Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives

W. Lawrence Hogue

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781438448343, 9781438448350
• eBook ISBN: 9781438448367
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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 Cartiér'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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Subjectivity
• 2. Multiple Representations of Philadelphia and John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire
• 3. The Trickster Figure, The African American Virtual Subject, and Percival Everett's Erasure
• 4. Using Jazz Music and Aesthetics to Redescribe the African American in Toni Morrison's Jazz
• 5. Revolting to Sustain Psychic Life: Bonnie Greer's Hanging by Her Teeth and the Encounter with the Other
• 6. Virtual-Actual Reality and Clarence Major's Reflex and Bone Structure
• 7. The Jungian/African Collective Unconscious, Jazz Aesthetics, and Xam Cartiér's Muse-Echo Blues
• 8. Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited