Western Fictions, Black Realities: Meanings of Blackness and ModernitiesIsabel Soto, Violet Showers Johnson This anthology interrogates two salient concepts in studying the black experience. Ushered in with the age of New World encounters, modernity emerged as brutal, complex and multiple, from its very definition to its manifestations. Equally challenging is blackness, which is forever dangling between the range of uplifting articulations and insidious degradation. The essays confront the conflicting confluences of these two terms. Questioning Euro-centric and 'mainstream' American interpretations, they reveal the diverse meanings of modernities and blackness from an equally diverse set of milieus of the black experience. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in thematic and epochal scope, they use theoretical and empirical studies to demonstrate that, indeed, blackness is relevant for understanding modernities and vice versa. |
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aesthetic African American Afro Angela Davis argues Armstrong artists Asante Asante’s autobiography Black Atlantic black music black women blues Bois Bois’s boxing Cambridge Canary cancer century Clubber Lang color concept of double critical cultural Davis’s discourse Dominican Republic double consciousness Duke Ellington essay ethnic European Ex-Colored experience eyes Feminist fiction fight fighter film gender genre Gilroy gothic Haitian Harlem Renaissance human islanders James Weldon Johnson jazz Jazz Studies Juana’s LaMotta Langston Lilies and Jade literary literature living Lorde Lorde’s Louis Armstrong man’s migrants modernist Moses Multiple Modernities musicians nation Negro Nordan’s novel Nugent’s one’s oppression political race racial racism Reader represented Rocky sexual slave narratives slavery Smoke social society Spain Spanish spiritual story struggle Taíno tion tradition travel narratives Velma vernacular voice W. E. B. Du Bois Western White Hope white supremacy Wolf Whistle writing York Zora Neale Hurston