Masks: Blackness, Race, and the ImaginationOxford University Press, 2000 - 295 psl. What is "race"? A biological fact, a social construction, or an assumed disguise? In Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination, acclaimed novelist and critic Adam Lively offers a brilliant exploration of how the concept of blackness has evolved in Western thought and literature, and how changing notions of racial identity helped to shape modern consciousness. Lively traces ideas of racial difference to their earliest expressions in European culture, at the time of the Europeans' first encounters with African and American peoples, and follows these ideas to their current incarnations in contemporary America and the Caribbean. He explores the various and sometimes reversible ways in which racial identity has functioned as a mask: the pure white soul inside the black person; the primitive, dark soul ready to break through the civilized white veneer; the "invisible" black whose identity consists of projected white fears. Examining a wide range of works over the last three centuries--including slave autobiographies, sentimental romances, propagandist verse, natural history, jazz (which he calls "a music of disguises") and such 20th-century writers as Jean Genet, Joseph Conrad, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, Eugene O'Neill, and others--Lively explores the fluidity of racial identity. He argues that the modernist concern with the uncertainties of identity and indeed that modernism's relativistic, ironic, pluralistic, and perpetually questioning characteristics are derived largely from black experience of a shifting sense of self. Lucidly written and covering an enormous historical expanse, Masks uncovers the changing ways we have tried to understand the elusive and often illusory nature of racial identity. |
Turinys
Introduction | 1 |
Race and the Sentimental Imagination | 55 |
Race and Evolution | 99 |
The Pessimism of Empire | 125 |
A Question of Identity | 161 |
The Black Hero | 203 |
Black Apocalypse | 247 |
Epilogue | 282 |
Pagrindiniai terminai ir frazės
abolitionism abolitionist aesthetic African African-American American anti-slavery apes artistic association atavism authenticity Baldwin become black black black black culture Bois Césaire character Chillun Got Wings Christian civilisation colour Conrad Darwin dream early eighteenth century Ellison essay European evangelical evolution feel fiction French God's Chillun Harlem Renaissance Heart of Darkness human idea imagination imperial James jazz Jim Crow John language liberal literary literature London Mailer masks minstrel minstrel show modern moral narrative nature Nègres negritude Negro Nella Larsen nigger nineteenth century novel novelist origins Oroonoko passing Penguin physical play Plum Bun political polygenist popular primitive primitivism published Pudd'nhead Pudd'nhead Wilson Rabbit Redux race racial identity Ralph Ellison Rider Haggard role romance savage sense sentimental sexual Skeeter skin slave trade slavery society soul spiritual stereotypes story theory things thought tradition Tyssot Uncle Tom's Cabin Updike Updike's Victorian violence Wright writing York