Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Writing Apartheid

Tyrone R. Simpson II

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230115934
• eBook ISBN: 9781137014894
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how six American writers have artistically responded to the racialization of U.S. frostbelt cities in the twentieth century. Using the critical tools of spatial theory, critical race theory, urban history and sociology, Simpson explains how these writers imagine the subjective response to the race-making power of space.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Mapping the Racial Partition
• 1 “The Love of Colour in Me”: Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers and the Space of White Racial Manufacture
• 2 “To Make a Man out of You”: Masculine Fantasies and the Failure of Whiteness in Michael Gold’s Jews without Money
• 3 “Something Tangible to Strike at”: Urban Moralism and the Transvestitic Antidote in Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn
• 4 “Enough to Make a Body Riot”: Chester Himes, Melancholia, and the Postmodern Renovation
• 5 “In a World with No Address”: Carceral Ghettos and Ambivalent Nationalist Rebellions in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place
• 6 “And the Arc of His Witness Explained Nothing”: Black Flanerie and Traumatic Photorealism in Wideman’s Two Cities
• Conclusion: On Ghettos to Come
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index