Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary
performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with
issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward
racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines
Welty's handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation
and sheds new light on her views about the patterns,
insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness.
Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and
race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel,
"Delta Wedding." In subsequent work, including "The Golden Apples,"
"The Optimist's Daughter," and her memoir, "One Writer's
Beginnings," she made the color line and white privilege visible,
revealing the gaping distances between lives lived in shared space
but separated by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black
characters hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers
toward complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning
in her work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race,
like gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Her
black characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as
performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware
of their role play.
"Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race" also makes clear that Welty
recognized white material advantage and black economic deprivation
as part of a cycle of race and poverty in America and that she
connected this history to lives on either side of the color line,
to relationships across it, and to an uneasy hierarchy of white
classes within the presumed monolith of whiteness.
Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia
Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne
Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack, Keri
Watson, Patricia Yaeger.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(2)
(1)
