The real Negro : the question of authenticity in twentieth-century African American literature
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The real Negro : the question of authenticity in twentieth-century African American literature
（Literary criticism and cultural theory）（A Routledge series）
Routledge, 2004
- : hardcover
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Note
Bibliography: p. 97-105
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author belongs into a question of what it takes to belong to that race. Consequently, Paul Laurence Dunbar's Negro dialect poems were prized in the first part of the century because - written by a black man - they were not 'imitation' black, while the dialect performances by Zora Neale Hurston were celebrated because, written by a 'real' black, they were not 'imitation' white. The second half of the century, in its dismissal of material segregation, sanctions a notion of black racial meaning as internal and psychological and thus promotes a version of black racial 'truth' as invisible and interior, yet fixed within a stable conception of difference. The Real Negro foregrounds how investments in black racial specificity illuminate the dynamic terms that define what makes a text and a person 'black', while it also reveals how 'blackness', spoken and authentic, guards a more fragile, because unspoken, commitment to the purity and primacy of 'whiteness' as a stable, uncontested ideal.
Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: Black Man, Blackface: The Case of Paul Laurence Dunbar Chapter Two: Racial Hieroglyphics: Zora Neale Hurston and the Rise of the New Negro Chapter Three: Unspoken Words Are Stronger: Narrative Interiority and Racial Visibility in Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha Chapter Four: Sex and Violence: The Poetics of Black Power Postscript Notes Bibliography Index
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