The Future in Black and White

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-164
Author(s):  
Samantha Pinto
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Movie Star ◽  
Literature Culture ◽  
Post Civil Rights

Focusing on Adrienne Kennedy's 1976 drama, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, and Fran Ross's 1974 novel, Oreo, this essay argues for a radical reinterpretation of post-civil rights cultural and political legacies. Each author has been neglected in classrooms and criticism of the period, and in our stories about what constitutes paradigmatic black artistic practice of the time just beyond the height of the civil rights era. This essay renarrates this moment in African American literature, culture, and politics with these two authors at its center, marking the two texts as finding both danger and pleasure in popular performances of sexuality, gender, and race as they constitute a contemporary black feminist practice.

“Katrina is the Mother We Will Remember Until the Next Mother”

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-90
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Division

This chapter analyzes representations of Hurricane Katrina in African American literature to argue that the storm served to illustrate the entrenchment of structural racism and the importance of a specifically racialized tradition in African American literature. Adopting the theoretical framework of “slow violence,” the chapter analyzes two novels which depict both the storm and its aftermath: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Kiese Laymon’sLong Division (2013). In the context of the early twenty-first century, these representations of Katrina do not displace the social advancements of African Americans but instead force recognition of the incompleteness not only of specific political battles but also of ongoing race, gender, and class-based narratives, thereby questioning the optimism of a rhetoric of post-Blackness. In particular, the novels establish continuity between Civil Rights Era traumas and struggles and Hurricane Katrina to push against a rhetoric focused on the transcendence of the past.

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