Habitations of the Veil

Rebecka Rutledge Fisher is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"This is a book that is not for the faint of heart: it is a thinking book … A worthy addition to the growing literary criticism of African American literature." — San Francisco Book Review

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Poetics of Being BlackI. Inhabiting the Veil: On Black Being 1. Being and MetaphorA Philosophy of Ordinary Black Being: Hurston’s "Characteristics of Negro Expression"2. African American Philosophy and the Poetics of Black BeingCrafting a Poetics of Black Being: Du Bois’s Philosophical ExampleWhither Blackness? Du Bois, Black Culture, and the Contemporaneity of Black BeingII. The Poetics of Black Being Before and After Du Bois 3. Being and Becoming: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the AfricanThe Rhetoric of the Image: Being and Becoming in Equiano’s Use of PortraitureHope in Narrative: Equiano’s Biblical TurnAn Actuated Being4. Remnants of Memory: Metaphor and Being in Frances E.W. Harper’s Sketches of Southern LifeThe Evolution of Harper’s Vernacular PoetryBetween Metaphor and Black Being: Aunt Chloe’s Structure of Poetic Memory5. A Technology of Modern Black Being: "The Conservation of Races" as a Critical Ontology of RaceBeing in the Occasion of Discourse: "Conservation," Metaphor, and the Historical Narrative of RaceA Technology of Black Being: "The Conservation of Races" as the Contested "Mediation by which We Understand Ourselves"The Interpretation of Black Historicity: Reading "Conservation" in Context"Conservation" and the Hermeneutics of Race6. Habitations of the Veil: Souls, Figure, FormIncipit and ExcipitPoem and Paratext: The African American Spiritual and the Strivings of Black BeingInspiriting Time: The Spiritual and the Ontology of the SlaveMetaphors of Perceiving, Knowing, and MourningMetaphors of Journeying and InsightMetaphors of the Temporal and the AtemporalThe Fundamental Mythopoetics of Metaphor in African American ReligionThe Soul’s Biography: Metaphors of Transition and TranscendenceNavigating the Undulating Waters of Being: The Spirituals and the Possibilities of Metaphor7. Symbolic Wrights: The Poetics of Being UndergroundIncipitMapping Black Ontology and Black Freedom"Blueprint for Negro Writing" in ContextBeing Underground8. A Love Called Democracy: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible ManBy Way of ConclusionSpeaking for the BelovedLove’s Habitation: Blackness, the Uncanny Maternal, and American DemocracyThe Repression of the Black MaternalThe Irrepressible Dreamer: Reveries of Sexual LoveSacrificing Sexual DesireBlack Being’s Moral of LoveNotesBibliographyIndex