- Title Information
- Title
- Gendered Nations: Black Subjectivity In Late Twentieth-Century African American and Black Caribbean Narratives
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Lee, Jeannette M.
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
(keyDate="yes", encoding="w3cdtf")
- 2009
- Physical Description
- Extent
- vii, 255 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009)
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Keizer, Arlene
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- George, Olakunle
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Murray, Rolland
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. English
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- 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.
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- African American literature
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Postcolonial studies
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Gender and Sexuality
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Black Diaspora
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Abjection
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Melancholia
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/847469")
- Topic
- Caribbean literature
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1033832")
- Topic
- Nationalism
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/799755")
- Topic
- African diaspora
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/890931")
- Topic
- Depression, Mental
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20091218
- Language
- Language Term:
Code (ISO639-2B)
- eng
- Language Term:
Text
- English
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.7301/Z0BV7DW2
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations