TY - BOOK AU - Eversley,Shelly TI - The Real Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature T2 - Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory SN - 9780203498392 AV - PS153.N5 -- E93 2004eb U1 - 810.98960730904 PY - 2004/// CY - London PB - Taylor & Francis Group KW - African Americans -- Intellectual life -- 20th century KW - African Americans in literature KW - American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism KW - American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism KW - Authenticity (Philosophy) in literature KW - Race in literature KW - Reality in literature KW - Electronic books N1 - Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER ONE Black Man, Blackface: The Case of Paul Laurence Dunbar -- CHAPTER TWO Racial Hieroglyphics: Zora Neale Hurston and the Rise of the New Negro -- CHAPTER THREE "Unspoken Words Are Stronger": Narrative Interiority and Racial Visibility in Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha -- CHAPTER FOUR Sex and Violence: The Poetics of Black Power -- POSTSCRIPT -- NOTES -- WORKS CITED -- INDEX N2 - 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 UR - https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buse-ebooks/detail.action?docID=182969 ER -