The Real Negro : The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature.

By: Eversley, ShellyMaterial type: TextTextSeries: Literary Criticism and Cultural TheoryPublisher: London : Taylor & Francis Group, 2004Copyright date: ©2004Edition: 1st edDescription: 1 online resource (118 pages)Content type: text Media type: computer Carrier type: online resourceISBN: 9780203498392Subject(s): African Americans -- Intellectual life -- 20th century | African Americans in literature | American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism | American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism | Authenticity (Philosophy) in literature | Race in literature | Reality in literatureGenre/Form: Electronic books.Additional physical formats: Print version:: The Real Negro : The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American LiteratureDDC classification: 810.98960730904 LOC classification: PS153.N5 -- E93 2004ebOnline resources: Click to View
Contents:
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.
Summary: 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.
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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.

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.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.

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