Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900
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Playing in the White - Black Writers, White Subjects (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,478
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Playing in the White - Black Writers, White Subjects (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels,
that is texts by African American writers focused almost
exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth
century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright,
Ann Petry and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous
texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s,
these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges
they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American
literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects
aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about
the nature of African American literature and the unique
expectations imposed upon black texts. In a series of nuanced
readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the
forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies.
Novels like Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright's Savage
Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of
African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how
whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America's
abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this
particular racial construction is freighted with social power and
narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a
set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By
describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life
novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans.
Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in
the White also provides important historical context to understand
how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly
integrated nation.
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