Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction
From Faulkner to Morrison
Duvall, John N.
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BOOK SYNOPSIS
Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction explores a form of racial passing that has gone largely unnoticed. Duvall makes visible the means by which southern novelists repeatedly imagined their white characters as fundamentally black in some sense. Beginning with William Faulkner, Duvall traces a form of figurative and rhetorical masking in twentieth-century southern fiction that derives from whiteface minstrelsy. In the fiction of such subsequent writers as Flannery O'Connor, John Barth, Dorothy Allison, and Ishmael Reed, the reader sees characters who present a white face to the world, even as they unconsciously perform cultural blackness. These queer performances of race repeatedly reveal that being merely Caucasian is insufficient to claim Southern Whiteness.
AUTHOR BIO
John N. Duvall is Professor of English, Purdue University. He is author of Faulkner's Marginal Couple: Invisible Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities, The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness, and editor or co-editor of Modern Fiction Studies, Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies, Faulkner and Postmodernism, Approaches to Teaching DeLillo's White Noise, and the Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo.
BOOK REVIEWS
For some reason, the synergy between critical whiteness studies and southern literary studies has been slow to develop. That changes with Duvalls Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction. In a series of deftly written chapters ranging from Faulkners self-caricature as a funny black man in New Orleans in the 1920s to contemporary dissections of whiteness by Toni Morrison, Dorothy Allison, and Ishmael Reed, Duvall charts the crises in representation and subjectivity that result when racially white southerners find themselves, often inadvertently, performing cultural blackness. This book would be indispensable if only for the highly original way in which it racializes the famous anagogical moment (or moment of grace) in the writings of Flannery OConnor. But Duvall deserves extra credit for welcoming John Barth back into the canon of Southern writing, a canon from which Barths credentials as a postmodernist have often seemed to exclude him. A very impressive study.--Jay Watson, Professor of English, University of Mississippi
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 1403983879
ISBN(13-digit): 9781403983879
Dewey Decimal: 813/.509355
Library of Congress: 2007040929
Book Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 194
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