Representing segregation : toward an aesthetics of living Jim Crow, and other forms of racial division / edited by Brian Norman and Piper Kendrix Williams.
Title
Representing segregation : toward an aesthetics of living Jim Crow, and other forms of racial division / edited by Brian Norman and Piper Kendrix Williams.
Publication
Albany : State University of New York Press, c2010.
Scholars of English from across the US, most specializing in African-American literature, examine the literary representation of racial segregation in the country. Their overall themes are the aesthetic challenges of Jim Crow politics, imagining and subverting Jim Crow in Charles Chesnutt's segregation fiction, inside Jim Crow and his doubles, exporting Jim Crow, and Jim Crow's legacy. Their topics include the social life of segregation signs, Chesnutt's "The Dumb Witness" and the culture of segregation, remapping segregation in Angelina Weld Grimké's "Blackness" and "Goldie," Latin America and the transnational in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Along this Way, and abolitionist memory and spatial transformation in civil rights literature and photography. Earlier versions of some of the essays appeared in a special issue of African American Review 42.1 (2008).
Foreword / Jocelyn Moody -- 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 -- Section I: The aesthetic challenges of Jim Crow politics. American graffiti: the social life of segregation signs / Elizabeth Abel ; Smacked upside the head-again / Trudier Harris -- Section II: 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 --^
Section III: 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 segregation narratives / GerShun Avilez ; Diseased properties and broken homes in Ann Petry's "The Street" / Elizabeth Boyle Machlan -- Section IV: Exporting Jim Crow. Embodying segregation: Ida B. Wells and the cultural work of travel / Gary Totten ; Black is a region: segregation and American 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 Blandón --^
Section V: 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 A. Wall -- Afterword . Cheryl A. Wall.