Keith Clark - Böcker

The "problem of the twentieth century" was one of the most important factors in the development of American modernism. W. E. B. Du Bois, of course, identified that problem as "the color line" a phrase for the broad array of laws and practices that promulgated legal segregation, cultural separation, and racial antagonism in the US from the end of Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era. A more familiar name, borrowed from the popular tradition of blackface minstrelsy, personified this elusive but ever-present racial regime: Jim Crow. Taking as its starting point the contemporaneity of the Jim Crow era and the modernist era in art and culture, Jim Crow Modernism explores how these phenomena informed one another, and how artists and thinkers on both sides of the color line worked in and against the "separate but equal" landscape and the organizing logic of Jim Crow. This collection of new essays by prominent scholars in several fields-from American literary studies to film, media, art history, politics, and performance-provides a broad and deep analysis of this vital aspect of modern cultural history. Contributors address well known modernist figures like T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Wallace Thurman, as well as many others, from the Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay to the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi to the Afro-Latino writer Piri Thomas, whose peripatetic lives and careers initiated them into far-ranging traditions and contexts. At the same time, Jim Crow Modernism reaches well beyond the segregated US South to examine national and global spaces, networks, and migrations, from New York and Los Angeles to the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Challenging the standard portrayals of Black men in African American literatureFrom Frederick Douglass to the present, the preoccupation of black writers with manhood and masculinity is a constant. Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson explores how in their own work three major African American writers contest classic portrayals of black men in earlier literature, from slave narratives through the great novels of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.Keith Clark examines short stories, novels, and plays by Baldwin, Gaines, and Wilson, arguing that since the 1950s the three have interrupted and radically dismantled the constricting literary depictions of black men who equate selfhood with victimization, isolation, and patriarchy. Instead, they have reimagined black men whose identity is grounded in community, camaraderie, and intimacy.Delivering original and startling insights, this book will appeal to scholars and students of African American literature, gender studies, and narratology.

This welcome study delivers a long-overdue analysis of the works of Ann Petry (1908- 1997), a major mid-twentieth-century African American author. Primarily known as the sole female member of the ""Wright School of Social Protest,"" Petry has been most recognized for her 1946 novel The Street, about a woman's struggle to raise her son in a hardscrabble Harlem neighborhood. Keith Clark moves beyond assessments of Petry as a sort of literary descendent of Richard Wright to acclaim her innovative approaches to gender performance, sexuality, and literary technique.Engaging a variety of disciplinary frameworks, including gothic criticism, masculinity and gender studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic theory, Clark offers fresh readings of Petry's three novels and collection of short stories. Clark explores, for example, Petry's use of terror in The Street, where both blacks and whites appear physically and psychically monstrous. He also identifies the use of dark comedy and the macabre in her startling depictions of race, class, gender construction, and sexual identity in the stories ""The Bones of Louella Brown"" and ""The Witness."" Petry's overlooked second novel, Country Place- set in a deceptively serene, bucolic Connecticut hamlet- camouflages a world as palsied and nightmarish as the Harlem of her previous work. While confirming the black feminist dimensions of Petry's writing, Clark also assesses the writer's representations of an array of black and white masculine behaviors- some socially sanctioned, others transgressive and taboo- in her unheralded masterpiece, The Narrows, and her widely anthologized short story, ""Like a Winding Sheet."" Expansive in scope, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry foregrounds and analyzes Petry's unique concerns and agile techniques, re-introducing and situating her among more celebrated male contemporaries.

One of the South's most revered writers, Ernest J. Gaines attracts both popular and academic audiences. Gaines's unique literary style, depiction of the African American experience, and celebration of the rural South's oral tradition have brought him critical praise and numerous accolades, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel A Lesson before Dying. In this welcome guide to Gaines's fiction, Keith Clark offers insightful analyses of his novels and short stories. Clark's close readings elucidate Gaines's more acclaimed works- including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Gathering of Old Men- while also introducing lesser­-known but masterfully crafted pieces, such as the story ""Three Men"" and the civil rights novel In My Father's House. Gaines's most recent work, The Tragedy of Brady Sims, receives here one of its first critical examinations.Clark shows how the themes of Gaines's literary oeuvre, produced over the past fifty years, dovetail with issues reverberating in twenty-­first-­century America: race and the criminal justice system; black masculinity; the environment; the enduring impact of slavery; black southern women's voices; and blacks' and whites' interpretation of history. In addition to textual discussions, the book includes an interview Clark conducted with Gaines at the writer's home in New Roads, Louisiana, in 2014, further illuminating the inner workings and personality of this eminent literary artist.