Neo-Segregation Narratives
Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature
Title Details
Pages: 212
Illustrations: 4 b&w photos
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 11/01/2010
ISBN: 9-780-8203-3597-1
List Price: $30.95
Hardcover
Pub Date: 11/01/2010
ISBN: 9-780-8203-3596-4
List Price: $120.95
Related Subjects
Neo-Segregation Narratives
Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature
Skip to
- Description
- Reviews
This study of what Brian Norman terms a neo–segregation narrative tradition examines literary depictions of life under Jim Crow that were written well after the civil rights movement.
From Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, to bestselling black fiction of the 1980s to a string of recent work by black and nonblack authors and artists, Jim Crow haunts the post–civil rights imagination. Norman traces a neo–segregation narrative tradition—one that developed in tandem with neo–slave narratives—by which writers return to a moment of stark de jure segregation to address contemporary concerns about national identity and the persistence of racial divides. These writers upset dominant national narratives of achieved equality, portraying what are often more elusive racial divisions in what some would call a postracial present.
Norman examines works by black writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, David Bradley, Wesley Brown, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Colson Whitehead, films by Spike Lee, and other cultural works that engage in debates about gender, Black Power, blackface minstrelsy, literary history, and whiteness and ethnicity. Norman also shows that multiethnic writers such as Sherman Alexie and Tom Spanbauer use Jim Crow as a reference point, extending the tradition of William Faulkner’s representations of the segregated South and John Howard Griffin’s notorious account of crossing the color line from white to black in his 1961 work Black Like Me.
Provocative and illuminating . . . Neo–Segregation Narratives is crucial reading for anyone interested in deciphering the malleable manifestations of the color line in a postracial culture.
—Elizabeth Abel, University of California, Berkeley
Offering an original and provocative approach to the literary representation of segregation, Neo–Segregation Narratives demands that we think differently, and much more creatively, about the historical timeline of Jim Crow and the complex persistence of American racial divisions.
—Eric J. Sundquist, author of King’s Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech
By defining key figures, practices, and comparative approaches, Neo-Segregation Narratives clarifies and validates the work of scholarship on the literature of the Civil Rights Movement.
—Julie Buckner Armstrong, MELUS
—John S. Wright, Journal of American History
—Heidi E. Bollinger, Callaloo