Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division

Examines racial segregation in literature and the cultural legacy of the Jim Crow era. As a touchstone issue in American history, segregation has had an immeasurable impact on the lives of most ethnic groups in the United States. Primarily associated with the Jim Crow South and the court cases Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), segregation comprises a diverse set of cultural practices, ethnic experiences, historical conditions, political ideologies, municipal planning schemes, and de facto social systems. Representing Segregation traces the effects of these practices on the literary imagination and proposes a distinct literary tradition of representing segregation. Contributors engage a cross section of writers, literary movements, segregation practices, and related experiences of racial division in order to demonstrate the richness and scope of responses to segregation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By taking up the cultural expression of the Jim Crow period and its legacies, this collection reorients literary analysis of an important body of African American literature in productive new directions.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Foreward Joycelyn Moody Acknowledgments Introduction To Lie, Steal, and Dissemble: The Cultural Work of the Literature of Segregation Brian Norman and Piper Kendrix Williams In The Crowd, Artist's Statement Shawn Michelle Smith 1. The Aesthetic Challenge of Jim Crow Politics American Graffiti: The Social Life of Segregation Signs Elizabeth Abel Smacked Upside the Head-Again Trudier Harris 2. Imagining and Subverting Jim Crow in Charles Chesnutt's Segregation Fiction Wedded to the Color Line: Charles Chesnutt's Stories of Segregation Tess Chakkalakal Charles Chesnutt's "The Dumb Witness" and the Culture of Segregation Lori Robison and Eric Wolfe "Those that Do Violence Must Expect to Suffer": Disrupting Segregationist Fictions of Safety in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition Birgit Brander Rasmussen 3. Inside Jim Crow and His Doubles White Islands of Safety and Engulfing Blackness: Remapping Segregation in Angelina Weld Grimke's "Blackness" and "Goldie" Anne P. Rice "Somewhat Like War": The Aesthetics of Segregation, Black Liberation, and A Raisin in the Sun Michelle Y. Gordon Housing the Black Body: Value, Domestic Space, and African American Narratives of Segregation GerShun Avilez Diseased Properties and Broken Homes in Ann Petry's The Street Elizabeth Boyle Machlan 4. Exporting Jim Crow Embodying Segregation: Ida B. Wells and the Cultural Work of Travel Gary Totten Black Is a Region: Segregation and Literary Regionalism in Richard Wright's The Color Curtain Eve Dunbar "Que Dice?" Latin America and the Transnational in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Along this Way Ruth Blandon 5. Jim Crow's Legacy In Possession of Space: Abolitionist Memory and Spatial Transformation in Civil Rights Literature and Photography Zoe Trodd Into a Burning House: Representing Segregation's Death Vince Schleitwiler Afterword Cheryl Wall List of Contributors Index

About the Author :
Brian Norman is Assistant Professor of African American and American Literature at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division, also published by SUNY Press. Piper Kendrix Williams is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at the College of New Jersey.

Review :
"This book deals with more than just aesthetics; it also looks at the very nature of literary and theoretical representations of segregation." - Kathaleen E. Amende, Alabama State University Brian Norman is Assistant Professor of African American and American Literature at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division, also published by SUNY Press. Piper Kendrix Williams is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at the College of New Jersey. "By defining key figures, practices, and comparative approaches ... [Representing Segregation] clarif[ies] and validate[s] the work of scholarship on the literature of the Civil Rights Movement ... the volume ... is excellent." - MELUS "Norman and Williams have assembled a collection of fine essays addressing the topic of place and space with regard to segregation ... Presenting not only an eye-opening lesson in African American history but also a study in environmental justice, the contributors to this volume explain how race is embedded in the body, street, city, region, and country ... This book settles any question there may have been about whether segregation or Jim Crow narrative exists ... Highly recommended." - CHOICE "This book deals with more than just aesthetics; it also looks at the very nature of literary and theoretical representations of segregation." - Kathaleen E. Amende, Alabama State University