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Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002 Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-233) and index Introduction : Southern black writers no matter where they are born -- Such a frightening musical form : James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie (1964) -- Fear of manhood in the wake of systemic racism in Ernest J. Gaines's "Three men" (1968) -- The irresistible appeal of slavery : fear of losing the self in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred (1979) -- Owning the script, owning the self : transcendence of fear in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) -- 10,000 miles from Dixie and still in the South : fear of transplanted racism in Yusef Komunyakaa's Vietnam poetry : Dien cai dau (1988) -- Fear of family, Christianity, and the self : Southern black "othering" in Randall Kenan's A visitation of spirits (1989) -- A haunting diary and a slasher quilt : using dynamic folk communities to combat terror in Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata (1998) -- Domesticating fear : Tayari Jones's mission in Leaving Atlanta (2002) -- The worst fear imaginable : black slave owners in Edward P. Jones's The known world (2003) -- No fear; or, autoerotic creativity : how Raymond Andrews pleasures himself in Baby Sweet's (1983) New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In this book, the author a renowned literary scholar explores why black writers, whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere, have consistently both loved and hated the South. She explains that for these authors the South represents not so much a place or even a culture as a rite of passage. Not one of them can consider himself or herself a true African American writer without confronting the idea of the South in a decisive way. She considers native born black southerners Raymond Andrews, Ernest J. Gaines, Edward P. Jones, Tayari Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, and Phyllis Alesia Perry, and nonsouthern writers James Baldwin, Sherley Anne Williams, and Octavia E. Butler. The works she examines date from Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) to Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003). By including Komunyakaa's poems and Baldwin's play, as well as male and female authors, she demonstrates that the writers' preoccupation with the South cuts across lines of genre and gender. Whether their writings focus on slavery, migration from the South to the North, or violence on southern soil, and whether they celebrate the triumph of black southern heritage over repression or castigate the South for its treatment of blacks, these authors cannot escape the call of the South. Indeed, she asserts that creative engagement with the South represents a defining characteristic of African American writing. A singular work by one of the foremost literary scholars writing today, this book demonstrates how history and memory continue to figure powerfully in African American literary creativity |
