Synopses & Reviews
Co-edited and introduced by Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature,
Birth of a Nation'hood elucidates as never before the grim miasma of the O.J. Simpson case, which has elicited gargantuan fascination.
As they pertain to the scandal, the issues of race, sex, violence, money, and the media are refracted through twelve powerful essays that have been written especially for this book by distinguished intellectuals--black and white, male and female. Together these keen analyses of a defining American moment cast a chilling gaze on the script and spectacle of the insidious tensions that rend our society, even as they ponder the proper historical, cultural, political, legal, psychological, and linguistic ramifications of the affair.
With contributions by:
Toni Morrison, George Lipsitz, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., with Aderson Bellegarde Francois and Linda Y. Yueh, Nikol G. Alexander and Drucilla Cornell, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Ishmael Reed, Leola Johnson and David Roediger, Andrew Ross, Patricia J. Williams, Ann duCille, Armond White, Claudia Brodsky Lacour
About the Author
Toni Morrison is the author of ten novels, from
The Bluest Eye (1970) to
A Mercy (2008). She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York.
With contributions by:
Toni Morrison, George Lipsitz, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., with Aderson Bellegarde Francois and Linda Y. Yueh, Nikol G. Alexander and Drucilla Cornell, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Ishmael Reed, Leola Johnson and David Roediger, Andrew Ross, Patricia J. Williams, Ann duCille, Armond White, Claudia Brodsky Lacour
Table of Contents
The Official Story: Dead Man GolfingIntroduction by Toni Morrison
The Greatest Story Ever Sold: Marketing and the O.J. Simpson Trial
George Lipsitz
The O.J. Simpson Trial: Who Was Improperly "Playing the Race Card"?
A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Aderson Bellegarde Francois, Linda Y. Yueh
Dismissed or Banished? A Testament to the Reasonableness of the Simpson Jury
Nikol G. Alexander and Drucilla Cornell
Color-blind Dreams and Racial Nightmares: Reconfiguring Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era
Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
Bigger and O.J.
Ishmael Reed
"Hertz, Don't It?"
Becoming Colorless and Staying Black in the Crossover of O.J. Simpson
Leola Johnson and David Roediger
If the Genes Fit, How Do You Aquit?
O.J. and Science
Andrew Ross
American Kabuki
Patricia J. Williams
The Unbearable Darkness of Being: "Fresh" Thoughts on Race, Sex, and the Simpsons
Ann duCille
Eye, the Jury
Armond White
The "Interest" of the Simpson Trial: Spectacle, National History, and the Notion of Disinterested Judgement
Claudia Brodsky Lacour