The Contemporary African American Novel

Multiple Cities, Multiple Subjectivities, and Discursive Practices of Whiteness in Everyday Urban Encounters

E. Lâle Demirtürk

• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781611475319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the post-1990s African American novels, namely the "neo-urban novel," and develops a new urban discourse for the twenty-first century on how the city, as a social formation, impacts black characters through everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in a racial context is important in considering diverse forms of the lived reality of black everyday life in the novelistic representations of the white dominant urban order. African American fictional representations of the city have political significance in that the "neo-urban novel" explores the nature of the American society at large. This book explores the need to understand how whiteness works, what it forecloses, and what it occasionally opens up in everyday life in American society.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: How Black Are Whites in the Age of Obama
• Alternative “Detection” of Whiteness in Walter Mosley’s L.A.
• Transgressing the Authority of Whiteness in Strategic Spaces of Blackness
• Deconstructing the Black Body as Biopolitical Paradigm of the City
• Rescripted Performances of Blackness as “Parodies of Whiteness”
• The Contested Terrain of Blackness in “Color-Blind” Spaces of Racialized Intersubjectivity
• Navigations of Embedded Dynamics of Whiteness in the City as Discursive Space
• The (Im)possibilities of Writing the Black Interiority into Discursive Terrain
• Undoing Whiteness or Performing Whiteness Differently
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author