A01=Madhu Dubey
african-american
american south
Author_Madhu Dubey
belonging
black
blackness
book
Category=DSA
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Category=GTM
community
disenchantment
disillusionment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
expression
folk narrative
gloria naylor
heritage
information age
ishmael reed
john edgar wideman
literature
mediation
nonfiction
octavia butler
oral storytelling
postmodernism
print literacy
race
racism
reading
samuel delany
sapphire
spectacle
subjectivity
toni morrison
urban
voyeurism
writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780226167275
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 17 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2003
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy.
Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression
Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression
