The Real Negro - The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (Paperback)

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.

General

Imprint:	Routledge
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Series:	Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Release date:	May 2015
First published:	2004
Authors:	Shelly Eversley
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 8mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	136
ISBN-13:	978-1-138-80645-0
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900 Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies > General
LSN:	1-138-80645-5
Barcode:	9781138806450

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