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

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910807065403321
• Autore: McKee Patricia <1945->
• 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.