Power Relations in Black Lives

Reading African American Literature and Culture with Bourdieu and Elias

Christa Buschendorf

• Publisher: transcript Verlag
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783837636604
• eBook ISBN:
  9783839436608
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

According to relational sociology, power imbalances are at the root of human conflicts and consequently shape the physical and symbolic struggles between interdependent groups or individuals. This volume highlights the role of power relations in the African American experience by applying key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias to black literature and culture. The authors offer new readings of power asymmetries as represented in works of canonical and contemporary black writers (Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead), rap music (e.g., Jay Z), images of black homelessness, and figurations of political activism (civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, #BlackLivesMatter in Ferguson).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction. Key Concepts of Relational Sociologyas Tools of Hermeneutics
• Satin-Legs Smith and a Mississippi Mother. Dissections of Habitus in Gwendolyn Brooks
• Intellectual Disposition and Bodily Knowledge. Richard Wright’s Literary Practice
• “You have to leave home to find home”. Charismatic Violence and Split Habitus in Ralph Ellison’s Second Unfinished Novel
• (Post-Black) Bildungsroman or Novelof (Black Bourgeois) Manners? The Logic of Reproduction in Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor
• “You People Almost Had Me Hating You Because of the Color of Your Skin”. Symbolic Violence and Black In-Group Racism in Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier
• Black Women’s Business. Female Entrepreneurship and Economic Agency in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child
• “What’s the Position You Hold?” Bourdieu and Rap Music
• “Decolorized for Popular Appeal”. ‘True’ Stories of African American Homelessness
• Understanding Ferguson. Suburban Marginality and Racialized Penality in the Age of Neoliberalism
• Transformations of Oppression. The Case of Bayard Rustin
• Introducing Disagreement. Rancière’s Anti-Sociology and the Parallax of Political Subjectivity and Political Economy (of Racism)
• Contributors