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Black
Subjects Identity Formation
in the Contemporary Narrative
of Slavery
By Arlene R. Keizer
Reviews Writers
as diverse as Carolivia Herron, Charles Johnson, Paule Marshall,
Toni Morrison, and Derek Walcott have addressed the history of
slavery in their literary works. In this groundbreaking new
book, Arlene R. Keizer contends that these writers theorize the
nature and formation of the black subject and engage established
theories of subjectivity in their fiction and drama by using
slave characters and the condition of slavery as focal points.
In this book, Keizer examines theories derived from fictional
works in light of more established theories of subject
formation, such as psychoanalysis, Althusserian interpellation,
performance theory, and theories about the formation of
postmodern subjects under late capitalism.
Black Subjects
shows how African American and Caribbean
writers’ theories of identity formation, which arise from the
varieties of black experience re-imagined in fiction, force a
reconsideration of the conceptual bases of established theories
of subjectivity. The striking connections Keizer draws between
these two bodies of theory contribute significantly to African
American and Caribbean Studies, literary theory, and critical
race and ethnic studies.—Cornell
University Press, Publisher
Black Subjects is one of the most illuminating and suggestive
explorations of contemporary narratives of slavery to date. From
among the myriad themes and occupations of the genre, Keizer
identifies a common and compelling narrative drive: to imagine
the vexed relation between slavery and subjectivity. Ranging
gracefully over texts throughout the African diaspora, she
offers a model example of thinking in the round-not only about
slavery and subjectivity—but also about the forms, the modes,
the missions of critical theory.—Deborah
McDowell, University of Virginia
Black
Subjects Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative
of Slavery is a superb analysis of contemporary
narratives of slavery from the United States and the Anglophone
Caribbean. Arlene R. Keizer argues that these fictions theorize
the nature and formation of black subjectivity. Juxtaposing
these ‘fictionalized’ theories with mainstream theories of
subjectivity, Keizer decisively shifts the conversation between
black literature and the dominant theoretical discourses in the
humanities. Persuasively argued and elegantly written, Black
Subjects is a work of creative insight and critical imagination.—Valerie
Smith, Princeton University
Black Subjects offers an extended analysis and meditation
on narratives of slavery in a significant portion of the African
Diaspora. It concerns itself with memory—indeed, postmemory—and
theories of subject formation, most of them postmodern and
postcolonial in origin. It is about the legacy of slavery rather
than slavery itself. Its topic is literature, fictive narratives
of slavery by contemporary writers from throughout the
post-civil rights and post-colonial English speaking African
Diaspora. Black Subjects demonstrates how much is missed when
history shuns or shies away from the aesthetic dimension of the
past. The work of identity formation that Keizer so skillfully
uncovers and interrogates in the works she analyzes (so
perceptively and so passionately) is the thing most glaringly
missing from even our most recent and most substantial histories
of slavery in America—the black subject, as distinct from
black agents.”—Arna
Alexander Bontemps, Department of African American Studies,
Arizona State University
This is no doubt one of the best books on contemporary African
diaspora narratives of slavery. In a most eloquent mixture of
persuasive close readings and theoretical subtlety, Arlene R.
Keizer examines not just why many African diaspora writers haunt
slavery as the primal scene in the refashioning of African
diasporan subjectivity, but also how they do that in enabling,
liberating, and even contradictory—but always unfailingly and
suggestively complex—ways. A terrific achievement.—Tejumola
Olaniyan, author of Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance
By focusing her attention on the ways that contemporary black
writers from the United States and the Caribbean represent
slavery and its continuing legacy, Arlene R. Keizer broadens our
understanding across boundaries between nations and between
canonical and non-canonical writers. In a deftly rendered series
of readings, she sheds light on new ways of theorizing issues of
power, race, identity, and knowledge.—Farah
Jasmine Griffin, author of Who Set You Flowin’?: The African
American Migration Narrative
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Arlene R. Keizer, Associate
Professor of English and American Civilization at Brown University.
Ph.D. University of California,
Berkeley, 1996 / M.A. Stanford University, 1988 / B.A. Princeton University, 1986
African American
literature and culture, Caribbean literature and culture
(primarily Anglophone), critical race and ethnic studies,
literary and critical theory, psychoanalysis, cultural studies.
Black Subjects Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative
of Slavery
(Cornell UP, 2004); articles in African American Review,
American Literature, and other journals and edited books |
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Not Gone
With the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.—9 February 2003—Unchained Memories,
an HBO documentary that makes its debut tomorrow
night, provides a powerful answer to that question.
It gives us, through the faces and voices of
African-American actors, an introduction to a vast
undertaking that took place in the 1930's: the
collection and preservation of the testimonies of
thousands of aged former slaves in an archive known
as the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal
Writers' Project. This archive unlocked the brutal
secrets of slavery by using the voices of average
slaves as the key, exposing the everyday life of the
slave community. Rosa Starke, a slave from South
Carolina, for example, told of how class divisions
among the slaves were quite pronounced:
''Dere was just
two classes to de white folks, buckra slave owners
and poor white folks dat didn't own no slaves. Dere
was more classes 'mongst de slaves. De fust class
was de house servants. Dese was de butler, de maids,
de nurses, chambermaids, and de cooks. De nex' class
was de carriage drivers and de gardeners, de
carpenters, de barber and de stable men. Then come
de nex' class, de wheelwright, wagoners, blacksmiths
and slave foremen. De nex' class I members was de
cow men and de niggers dat have care of de dogs. All
dese have good houses and never have to work hard or
git a beatin'. Then come de cradlers of de wheat, de
threshers and de millers of de corn and de wheat,
and de feeders of de cotton gin. De lowest class was
de common field niggers.''—NYTimes
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
27 December 2011
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