Description
Book SynopsisThis book examines the post-9/11 African American novels, developing a new critical discourse on everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in the racial context of post-9/11 American society is important in considering diverse forms of the lived experiences and subjectivities of black people in the novels. They help us see that African American representations of the city have political significance in that the neo-urban novel explores the possibility of a black dialogic communication to build a transformative social change. Since the real power of Whiteness lies in its discursive power, the book reveals the urgency to understand not only how whiteness works in everyday life in American society. But it also explores how to cultivate new possibilities of configuring and performing Blackness differently, as a response to the post-9/11 configurations of the culture of fear, to produce new ways of interactional social relations that can eventually open up th
Trade ReviewWritten within the historical context of 9/11 and the subsequent Iraq war and the war-on-terror, Obama and the post-racial society, the killing of young unarmed black males, and the re-emergence of the ideology of Whiteness, E. Lâle Demirtürk’s The Twenty-First Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life examines seven novels by African Americans published after 2000. These individual analyses/readings are first-rate. Effectively using Critical Whiteness studies and other current social and literary theories, Professor Demirtürk locates and reads meaning in the cracks, seams, margins and the unconscious of these texts, thereby breathing new and innovative life into them. -- W. Lawrence Hogue, John and Rebecca Moores Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Houston and author of "Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives"
In this new book that creates a fissure at the ontological core of whiteness and underscores the humanity and agency of Black people, E. Lâle Demirtürk engages a critical literary corpus by African American novelists who not only understand the urgency that Black lives matter, but who also bear witness to the complexity of everyday Black ontology that dares to lay claim to its own self-understanding in the face of insidious operations of whiteness. Demirtürk's text underscores the interiority of Black existence as a testimonial ground for laying claim to Black agency, the risks of Black vulnerability, and the gifts of Black epistemology. In doing so, she renders visible the fragility of whiteness. For those who refuse the seductions of a 'post-racial' America, which is contested by the literary Black counter-gaze, Demirtürk's new text is a must read. -- George Yancy, professor of philosophy, Emory University
Table of ContentsIntroduction - The 21st Century and the Invention of “Post-Racial(ized)” Blackness: Discrepant Engagements in the African American “Neo-Urban” Novel Chapter One - The Contemporary African American Novel as Strategic Intervention in Post-9/11: Re-inscriptions of Emmett Till by Olympia Vernon, Daniel Black and Bernice L. McFadden Chapter Two - The “Politics of Small Things” as Transformative Change: Living “Thought in Action” in Walter Mosley’s The Right Mistake Chapter Three - Hybrid Spatialities in ‘Gentrified’ Discursive Terrain: Undoing the Walls of Whitely Modes of Being in Nathan McCall’s Them Chapter Four - Navigating Interiority in the Interstices of ‘Black(Police)Man’ as Resistance: Transformative Politics of Mourning in Marita Golden’s After Chapter Five - (Dis)Articulations of Racial Scripts in the Black Performative: Savage Junctures of (Neo)Colonial Whiteness inWalter Mosley’s The Man in my Basement Afterword - Transgressive Performativity of Blackness as Blueprint for Change: Deconstructing the Everyday Whiteness of Postraciality
