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In the 1960s, Charles Wright’s (1932–2008) star was on the
rise. After dropping out of high school and serving in the Korean
War, the young Black writer landed in New York, where he was
mentored by Norman Mailer, signed a book deal with a leading
publisher, and was celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and
James Baldwin. Over the decades to follow, Wright would lead a
peripatetic and at times precarious life, moving between Tangier,
Veracruz, Paris, and New York, penning a regular column for the
Village Voice, living off the goodwill of his friends, and battling
addiction and, later, mental health issues. As W. Lawrence Hogue
shows, Wright’s innovative fiction stands apart, offering a
different vision of outcast Black Americans in the postwar era and
using satire to bring agency and humanity to working-class
characters. This critical biography—the first devoted to
Wright’s significant but largely forgotten story—brings new
attention to the writer’s impressive body of work, in the context
of a wild, but troubled, life.
Although literary postmodernism has been defined in terms of
difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and plurality, some of the
most vaunted authors of postmodern American fiction--such as Thomas
Pynchon, Paul Auster, and other white male authors--often fail to
adequately represent the distinct subjectivities of African
Americans, American Indians, Latinos and Latinas, women, the poor,
and the global periphery. In this groundbreaking study, W. Lawrence
Hogue exposes the ways in which much postmodern American literature
privileges a typically Eurocentric, male-oriented type of
subjectivity, often at the expense of victimizing or objectifying
the ethnic or gendered Other. In contrast to the dominant white
male perspective on postmodernism, Hogue points to African
American, American Indian, and women authors within the American
postmodern canon--Rikki Ducornet, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, and
Gerald Vizenor--who work against these structures of stereotype and
bias, resulting in a literary postmodernism that more genuinely
respects and represents difference.
Originally published in 1986, this new edition returns to print a
classic, influential work of American fiction The author of the
acclaimed novel Reflex and Bone Structure returns here in My
Amputations to the question of identity, the double, adventure,
detection, and mystery, but with more hypnotic power and range. In
My Amputations he has his protagonist, Mason Ellis (who may just be
"a desperate ex-con" or a wronged American novelist out to right
the wrong done to him), jump through flaming loops like a trained
dog, so to speak. In other words, there seems to be no end to the
troubles Mason Ellis faces. His story takes him from the South Side
of Chicago, to New York, with a stint in Attica prison, across
America and Europe and into the primal depths of Africa. Mason, all
the while, tries to convince the reader that he is the important
American writer he says he is. Upon his release from prison he sets
out to prove his claim. After an audacious bank-robbery and a
couple of burglaries that are hilarious, he goes into hiding to
escape the malice of one of his cohorts, and eventually flees to
Europe. The irony is that he is now as much the runner as the
seeker. After encounters with a Zuni ex-folksinger, kidnappers, the
New York underworld, literary groupies, an Italian swordsman, a
violent German secret society, and an anti-bellum cotillion in
rural Greece, he finds himself face to face (behind a mask) with
his own destiny.
This book explores how African American social and political
movements, African American studies, independent scholars, and
traditional cultural forms revisit and challenge the representation
of the African American as deviant other. After surveying African
American history and cultural politics, W. Lawrence Hogue provides
original and insightful readings of six experimental/postmodern
African American texts: John Edgar Wideman s "Philadelphia Fire";
Percival Everett s "Erasure"; Toni Morrison s "Jazz"; Bonnie Greer
s "Hanging by Her Teeth"; Clarence Major s "Reflex and Bone
Structure"; and Xam Wilson Cartier s "Muse-Echo Blues." Using
traditional cultural and western forms, including the blues, jazz,
voodoo, virtuality, radical democracy, Jungian/African American
Collective Unconscious, Yoruba gods, black folk culture, and black
working class culture, Hogue reveals that these authors uncover
spaces with different definitions of life that still retain a
wildness and have not been completely mapped out and trademarked by
normative American culture. Redefining the African American novel
and the African American outside the logic, rules, and values of
western binary reason, these writers leave open the possibility of
psychic liberation of African Americans in the West."
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