Scarring Black Body 2 -- Contents

My son's question reacquainted me with my own haunting experience with the history of lynching.

I wasn't even born when Emmett Till was killed, but I remember seeing the photograph

at some point during my childhood. I recall being repelled by and likewise drawn to his image

Books by Carol E. Henderson

James Baldwin's Go tell It on the Mountain: Historical and Critical Essays / Scarring the Black Body

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Contents

Scarring the Black Body

Race and Representation in African American Literature

By Carol E. Henderson

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Bearing Witness Reading the Narrative of the African American Body 1

The Call

One. Imag(in)ing the Body Wounded: Bodily Inscriptions and Initiation Rites in

America's Social Discourse 19

Two. Whip-scarred and Branded: The Ancestors Speak on the Slave Condition 35

The Response

Three. Bodies of Texts: Literal and Figurative Visions of History in Sherley Anne

Williams's Dessa Rose 61

Four. Dis-Membered to Re-Member: Bodies, Scars, and Ritual in Toni Morrison's

Beloved 81

Five. "Walking Wounded": The Urban Experience in Ann Petry's The Street 111

Six. Fingering the Fissures of the Black Male Psyche: Wright and Ellison

Revisited 138

Coda . Awakenings: A Personal odyssey 158

Bibliography 163

Index 181

Source: Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature

Dr. Carol E. Henderson is an Assistant Professor of African American and American Literature at the University of Delaware, Newark campus. She has published articles is such journals as Modern Fiction Studies and Religion and Literature. Her recent publications include a 7,000 word critical biography on the noted cultural theorist bell hooks in Dictionary of Literary Biography series, and a forthcoming article entitled "In the Shadow of Streetlights: Loss, Restoration, and the Performance of Identity in Black Women’s Literature of the City," in Alizes, Journal of the Universite de La Reunion, France. Her book, Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature ( University of Missouri Press, Fall 2002) now available at www.amazon.com, is a study on the recurring theme of scarring and disfigurement in African American literature of the 19th and 20th century.