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The
Death Bound Subject
Richard Wright's
Archaeology of Death
By Abdul R.
JanMohamed
During the 1940s, in response to the charge
that his writing was filled with violence, Richard Wright replied
that the manner came from the matter, that the "relationship
of the American Negro to the American scene [was] essentially
violent," and that he could deny neither the violence he had
witnessed nor his own existence as a product of racial violence.
Abdul R. Jan Mohamed provides extraordinary
insight into Wright's position in this first study to explain the
fundamental ideological and political function of the threat of
lynching in Wright's work and thought. JanMohamed argues that
Wright's oeuvre is s systematic and thorough investigation of what
he calls the death-bound-subject, the subject who is formed from
infancy onward by the imminent threat of death.
Jan Mohamed shows that with each successive
work, Wright delved further into the question of how living under
a constant menace of physical violence affected his protagonists
and how they might "free" themselves by overcoming their
fear of death and redeploying death as the ground for their
struggle.
The
Death-Bound-Subject is a stunning reevaluation of the work of
a major twentieth century American writer, but it is also much
more. In demonstrating how deeply the threat of death is involved
in the formation of black subjectivity, JanMohamed develops a
methodology for understanding the presence of the
death-bound-subject in African American literature from the
earlier slave narratives forward.
--Publisher,
Duke University Press
* * *
* *
This is a
path-breaking, imaginative, comprehensive, indeed magisterial,
analysis of the ways in which death functions in the construction
of black subjectivities in Richard Wright's fiction,
autobiographies, and journalism. It both expands our understanding
of Wright's achievement and models a way in which the spectre of
violence, lynching, and death may be seen to shadow and shape a
trajectory of African American cultural production.
--Valerie Smith, author of Not
Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings
* * *
* *
Abdul JanMohamed
reworks the concept of "social death" to read Richard
Wright in comprehensive and provocative ways. At the same time, he
offers a new account of slavery, rewriting Hegel and
psychoanalysis along the way to rethink "lordship and
bondage" as the "death contract" and to discern the
precise and various ways in which autonomy and freedom are
asserted. This book is enormously impressive in its sweep, its
detailed consideration of Wright's corpus, its theoretical
ambitions, and the new and compelling paradigm it offers for
rethinking slavery, death, and resistance.
--Judith Butler, Maxine Elliott
Professor at the University of California, Berkeley
* * *
* *
Abdul R. JanMohamed is Professor of
English at the University of California, Berkeley. he is the
author of Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in
Colonial Africa and a coeditor of The Nature and Context of
Minority Discourse
We
Flew Over the Bridge
The Memoirs of
Faith Ringgold
304 pages, 101
b&w illustrations, 40 color illustrations, April 30, 2005
Duke University Press (Box 90660, NC 27708-0660
) www.dukeupress.edu
In We Flew Over
the Bridge one of the country's preeminent African American
artists and award-winning children's book authors shares the
fascinating story of her life. Faith Ringgold was born in Harlem
in 1930. Her artworks--startling "story quilts,"
politically charged paintings and more--hang in the Studio Museum
of Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern
Art, and other major museums around the world. Her children's
books, including the Caldecott Honor Book Tar Beach, have sold
hundred of thousands of copies. but Ringgold's path to success has
not been easy. in this gorgeously illustrated memoir, she looks
back and shares the story of her struggles, growth, and triumphs.
Ringgold recollects
how she had to surmount a wall of prejudices as she worked to
refine her artistic vision and raise a family. At the same time,
the story she tells is one of warm family memories and sustaining
friendships, community involvement, and hope for the future.
--Publisher
Faith Ringgold has
already won my heart as an artist, as a woman, as an African
American, and now with her entry into the world of autobiography
(where I dwell), she has taken my heart again. She writes so
beautifully.
--Maya Angelou
Faith Ringgold has
created a rich and highly informative work not only of her own
life as an American in general but as an African American in
particular. These memoirs are a part of American history--of what
it means to be an artist, a writer, and a philosopher in our
society.
--Jacob Lawrence
In words that as
direct, honest, full of color and life as her paintings, Ringgold
gives each reader the greatest gift of all--courage to be one's
own unique and universal self.
--Gloria Steinem
The story of
Ringgold's triumph--achieved through sheer determination, savvy,
and self-conviction -- is both accessible and inspiring.
--Lowery Stokes Sims, Executive
Director, the Studio Museum in Harlem
Faith Ringgold's
exuberant and original art has made her one of America's more
important artists and a feminist heroine. Now her wonderfully
honest memoirs will resonate with all political and creative women
who are still fighting the battles Ringgold has won.
--Lucy Lippard, author of The
Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art
Bridging is the
major motif of Ringgold's life. . . . She is a bridge between the
Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights era. She is a bridge
between her mother's applied art of fashion design and her own
fine art of painting and story quilts. She is a bridge between the
abstract art that dominated the 60s and the issue-oriented art
that connected with viewers' hearts--and lives.
--Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia
Inquirer
* *
* * *
Faith Ringgold was born in Harlem in 1930, She
began painting more than forty years ago, and has exhibited in
museums in the United States, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa,
and the Middle East. In addition to Tar Beach, the children's
books she has written and illustrated include Aunt Harriet's
Underground Railroad in the Sky, If a Bus Could Talk: The
Story of Rosa Parks, and My Dream of Martin Luther King.
Ringgold has received more than seventy-five awards, fellowships,
citations, and honors, including seventeen honorary doctorates.
She lives in Englewood, new Jersey. Visit her website at http://www.faithringgold.com.
See also http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/fringgol.htm
Publicity contact: Laura Sell lsell@dukeupress.edu
posted 12 June 2005 |
