Representing Segregation

Brian Norman is Assistant Professor of African American and American Literature at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division, also published by SUNY Press. Piper Kendrix Williams is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at the College of New Jersey.

"This book deals with more than just aesthetics; it also looks at the very nature of literary and theoretical representations of segregation." — Kathaleen E. Amende, Alabama State UniversityBrian Norman is Assistant Professor of African American and American Literature at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division, also published by SUNY Press. Piper Kendrix Williams is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at the College of New Jersey."By defining key figures, practices, and comparative approaches … [Representing Segregation] clarif[ies] and validate[s] the work of scholarship on the literature of the Civil Rights Movement … the volume … is excellent." — MELUS"Norman and Williams have assembled a collection of fine essays addressing the topic of place and space with regard to segregation … Presenting not only an eye-opening lesson in African American history but also a study in environmental justice, the contributors to this volume explain how race is embedded in the body, street, city, region, and country … This book settles any question there may have been about whether segregation or Jim Crow narrative exists … Highly recommended." — CHOICE"This book deals with more than just aesthetics; it also looks at the very nature of literary and theoretical representations of segregation." — Kathaleen E. Amende, Alabama State University

• List of IllustrationsForewardJoycelyn MoodyAcknowledgmentsIntroductionTo Lie, Steal, and Dissemble: The Cultural Work of the Literature of SegregationBrian Norman and Piper Kendrix WilliamsIn The Crowd, Artist’s StatementShawn Michelle Smith1. The Aesthetic Challenge of Jim Crow PoliticsAmerican Graffiti: The Social Life of Segregation SignsElizabeth AbelSmacked Upside the Head—AgainTrudier Harris2. Imagining and Subverting Jim Crow in Charles Chesnutt’s Segregation FictionWedded to the Color Line: Charles Chesnutt’s Stories of SegregationTess ChakkalakalCharles Chesnutt’s "The Dumb Witness" and the Culture of SegregationLori Robison and Eric Wolfe"Those that Do Violence Must Expect to Suffer": Disrupting Segregationist Fictions of Safety in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of TraditionBirgit Brander Rasmussen3. Inside Jim Crow and His DoublesWhite Islands of Safety and Engulfing Blackness: Remapping Segregation in Angelina Weld Grimkë’s "Blackness" and "Goldie"Anne P. Rice"Somewhat Like War": The Aesthetics of Segregation, Black Liberation, and A Raisin in the SunMichelle Y. GordonHousing the Black Body: Value, Domestic Space, and African American Narratives of SegregationGerShun AvilezDiseased Properties and Broken Homes in Ann Petry’s The StreetElizabeth Boyle Machlan4. Exporting Jim CrowEmbodying Segregation: Ida B. Wells and the Cultural Work of TravelGary TottenBlack Is a Region: Segregation and Literary Regionalism in Richard Wright’s The Color CurtainEve Dunbar"Que Dice?" Latin America and the Transnational in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Along this WayRuth Blandón5. Jim Crow’s LegacyIn Possession of Space: Abolitionist Memory and Spatial Transformation in Civil Rights Literature and PhotographyZoe TroddInto a Burning House: Representing Segregation’s DeathVince SchleitwilerAfterwordCheryl WallList of ContributorsIndex