In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to that race. Consequently, Paul Laurence Dunbar's Negro dialect poems were prized in the first part of the century because - written by a black man - they were not 'imitation' black, while the dialect performances by Zora Neale Hurston were celebrated because, written by a 'real' black, they were not 'imitation' white. The second half of the century, in its dismissal of material segregation, sanctions a notion of black racial meaning as internal and psychological and thus promotes a version of black racial 'truth' as invisible and interior, yet fixed within a stable conception of difference. The Real Negro foregrounds how investments in black racial specificity illuminate the dynamic terms that define what makes a text and a person 'black', while it also reveals how 'blackness', spoken and authentic, guards a more fragile, because unspoken, commitment to the purity and primacy of 'whiteness' as a stable, uncontested ideal.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Taylor & Francis Ltd
ISBN-13
9781138806450
eBay Product ID (ePID)
208846761
Product Key Features
Author
Shelly Eversley
Publication Name
The Real Negro: the Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Subject
Social Sciences
Publication Year
2015
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
136 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
229mm
Item Width
152mm
Item Weight
181g
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Shelly Eversley
Topic
Literature
Country/Region of Manufacture
United Kingdom
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