Synopses & Reviews
The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. In his compelling new book,
Representing the Race, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature. Jarrett examines texts of every sort--pamphlets, autobiographies, cultural criticism, poems, short stories, and novels--to parse the myths of authenticity, popular culture, nationalism, and militancy that have come to define African American political activism in recent decades. He argues that unless we show the diverse and complex ways that African American literature has transformed society, political myths will continue to limit our understanding of this intellectual tradition.
Cultural forums ranging from the printing press, schools, and conventions, to parlors, railroad cars, and courtrooms provide the backdrop to this African American literary history, while the foreground is replete with compelling stories, from the debate over racial genius in early American history and the intellectual culture of racial politics after slavery, to the tension between copyright law and free speech in contemporary African American culture, to the political audacity of Barack Obamas creative writing. Erudite yet accessible, Representing the Race is a bold explanation of whats at stake in continuing to politicize African American literature in the new millennium.
Review
“Framed by an audacious pairing of 'presidential bookends' (Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama), Representing the Race forces us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the putative political value of African American literature. Jarrett draws our attention away from the legacy of Black Arts in the 1960s to a richly historicized set of case studies from the colonial era to the present.”-Brent Hayes Edwards,Columbia University, and author of The Practice of Diaspora
Review
"In this tour de force, Jarrett offers us a strikingly fresh and powerfully cogent paradigm for African American literary history and historiography more generally. An exemplary model of interdisciplinary inquiry, Representing the Race deftly engages fierce historic and contemporary debates about the relationship between literature, culture and politics to bring us to new and nuanced understandings of them all. This latest scholarship of Jarretts is not only field-defining; it stunningly redefines altogether what we think of as the field of African American Studies." -Michele Elam,author of The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics
Synopsis
On Christmas day, 1993, a 59-year-old British woman gave birth to healthy twins. In Italy the very same week, a black woman bore a white baby, produced from the semen of her white husband and an egg donated by a white woman. Heated debates ensued across the United States and Europe.
Fifteen years ago the very idea of conception outside a woman's womb triggered science fiction fantasies and alarmist speculations. Today, thousands of babies are manufactured with the help of in-vitro fertilization and related technologies each year. The application of these procedures has continuously shifted the boundaries of conception and reproduction.
In the public debate on new reproductive technologies, many voices have been heard: medical scientists hailing the new technologies as an unprecedented advance; feminists raising apprehensions about the way in which these technologies might rob a woman of her reproductive autonomy and bodily integrity; and ethicists, religious groups, and politicians expressing concerns about the social and moral implications of the new technologies. Mapping out the public debate in the three discourses which play the most significant role in the distribution of public meaningsscience, journalism and fictionJos Van Dyck here traces the ways in which this public consent has been manufactured. This book examines important questions about the relationship between science, technology and popular culture.
About the Author
Gene Andrew Jarrett is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Boston University. He is the author of Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature, and the editor of several books, including African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader, also published by NYU Press. He also won a Walter Jackson Bate fellowship from Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2010.