feminism, Mass-Market Magazines, and Middle-Class Culture, 1905-1925
Volume 229
Naturethik und Neuengland-Regionalliteratur
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Volume 116
Renegotiating American Nationalism
The Proxy War over Marriage Equality through the Lens of Un-Americanism
Volume 317
Similar Books
Ars Prophetica
Theology in the Poetry of Twentieth-Century Hebrew Poets Avraham Halfi, Shin Shalom, Amir Gilboa, and T. Carmi
Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises
J. M. G. Le Clézio - Enseigner les littératures francophones aujourd’hui - Récit de soi et expérience de l’illusion (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles)
Volume 78
Cahiers de littérature française
Les Métamorphoses du texte. Enjeux intertextuels et transpositions visuelles
Volume 25
Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes – Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies
Volume 51
Cahiers de sémiotique des cultures
Ponctuation et sens. Nouvelles perspectives / Punctuation and meaning. New perspectives
Volume 6
CompLit
Myth, Folklore and Magic in European Literatures. Critical and Contemporary Reconfigurations
Dis/United States of Vulnerability
Literary and Cultural Transgressions in U.S. Poetry Since the 1960s
Volume 330
European Drama and Performance Studies
Dramatisations politiques. Théâtre, politique et idéologie au XIXe siècle (1806-1914)
Volume 27
La Lettre clandestine
La littérature philosophique clandestine, ses éditeurs et ses éditions
Volume 34
La Revue des lettres modernes
« Afin que rien ne meure ». Le deuil dans et de l’œuvre de Marguerite Duras
Volume 9
