W. Lawrence Hogue – författare

Although literary postmodernism has been defined in terms of difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and plurality, some of the most vaunted authors of postmodern American fiction--such as Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, and other white male authors--often fail to adequately represent the distinct subjectivities of African Americans, American Indians, Latinos and Latinas, women, the poor of the center, and the global periphery. In this groundbreaking study, W. Lawrence Hogue exposes the ways in which much postmodern American literature privileges a typically Eurocentric, male-oriented type of subjectivity, often at the expense of victimizing or objectifying the ethnic or gendered Other. In contrast to the dominant white male perspective on postmodernism, Hogue points to African American, American Indian, and women authors within the American postmodern canon--Rikki Ducornet, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, and Gerald Vizenor--who work against these structures of stereotype and bias, resulting in a literary postmodernism that more genuinely respects and represents difference. He argues that most postmodern African American, American Indian, and women writers experience and write about postmodernity in ways that are substantially different from white men, since they are intimately concerned with the existence of racism and sexism. These “Other” authors, who are searching for new cultural forms and paradigms to describe themselves outside modernity’s conventions, define themselves according to their own logic, one that eschews fixed notions of identity in favor of a network of contextual, partial, contradictory, and shifting identifications.

The central thesis of Lawrence Hogue''s book is that criticism of Afro-American literature has left out of account the way in which ideological pressures dictate the canon. This fresh approach to the study of the social, ideological, and political dynamics of the Afro-American literary text in the twentieth century, based on the Foucauldian concept of literature as social institution, examines the universalization that power effects, how literary texts are appropriated to meet ideological concerns and needs, and the continued oppression of dissenting voices.

Hogue presents an illuminating discussion of the publication and review history of "major" and neglected texts. He illustrates the acceptance of texts as exotica, as sociological documents, or as carriers of sufficient literary conventions to receive approbation. Although the sixties movement allowed the text to move to the periphery of the dominant ideology, providing some new myths about the Afro-American historical past, this marginal position was subsequently sabotaged, co-opted, or appropriated (Afros became a fad; presidents gave the soul handshake; the hip-talking black was dressing one style and talking another.)

This study includes extended discussion of four works; Ernest J. Gaines''s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Alice Walker''s The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Albert Murray''s Train Whistle Guitar, and Toni Morrison''s Sula. Hogue assesses the informing worldviews of each and the extent and nature of their acceptance by the dominant American cultural apparatus.

Examines how six writers reconfigure African American subjectivity in ways that recall postmodernist theory.This book explores how African American social and political movements, African American studies, independent scholars, and traditional cultural forms revisit and challenge the representation of the African American as deviant other. After surveying African American history and cultural politics, W. Lawrence Hogue provides original and insightful readings of six experimental/postmodern African American texts: John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire; Percival Everett's Erasure; Toni Morrison's Jazz; Bonnie Greer's Hanging by Her Teeth; Clarence Major's Reflex and Bone Structure; and Xam Wilson Cartiér's Muse-Echo Blues. Using traditional cultural and western forms, including the blues, jazz, voodoo, virtuality, radical democracy, Jungian/African American Collective Unconscious, Yoruba gods, black folk culture, and black working class culture, Hogue reveals that these authors uncover spaces with different definitions of life that still retain a wildness and have not been completely mapped out and trademarked by normative American culture. Redefining the African American novel and the African American outside the logic, rules, and values of western binary reason, these writers leave open the possibility of psychic liberation of African Americans in the West.

In the 1960s, Charles Wright’s (1932–2008) star was on the rise. After dropping out of high school and serving in the Korean War, the young Black writer landed in New York, where he was mentored by Norman Mailer, signed a book deal with a leading publisher, and was celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Over the decades to follow, Wright would lead a peripatetic and at times precarious life, moving between Tangier, Veracruz, Paris, and New York, penning a regular column for the Village Voice, living off the goodwill of his friends, and battling addiction and, later, mental health issues. As W. Lawrence Hogue shows, Wright’s innovative fiction stands apart, offering a different vision of outcast Black Americans in the postwar era and using satire to bring agency and humanity to working-class characters. This critical biography—the first devoted to Wright’s significant but largely forgotten story—brings new attention to the writer’s impressive body of work, in the context of a wild, but troubled, life.

In the 1960s, Charles Wright’s (1932–2008) star was on the rise. After dropping out of high school and serving in the Korean War, the young Black writer landed in New York, where he was mentored by Norman Mailer, signed a book deal with a leading publisher, and was celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Over the decades to follow, Wright would lead a peripatetic and at times precarious life, moving between Tangier, Veracruz, Paris, and New York, penning a regular column for the Village Voice, living off the goodwill of his friends, and battling addiction and, later, mental health issues. As W. Lawrence Hogue shows, Wright’s innovative fiction stands apart, offering a different vision of outcast Black Americans in the postwar era and using satire to bring agency and humanity to working-class characters. This critical biography—the first devoted to Wright’s significant but largely forgotten story—brings new attention to the writer’s impressive body of work, in the context of a wild, but troubled, life.

This book reconfigures the history of modern America, showing how multiple and, at times, vulnerable social, economic, literary, and political movements, levels, divisions, and conditions such as the emergent middle class, the labor movement, the Progressive Movement, the socialist and communist parties, the Women’s movements, the NAACP, the Garvey movement, Asian and Native American resistance movements, writers, artists, and intellectuals seized upon social, gender, economic, and racial inequalities and challenged a singularly defined modern America. This book re-represents the modern American novel, accenting the different critical literary voices that come out of the mainstream consumer society but also out of the various unequal social, economic, gender, and political movements and situations. In including racial, gender, sexual, colonial, class, and ethnic others—who reject the rigidity, the repression, the racial and ethnic stereotyping, the external and internal colonialism, the complication/rejection of the past/nature, and the violence of the institutionalized, conformist norm—in a discussion of the modern American novel, it effects a fundamental recasting of the modern Americanist paradigm, one that is de-centered, richer, more complex, and more diverse.

In belonging to an oppressed/colonized racial group in the West, where their voices, humanity, history, culture, reality, and subjectivity are perpetually under siege, distorted, and/or erased, African American writers since the 1960s have struggled to be heard and represented. Yet, despite the racism, terror, trauma, and dehumanization, they, in revisiting, reclaiming, and reassessing their history and culture, used their decolonized imaginations and agency to reconfigure their history, subjectivity, and reality, and to invoke a more humane and just world, with love, despite all the odds.

In belonging to an oppressed/colonized racial group in the West, where their voices, humanity, history, culture, reality, and subjectivity are perpetually under siege, distorted, and/or erased, African American writers since the 1960s have struggled to be heard and represented. Yet, despite the racism, terror, trauma, and dehumanization, they, in revisiting, reclaiming, and reassessing their history and culture, used their decolonized imaginations and agency to reconfigure their history, subjectivity, and reality, and to invoke a more humane and just world, with love, despite all the odds.

In belonging to an oppressed/colonized racial group in the West, where their voices, humanity, history, culture, reality, and subjectivity are perpetually under siege, distorted, and/or erased, African American writers since the 1960s have struggled to be heard and represented. Yet, despite the racism, terror, trauma, and dehumanization, they, in revisiting, reclaiming, and reassessing their history and culture, used their decolonized imaginations and agency to reconfigure their history, subjectivity, and reality, and to invoke a more humane and just world, with love, despite all the odds.

Reads and interprets eight works of literature by people of color, foregrounding the philosophical debate about modernity vs. postmodernity rather than solely issues of race.

Argues that African American literature must take into account the rich diversity of African American life and culture.In this wide-ranging analysis, W. Lawrence Hogue argues that African American life and history is more diverse than even African American critics generally acknowledge. Focusing on literary representations of African American males in particular, Hogue examines works by James Weldon Johnson, William Melvin Kelley, Charles Wright, Nathan Heard, Clarence Major, James Earl Hardy, and Don Belton to see how they portray middle-class, Christian, subaltern, voodoo, urban, jazz/blues, postmodern, and gay African American cultures. Hogue shows that this polycentric perspective can move beyond a "racial uplift" approach to African American literature and history and help paint a clearer picture of the rich diversity of African American life and culture.