1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910786898003321

Autore

McKee Patricia <1945->

Titolo

Producing American races : Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison / / Patricia McKee

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Durham, NC : , : Duke University Press, , 1999

ISBN

0-8223-2363-X

0-8223-9766-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (252 p.)

Collana

New Americanists

Disciplina

813.009/355

Soggetti

American fiction - 20th century - History and criticism

Race in literature

Literature and society - United States - History - 20th century

White people - Race identity - United States

African Americans - Race identity

African Americans in literature

White people in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages [207]-236) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: race and media -- Reproducing whiteness: The wings of the dove -- Collective whiteness in The golden bowl -- Self-division as racial divide: The sound and the fury -- Playing white men in Light in August -- Black spaces in Sula -- Off the record: Jazz and the production of Black culture.

Sommario/riassunto

In Producing American Races Patricia McKee examines three authors who have powerfully influenced the formation of racial identities in the United States: Henry James, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Using their work to argue that race becomes visible only through image production and exchange, McKee illuminates the significance that representational practice has had in the process of racial construction.McKee provides close readings of six novels—James’s The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, and Morrison’s Sula and Jazz—interspersed with excursions into Lacanian and Freudian theory, critical race theory, epistemology, and theories of visuality. In James and Faulkner, she



finds, race is represented visually through media that highlight ways of seeing and being seen. Written in the early twentieth century, the novels of James and Faulkner reveal how whiteness depended on visual culture even before film and television became its predominant media. In Morrison, the culture is aural and oral—and often about the absence of the visual. Because Morrison’s African American communities produce identity in nonvisual, even anti-visual terms, McKee argues, they refute not just white representations of black persons as objects but also visual orders of representation that have constructed whites as subjects and blacks as objects.With a theoretical approach that both complements and transcends current scholarship about race—and especially whiteness—Producing American Races will engage scholars in American literature, critical race theory, African American studies, and cultural studies. It will also be of value to those interested in the novel as a political and aesthetic form.