Search results for ""Author Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman""
Duke University Press Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture
In Millennial Style, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman looks at recent experiments in black expressive culture that begin in the place of ruin. By ruin, Abdur-Rahman means the political terror and social abjection that constitute the ongoing peril of black lives. Whereas earlier black writers and artists have employed realist modes of expression to represent racial harm and to imaginatively remediate it, the black avant-garde of today displays more experimental methods. Abdur-Rahman outlines four widely employed modes in contemporary African diasporic cultural production: Black Grotesquerie, Hollowed Blackness, Black Cacophony, and the Black Ecstatic. Mobilizing black feminist and black radical thought, she considers work by such cultural practitioners as Wangechi Mutu, Marci Blackman, Alexandria Smith, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Harmony Holiday, and Essex Hemphill. Writerly and experimental, Millennial Style theorizes contemporary black art as the holding (or hoarding) of black mortal and material resources against the injuries of social death, as the fashioning of relational ethics, and as exuberant black world-building in ruinous times.
£81.00
Duke University Press Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race
In Against the Closet, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman interrogates and challenges cultural theorists' interpretations of sexual transgression in African American literature. She argues that, from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers used depictions of erotic transgression to contest popular theories of identity, pathology, national belonging, and racial difference in American culture. Connecting metaphors of sexual transgression to specific historical periods, Abdur-Rahman explains how tropes such as sadomasochism and incest illuminated the psychodynamics of particular racial injuries and suggested forms of social repair and political redress from the time of slavery, through post-Reconstruction and the civil rights and black power movements, to the late twentieth century.Abdur-Rahman brings black feminist, psychoanalytic, critical race, and poststructuralist theories to bear on literary genres from slave narratives to science fiction. Analyzing works by African American writers, including Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler, she shows how literary representations of transgressive sexuality expressed the longings of African Americans for individual and collective freedom. Abdur-Rahman contends that those representations were fundamental to the development of African American forms of literary expression and modes of political intervention and cultural self-fashioning.
£21.99
Duke University Press Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture
In Millennial Style, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman looks at recent experiments in black expressive culture that begin in the place of ruin. By ruin, Abdur-Rahman means the political terror and social abjection that constitute the ongoing peril of black lives. Whereas earlier black writers and artists have employed realist modes of expression to represent racial harm and to imaginatively remediate it, the black avant-garde of today displays more experimental methods. Abdur-Rahman outlines four widely employed modes in contemporary African diasporic cultural production: Black Grotesquerie, Hollowed Blackness, Black Cacophony, and the Black Ecstatic. Mobilizing black feminist and black radical thought, she considers work by such cultural practitioners as Wangechi Mutu, Marci Blackman, Alexandria Smith, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Harmony Holiday, and Essex Hemphill. Writerly and experimental, Millennial Style theorizes contemporary black art as the holding (or hoarding) of black mortal and material resources against the injuries of social death, as the fashioning of relational ethics, and as exuberant black world-building in ruinous times.
£21.99