Gendered Nations: Black Subjectivity In Late Twentieth-Century African American and Black Caribbean Narratives

Lee, Jeannette M.

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Year:: 2009
Contributor:: Lee, Jeannette M. (creator); Keizer, Arlene (director); George, Olakunle (reader); Murray, Rolland (reader); Brown University. English (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: African American literature; Postcolonial studies; Gender and Sexuality; Black Diaspora; Abjection; Melancholia; Caribbean literature; Nationalism; African diaspora; Depression, Mental
Extent:: vii, 255 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0BV7DW2

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Abstract:: As a black feminist project, this dissertation contends that late twentieth-century black diasporic literature intervenes in debates about shifts in black communal formation in the postnational period. From the perspective of the non-normative character and through the frameworks of nationalism, and gender and sexuality, black writers explore how racial community informs subjectivity and polices difference. They assess the fraught ways blacks pursue agency by redeploying exclusionary structures central to modernity that have been instrumental in black subordination historically: reliance on others for self-constitution. The first half of the dissertation addresses the social construction of black hetero-masculinity and whom this construction privileges. The first chapter investigates how the heterosexual working-class black male subject is repositioned at the centre of the national community in _Salt_. Earl Lovelace's epic portrays the conditions of possibility for overcoming the challenges of the post-independent present. The novel's hopeful vision is constrained by the gendered and sexual limitations inherent to nationalism. The second chapter on Randall Kenan's _A Visitation of Spirits_ examines the relationship between a coherent black community, which I read as quasi-nationalist, and a queer African American male teenager. The heteronormative construction of black masculinity and abjection of queer sexuality delimit the black community, which results in the protagonist's suicide. The second half considers black feminist literary responses to the marginalization of black female subjects. These explorations desire a reconfiguration of the symbolic structure of Atlantic modernity as necessary for black female coherency. My third chapter on Toni Morrison's _Sula_ explores the conditions for full self- and sexual expression for a working-class black female within a coherent black community. _Sula_ portrays the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality and their compounded effects on the black female subject. The fourth chapter analyzes Jamaica Kincaid's _The Autobiography of My Mother_. The protagonist, Xuela, refuses to inhabit prescribed roles and charts an idiosyncratic future. Her recuperation, premised on the black female as a desiring subject, is disrupted by melancholia. Both Xuela and Sula are intriguing representations of radical black female subjectivity that collapse.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009)

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Rights: In Copyright
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Citation

Lee, Jeannette M., "Gendered Nations: Black Subjectivity In Late Twentieth-Century African American and Black Caribbean Narratives" (2009). English Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0BV7DW2

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English Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the English department.
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