Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus by : Margo Natalie Crawford

Download or read book Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus written by Margo Natalie Crawford and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the "Black is Beautiful" movement of the 1960s, black body politics have been overdetermined by both the familiar fetishism of light skin as well as the counter-fetishism of dark skin. Moving beyond the longstanding focus on the tragic mulatta and making room for the study of the fetishism of both light-skinned and dark-skinned blackness, Margo Natalie Crawford analyzes depictions of colorism in the work of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Thurman, William Faulkner, Black Arts poets, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman. In Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus, Crawford adds images of skin color dilution as a type of castration to the field of race and psychoanalysis. An undercurrent of light-skinned blackness as a type of castration emerges within an ongoing story about the feminizing of light skin and the masculinizing of dark skin. Crawford confronts the web of beautified and eroticized brands and scars, created by colorism, crisscrossing race, gender, and sexuality. The depiction of the horror of these aestheticized brands and scars begins in the white-authored and black-authored modernist literature examined in the first chapters. A call for the end of the ongoing branding emerges with sheer force in the post-Black movement novels examined in the final chapters.

Toni Morrison and the New Black

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429954913
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis Toni Morrison and the New Black by : Jaleel Akhtar

Download or read book Toni Morrison and the New Black written by Jaleel Akhtar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toni Morrison and the New Black examines how Morrison explores the concept of the new black in the context of post-soul, post-black and post-racial discourses. Morrison evolves the new black as symbolic of unprecedented black success in all walks of life, from politics to the media, business and beyond.The author's work shows how the new black reaffirms the possibility of upward mobility and success, and stands as testimony to the American Dream that anyone can achieve material success provided they work hard enough for it.

Toni Morrison and the Limits of a Politics of Recognition

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Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN 13 : 1497550769
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (975 download)

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Book Synopsis Toni Morrison and the Limits of a Politics of Recognition by : William Jefferson

Download or read book Toni Morrison and the Limits of a Politics of Recognition written by William Jefferson and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-05-25 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Toni Morrison's writing as politically progressive as is widely assumed? In this eye-opening study, critic William Jefferson argues that it is not. Analyzing Morrison's major texts from the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, Jefferson argues that Morrison's writing has advanced problematic conceptions of racial essentialism, sexuality, and agency that would not be identified as in any way progressive if issued from the pen of a white writer. More than merely showing readers underappreciated aspects of African-American history, Morrison's fiction has actively intervened in the politics of her era--and in ways politically reactionary and disturbing. Stepping back from Morrison's fiction, Jefferson asks why scholars have not recognized these political aspects of Morrison's writing. What he finds is a purportedly left-wing academy focused predominantly on recognizing the indisputably black aspects of Morrison's work. This "politics of recognition," unfortunately, also naturalizes Morrison's representations in the same manner liberal humanist criticism naturalized the representations of the pre-1970 literary canon.

The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009159712
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature by : Yogita Goyal

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature written by Yogita Goyal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a systematic and vibrant account of the range and achievements of contemporary Black writers.

The Trouble with Post-Blackness

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231538502
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis The Trouble with Post-Blackness by : Houston A. Baker Jr.

Download or read book The Trouble with Post-Blackness written by Houston A. Baker Jr. and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An America in which the color of one's skin no longer matters would be unprecedented. With the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, that future suddenly seemed possible. Obama's rise reflects a nation of fluid populations and fortunes, a society in which a biracial individual could be embraced as a leader by all. Yet complicating this vision are shifting demographics, rapid redefinitions of race, and the instant invention of brands, trends, and identities that determine how we think about ourselves and the place of others. This collection of original essays confronts the premise, advanced by black intellectuals, that the Obama administration marked the start of a "post-racial" era in the United States. While the "transcendent" and post-racial black elite declare victory over America's longstanding codes of racial exclusion and racist violence, their evidence relies largely on their own salaries and celebrity. These essays strike at the certainty of those who insist that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are now independent of skin color and race in America. They argue, signify, and testify that "post-blackness" is a problematic mythology masquerading as fact—a dangerous new "race science" motivated by black transcendentalist individualism. Through rigorous analysis, these essays expose the idea of a post-racial nation as a pleasurable entitlement for a black elite, enabling them to reject the ethics and urgency of improving the well-being of the black majority.

James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain

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Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9780820481586
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (815 download)

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Book Synopsis James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain by : Carol E. Henderson

Download or read book James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain written by Carol E. Henderson and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain ushered in a new age of the urban telling of a tale twice told yet rarely expressed in such vivid portraits. Go Tell It unveils the struggle of man with his God and that of man with himself. Baldwin's intense scrutiny of the spiritual and communal customs that serve as moral centers of the black community directs attention to the striking incongruities of religious fundamentalism and oppression. This book examines these multiple impulses, challenging the widely held convention that politics and religion do not mix.

How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind

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Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478012420
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind by : La Marr Jurelle Bruce

Download or read book How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind written by La Marr Jurelle Bruce and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly.” So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as “rage,” and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, and beyond. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes a set of interpretive practices, affective dispositions, political principles, and existential orientations that he calls “mad methodology.” Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.

The African American Roots of Modernism

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Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 0807878081
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The African American Roots of Modernism by : James Smethurst

Download or read book The African American Roots of Modernism written by James Smethurst and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, James Smethurst reveals, but instead a time of profound response from African American intellectuals. The African American Roots of Modernism explores how the Jim Crow system triggered significant artistic and intellectual responses from African American writers, deeply marking the beginnings of literary modernism and, ultimately, notions of American modernity. In identifying the Jim Crow period with the coming of modernity, Smethurst upsets the customary assessment of the Harlem Renaissance as the first nationally significant black arts movement, showing how artists reacted to Jim Crow with migration narratives, poetry about the black experience, black performance of popular culture forms, and more. Smethurst introduces a whole cast of characters, including understudied figures such as William Stanley Braithwaite and Fenton Johnson, and more familiar authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson. By considering the legacy of writers and artists active between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, Smethurst illuminates their influence on the black and white U.S. modernists who followed.

Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252051637
Total Pages : 395 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights by : Robert J Patterson

Download or read book Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights written by Robert J Patterson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The post-civil rights era of the 1970s offered African Americans an all-too-familiar paradox. Material and symbolic gains contended with setbacks fueled by resentment and reaction. African American artists responded with black approaches to expression that made history in their own time and continue to exercise an enormous influence on contemporary culture and politics. This collection's fascinating spectrum of topics begins with the literary and cinematic representations of slavery from the 1970s to the present. Other authors delve into visual culture from Blaxploitation to the art of Betye Saar to stage works like A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White as well as groundbreaking literary works like Corregidora and Captain Blackman. A pair of concluding essays concentrate on institutional change by looking at the Seventies surge of black publishing and by analyzing Ntozake Shange's for colored girls. . . in the context of current controversies surrounding sexual violence. Throughout, the writers reveal how Seventies black cultural production anchors important contemporary debates in black feminism and other issues while spurring the black imagination to thrive amidst abject social and political conditions. Contributors: Courtney R. Baker, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Madhu Dubey, Nadine Knight, Monica White Ndounou, Kinohi Nishikawa, Samantha Pinto, Jermaine Singleton, Terrion L. Williamson, and Lisa Woolfork

Black Men, Black Feminism

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Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319741268
Total Pages : 116 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (197 download)

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Book Synopsis Black Men, Black Feminism by : Jared Sexton

Download or read book Black Men, Black Feminism written by Jared Sexton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brief commentary on the necessity and the impossibility of black men’s participation in the development of black feminist theory and politics, Black Men, Black Feminism examines the basic assumptions that have guided—and misguided—black men’s efforts to take up black feminism. Offering a rejoinder to the contemporary study of black men and masculinity in the twenty-first century, Jared Sexton interrogates some of the most common intellectual postures of black men writing about black feminism, ultimately departing from the prevailing discourse on progressive black masculinities. Sexton examines, by contrast, black men’s critical and creative work—from Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep to Jordan Peele’s Get Out— to describe the cultural logic that provides a limited moral impetus to the quest for black male feminism and that might, if reconfigured, prompt an ethical response of an entirely different order.

Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199375208
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (993 download)

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Book Synopsis Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora by : Mae G. Henderson

Download or read book Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora written by Mae G. Henderson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The oral tradition has always played an important role in African American literature, ranging from works such as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to Toni Morrison's Beloved. These and countless other novels affirm the power of sonance and sound in the African American literary canon. Considering the wide swath of work in this powerful lineage -- in addition to its shared heritage with performance -- Mae G. Henderson deploys her trope of "speaking in tongues" to theorize the preeminence of voice and narration in black women's literary performance through her reconstruction of a fundamentally spiritual practice as a critical concept for reading black women's writing dialogically and intertextually. The first half of the book is devoted to influential works of fiction, as Henderson offers a series of spirited, attentive readings of works by Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Nella Larsen. The second half shifts gears to consider the world of female African American performance, most notably in the figures of Josephine Baker and the video dancer. Drawing on the trope of "dancing diaspora," Henderson proposes a model of theorizing based on "performing testimony" and "critical witnessing." Throughout the book, Henderson draws on a history of black women not only in the Pentecostal Holiness Church, but also within the traditions of classical, Christian, African, and black diasporic spirituality and performance. Ultimately, Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora provides a deeply felt reflection on race and gender and their effects within the discourses of speaker/listener and audience/performer.

Black Womanist Leadership

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Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438436033
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Black Womanist Leadership by : Toni C. King

Download or read book Black Womanist Leadership written by Toni C. King and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring the stories of fourteen Black women scholars, Black Womanist Leadership: Tracing the Motherline offers a culturally based model of Black women's leadership practices, and examines the mother-daughter transmission of these skills. The personal narratives fit into a storytelling tradition that reveals the ways Black mothers and women of the community—the Motherline—teach girls the "ways women lead." The essays present a range of different practical and theoretical issues of leadership and development, including mother nurture, emulation of and divergence from core values, internalized oppression, self determination, representation of the physical self, guardianship/governance of the body, cooperative economics, activism, contentiousness with or differentiation from the mother, and negotiation of leadership across public and private spheres. Together, they make a compelling argument for the necessity of continuing to teach the cultural and gender-specific resistance to oppression that has been passed along the Motherline, and to adapt this Motherline tradition to the lives and needs of women and girls in the 21st century.

Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252098323
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism by : GerShun Avilez

Download or read book Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism written by GerShun Avilez and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-05-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism explores the long-overlooked links between black nationalist activism and the renaissance of artistic experimentation emerging from recent African American literature, visual art, and film. GerShun Avilez charts a new genealogy of contemporary African American artistic production that illuminates how questions of gender and sexuality guided artistic experimentation in the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. As Avilez shows, the artistic production of the Black Arts era provides a set of critical methodologies and paradigms rooted in the disidentification with black nationalist discourses. Avilez's close readings study how this emerging subjectivity, termed aesthetic radicalism, critiqued nationalist rhetoric in the past. It also continues to offer novel means for expressing black intimacy and embodiment via experimental works of art and innovative artistic methods. A bold addition to an advancing field, Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism rewrites recent black cultural production even as it uncovers unexpected ways of locating black radicalism.

American Short Story Cycle

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Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474423949
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (744 download)

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Book Synopsis American Short Story Cycle by : Jennifer J. Smith

Download or read book American Short Story Cycle written by Jennifer J. Smith and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Short Story Cycle shows the roots of modernism and postmodernism winds through the short story cycle. Reviewers ranging from the The New York Times to Amazon do not know what to call books like Jennifer Egan?s A Visit from the Goon Squad or Jhumpa Lahiri?s Unaccustomed Earth. Why do such popular and acclaimed books spark debates about what they are and how they should be read? The American Short Story Cycle provides a history of this genre that has been hiding in plain sight. Dating back to the early nineteenth century and proliferating to the present, the short story cycle has been wildly popular both in the US and around the world. Stories in a cycle, which can be read singly but mean more together, reflect the individualism and pluralism that shape modern experience. This book gives a name and theory to the genre that has fostered the aesthetics of fragmentation and recurrence that characterize fiction today.

Blackness Is Burning

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Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 0814340520
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (143 download)

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Book Synopsis Blackness Is Burning by : TreaAndrea M. Russworm

Download or read book Blackness Is Burning written by TreaAndrea M. Russworm and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blackness Is Burning critiques the way the politics of recognition and representation appear in popular culture as attempts to "humanize" black identity through stories of suffering and triumph or tales of destruction and survival. Blackness Is Burning is one of the first books to examine the ways race and psychological rhetoric collided in the public and popular culture of the civil rights era. In analyzing a range of media forms, including Sidney Poitier's popular films, black mother and daughter family melodramas, Bill Cosby's comedy routine and cartoon Fat Albert, pulpy black pimp narratives, and several aspects of post–civil rights black/American culture, TreaAndrea M. Russworm identifies and problematizes the many ways in which psychoanalytic culture has functioned as a governing racial ideology that is built around a flawed understanding of trying to "recognize" the racial other as human. The main argument of Blackness Is Burning is that humanizing, or trying to represent in narrative and popular culture that #BlackLivesMatter, has long been barely attainable and impossible to sustain cultural agenda. But Blackness Is Burningmakes two additional interdisciplinary interventions: the book makes a historical and temporal intervention because Russworm is committed to showing the relationship between civil rights discourses on theories of recognition and how we continue to represent and talk about race today. The book also makes a formal intervention since the chapter-length case studies take seemingly banal popular forms seriously. She argues that the popular forms and disreputable works are integral parts of our shared cultural knowledge. Blackness Is Burning's interdisciplinary reach is what makes it a vital component to nearly any scholar's library, particularly those with an interest in African American popular culture, film and media studies, or psychoanalytic theory.

New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement

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Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813541077
Total Pages : 403 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (135 download)

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Book Synopsis New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement by : Lisa Gail Collins

Download or read book New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement written by Lisa Gail Collins and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-16 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1960s and 1970s, a cadre of poets, playwrights, visual artists, musicians, and other visionaries came together to create a renaissance in African American literature and art. This charged chapter in the history of African American culture—which came to be known as the Black Arts Movement—has remained largely neglected by subsequent generations of critics. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement includes essays that reexamine well-known figures such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Betye Saar, Jeff Donaldson, and Haki Madhubuti. In addition, the anthology expands the scope of the movement by offering essays that explore the racial and sexual politics of the era, links with other period cultural movements, the arts in prison, the role of Black colleges and universities, gender politics and the rise of feminism, color fetishism, photography, music, and more. An invigorating look at a movement that has long begged for reexamination, this collection lucidly interprets the complex debates that surround this tumultuous era and demonstrates that the celebration of this movement need not be separated from its critique.

We Cast a Shadow

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Publisher : One World
ISBN 13 : 0525509070
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (255 download)

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Book Synopsis We Cast a Shadow by : Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Download or read book We Cast a Shadow written by Maurice Carlos Ruffin and published by One World. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An incisive and necessary” (Roxane Gay) debut for fans of Get Out and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, about a father’s obsessive quest to protect his son—even if it means turning him white “Stunning and audacious . . . at once a pitch-black comedy, a chilling horror story and an endlessly perceptive novel about the possible future of race in America.”—NPR LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD, THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE, THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD, AND THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE WASHINGTON POST “You can be beautiful, even more beautiful than before.” This is the seductive promise of Dr. Nzinga’s clinic, where anyone can get their lips thinned, their skin bleached, and their nose narrowed. A complete demelanization will liberate you from the confines of being born in a black body—if you can afford it. In this near-future Southern city plagued by fenced-in ghettos and police violence, more and more residents are turning to this experimental medical procedure. Like any father, our narrator just wants the best for his son, Nigel, a biracial boy whose black birthmark is getting bigger by the day. The darker Nigel becomes, the more frightened his father feels. But how far will he go to protect his son? And will he destroy his family in the process? This electrifying, hallucinatory novel is at once a keen satire of surviving racism in America and a profoundly moving family story. At its center is a father who just wants his son to thrive in a broken world. Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s work evokes the clear vision of Ralph Ellison, the dizzying menace of Franz Kafka, and the crackling prose of Vladimir Nabokov. We Cast a Shadow fearlessly shines a light on the violence we inherit, and on the desperate things we do for the ones we love.