A01=Shelly Eversley
african
African American identity
american
Authentic Black Voice
Author_Shelly Eversley
Bad Nigger
Banjo Song
Black Aesthetic
Black Arts Poets
Black Poems
Black Power movement
Black White Man
Boll Weevil
brooks
Calls Attention
Category=DSBH
Category=JBSL
century
Chopin
cultural hybridity
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gwendolyn
Gwendolyn Brooks
Hard Slowness
hurston
Intangible Considerations
literary authenticity
literature
Mule Bone
narrative interiority
neale
Negro Dialect
Negro Expression
Negro Minstrels
Pri Vate
Racial Authenticity
racial representation
Real Negro
Spoon River
Sweet Potato Pie
twentieth
Twentieth Century African American Literature
twentieth-century Black literature analysis
White America
White Man's Law
White Man’s Law
zora
Product details
- ISBN 9780415968355
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 29 Mar 2004
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Shelly Eversley, an Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York, writes on 20th Century African American Literature, race, gender and sexuality theory. She has two forthcoming books, Integration and Its Discontents and Race and Sex:Theorizations of Literature, Culture and Desire (edited with Robert F. Reid-Pharr).
